Multiagent-based Autonomic and Resilient Service Provisioning Architecture for the Internet of Things

This paper proposes the Agent-based Internet of Things (AIoT) architecture and AIoT middleware to realize autonomic and resilient service provisioning in IoT systems. As a massive number of devices are becoming part of the Internet, it is highly difficult to organize IoT devices as a system to provide appropriate services in our lives. It is difficult because the IoT devices are heterogeneous, and the situation often changes overtime which requires complicated reconfigurations of IoT systems. Our AIoT middleware provides IoT devices with the functionality of autonomic and resilient service provisioning in IoT systems. In this paper, we propose AIoT architecture of IoT application, AIoT organization and re-organization scheme to compose and operate IoT application according to user requirement and environmental condition. As the evaluation, we have implemented an autonomous logistics application with simplified logistics robots using proposed AIoT middleware, and conducted logistics experiments and scalability measurement simulation, to evaluate the effect of introducing AIoT architecture and AIoT middleware. We have also performed an architectural flexibility analysis on our architecture to examine further feasibility of proposals. The results of evaluations show the evidence of the realized capability of autonomic and resilient service provisioning, as well as the architectural flexibility of our middleware.