一种基于智能物体的物联网系统及应用开发方法

An Approach to Building Systems and Applications of Internet of Things with Smart Things

随着普适计算和物联网技术的发展和应用,人们不断地把传感、效应、通信和计算能力嵌入到现实世界的人工物体中,使其更加智能化、自动化甚至协同地完成复杂的任务,这类能力得以增强的新型物体被称为智能物体或者智能对象.智能物体将成为物联网的基本构造单元,促进新型物联网应用的涌现.但是,基于智能物体开发物联网系统和应用面临着智能物体的动态性以及它们在固有功能、计算能力、网络接口等方面的异构性带来的挑战.为此,提出了一种智能物体交互机制和统一的编程抽象来支持基于智能物体的应用系统开发,实现了一个中间件系统来完成该交互机制和编程抽象,同时提供运行时支持.基于提出和实现的智能物体编程抽象,应用开发者可以容易地开发基于智能电视、智能空调、智能投影仪、智能电灯等设备的应用程序.应用举例和实验结果表明,利用基于智能物体的开发方法能够灵活有效地开发物联网应用.

With the rapid development and application of pervasive computing and Internet of Things, more and more artificial things are augmented by seamlessly embedding new capabilities such as sensing, actuating, communication and calculation. Compared with their traditional counterparts, the augmented artifacts can perform complex tasks more intelligently, automatically, and even collaboratively. These augmented artifacts are referred to as smart things （or smart objects）, which are becoming basic building blocks of Internet of Things and driving the emergence of novel pervasive applications. However, programming smart things faces challenges because they are dynamic and inherently heterogeneous in terms of their built-in functionalities, computational capabilities, network interfaces, etc. This paper proposes an interaction mechanism and programming abstraction to support smart things-based application development. A middleware system is implemented to realize the interaction mechanism and programming abstraction while providing runtime support for heterogeneous smart things. With the help of the proposed programming abstraction and interfaces, application developers can easily program smart household appliances such as smart TV, smart air conditioner, smart projector, smart light, and so on. Case studies and experimental results show that the proposed smart things based approach can be utilized to develop systems and applications of the Internet of Things flexibly and effectively.