Towards low-effort development of advanced IoT applications

Building customised IoT applications is often labor intensive. While several frameworks support developers in building sophisticated applications, they mainly focus on the communication with the underlying devices and their automation. Modular programming may further improve the reuse of components in other applications. However, integrating automatic device configuration, connection management, and user support for solving connectivity issues, remains a real endeavor for application developers. Likewise, integrating and enforcing policies in an IoT application is complex, and the dynamic nature of IoT systems makes it even more difficult to develop applications that properly handle changes in the environment. This paper presents a middleware that simplifies the development of smart IoT applications. The middleware hosts a modular, event-based, logic reasoner. The reasoner is developed in Prolog and communicates with the underlying IoT framework. The middleware leverages the actual benefits of Prolog through complex querying and inference capabilities on the IoT system. This, combined with built-in functionality for automatic device and connection management, access control, advanced automation and an abstraction module that decouples the applications from the underlying infrastructure, grants the developer to focus on the specific application. An integration in a server and a mobile application demonstrates the capabilities of the middleware and its modules.