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Connection models for the Internet-of-Things

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Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is expected to swamp the world. In order to study and understand the emergent behaviour of connected things, effective support for their modelling is needed. At the heart of IoT are flexible and adaptive connection patterns between things, which can naturally be modelled by channel-based coordination primitives, and characteristics of connection failure probabilities, execution and waiting times, as well as resource consumption. The latter is especially important in light of severely limited power and computation budgets inside the things. In this paper, we tackle the IoT modelling challenge, based on a conservative extension of channel-based Reo circuits. We introduce a model called priced probabilistic timed constraint automaton, which combines models of probabilistic and timed aspects, and integrates pricing information. An expressive logic called priced probabilistic timed scheduled data stream logic is presented, so as to enable the specification and verification of properties, which characterize data-flow streams and prices. A small but illustrative IoT case demonstrates the principal benefits of the proposed approach.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61370100, 61321064 and 61773019), Shanghai Knowledge Service Platform for Trustworthy Internet of Things (ZF1213), Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission Project (1451100400), and Defense Industrial Technology Development Program JCKY 2016212B004-2, by the ERC Advanced Grant 695614 (POWVER), and by the Sino-German Center for Research Project CAP (GZ 1023).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MoE Engineering Research Center for Software/Hardware Co-design Technology and Application, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Kangli He, Hengyang Wu & Yixiang Chen

  2. Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbrücken, 66123, Germany

    Holger Hermanns

Authors
  1. Kangli He
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  2. Holger Hermanns
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  3. Hengyang Wu
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  4. Yixiang Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yixiang Chen.

Additional information

Kangli He is a PhD student in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering in the East China Normal University, China. He received the BS degree from East China Normal University, China in 2009. His research interests include formal methods, Internet of Things and Bisimulation. Now his research topic concerns the formal modelling and verification of Internet of Things.

Holger Hermanns is a full professor at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, holding the chair of Dependable Systems and Software on Saarland Informatics Campus. He is an ERC Advanced Grantee and member of Academia Europaea. His research interests include perspicuous computing, modeling and verification of concurrent systems, resource-aware embedded systems, compositional performance and dependability evaluation, and their applications to energy informatics. Holger Hermanns has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers (ha-index 92, h-index 50). He co-chaired the program committees of major international conferences such as CAV, CONCUR, TACAS, and QEST, and delivered keynotes at about a dozen international conferences and symposia. He serves on the steering committees of ETAPS and TACAS. He is president of the association “Friends of Dagstuhl”.

Hengyang Wu received the BS degree from Xuzhou Normal University, China in 1996, and the MS and PhD degrees from Shanghai Normal University, China in 2004 and 2007, respectively, all in mathematics. From 2008 to 2011, he was a postdoctoral researcher with East China Normal University, China, where he is currently an associate research fellow. From 2011 to July 2016, he was an associate professor of computer science with Hangzhou Dianzi University, China. His current research interests include formal methods and domain theory. He serves on the thechnical committees of Fuzzy Systems and Mathemantics and CCF Theoretical Computer Science.

Yixiang Chen is a full professor in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, East China Normal University, China. Where he is coordinating trustworthy software, Internet of Things and Human-Cyber-Physical System related research activities. Professor Chen is the director of the MoE Engineering Research Center for Software/Hardware Co-design Technology and Application. He is a vice-chairman of technical committee of Embedded System of China Computer Federation, Fuzzy Systems and Mathemantics, Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence.

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He, K., Hermanns, H., Wu, H. et al. Connection models for the Internet-of-Things. Front. Comput. Sci. 14, 143401 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-018-7395-3

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