Modeling BPEL-based collaborations with heterogeneous IoT devices

Abstract

A number of different IoT devices are already available and newer types would appear on the market. A technical difficulty in IoT computing is to manage the heterogeneity of IoT devices in terms of their network protocol supported, interface language, data exchange scheme, and type of mobility provided. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has been effectively utilized to collaborate multiple services by defining a business workflow. Due to the effectiveness of BPEL, a natural attempt to effectively develop IoT applications with complex workflows would be the adoption of BPEL and integrating IoT devices in BPEL-based collaborations. However, there exists two technical challenges, (1) Mismatch between BPEL collaboration models and IoT services and (2) heterogeneity of IoT devices. In this paper, we propose an effective method to remedy the technical challenges by presenting Adapters between BPEL documents and IoT services. With our method, heterogeneous IoT services can be seamlessly collaborated with the BPEL-based collaborations. © 2014 IEEE.