Extending SOA/MDD to Sensors and Actuators for Sense-and-Respond Business Processes

While the practice of service oriented architecture (SOA) and model-driven development (MDD) has brought efficiency gains to software development, building responsive, scalable business applications enabled by distributed sensor and actuator (S&A) infrastructure remains challenging, often involving extensive effort and skill. The results are typically one-of-a-kind, difficult to replicate or modify for different environments, and brittle in the face of changes to the physical plant and equipment. This paper examines the challenges presented by distributed S&A infrastructure in the context of business information systems, and introduces an architecture that applies SOA/MDD methodologies to the modeling, development, deployment, and management of S&A systems. In particular, the architecture focuses on the separation of concerns between logical application development and infrastructure capability management, and the support of component assembly with an event-based programming model. The paper then briefly describes a prototype implementation of the architecture, including integrated tooling and runtime support, and illustrates its role relative to existing business process modeling, integration and execution environments with examples based on industry applications.