Designing IoT Systems: Patterns and Managerial Conflicts

The first step in a system design process is to perform domain analysis. This entails acquiring stakeholder concerns throughout the life cycle of the system. The second step is to design solutions addressing those stakeholder concerns. This entails applying patterns for solving known, recurring problems. For these there are architecture patterns and design patterns for architecture design and detailed design respectively. For Internet of Things (IoT) systems such patterns are hardly defined yet since experience is just evolving. In this paper, we propose our definition of an IoT pattern along with its formal specification, explained by a running example. IoT systems are characterized by the variety of stakeholders involved throughout their life cycle, therefore our pattern specification includes means for identifying possible conflicts between these stakeholders.