An end user development platform based on dataflow approach for IoT devices

Abstract

IoT devices are diverse in their characteristics and made by many vendors, hence the inter-operation among them is difficult. Especially, end users can't make their own programs by do-it-yourselves. IFTTT and Zapier platforms are designed to help end users to make them inter-operable easily and prevail in these days. Their approach is categorized into a Trigger-Action-Programming, in which trigger conditions and actions are already made by professional programmers of several IoT vendors and end users composite them into their own applications easily. But, their drawback is that the composition can be made at once in the first level, hence end users can't make more complicated applications. Our approach is based on a dataflow programming paradigm which resembles the TAP in that the internal actions are triggered when all the inputs of a node are prepared. In our approach, a composition of some atomic nodes becomes another atomic node, so the composition would continue iteratively. This feature is so generous that several visual programming languages like LabView are relied on the approach for various fields. We propose the overall architecture of our system and explain them. We also present Internet of Things examples of our approach, which shows that atomic dataflow objects can be associated to produce composite dataflow objects. And they are also composited to make more complex applications iteratively. We compare IFTTT, Zapier, and our approach qualitatively and show that end users can make more diverse and flexible applications in our approach.