Virtual Testing Environment for Smart Automations in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly progressing domain, with solutions ranging from large-scale urban infrastructures shared by all citizens, to smaller scale home-based ecosystems targeted to individuals and families. While the choice of functionality in large ecosystems is the responsibility of respective authorities, in home setups smartness implies individualization of automations. In this context, the notion of end-user programming gains increasing attention as a promising way to allow users develop personalized automations by deploying visual programming tools. Since in an IoT ecosystem devices may be invisible, embedded or hardly locatable, sometimes physically inaccessible, testing becomes very challenging, as bringing physical devices to certain states may be either impractical (e.g. window and door sensors) or overall unsafe (e.g. fire or smoke sensors). For this purpose we implemented a virtual testing environment where trials are executed in a protected runtime, not confined to a particular location, disengaged from the physical ecosystem. All our tools run locally in a typical mobile machine and may operate in standalone mode without connecting to real smart devices. Finally, for automations involving time and scheduling, we introduce a virtual time tool, so that testing is done on demand, not following or waiting the actual pace of physical time.