=Paper=
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|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2442/invited1.pdf
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==None==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2442/invited1.pdf
Bringing Intelligence to Sociotechnical IoT
Systems: Modeling Opportunities and
Challenges
Benoit Combemale?
University of Toulouse & Inria, France
benoit.combemale@inria.fr
http://combemale.fr
Abstract. IoT Systems involve numerous interconnected things that
sense or enact on the physical world to support customized software ser-
vices for human beings. From a software and systems engineering point
of view, such systems are essentially complex sociotechnical systems that
lead to the development of dynamically adaptable, cyber-physical, sys-
tems. The adaptability with regards to the physical environment comes
from a feedback (control) loop (e.g., MAPE-K loop) assimilating data
from the sensors, building a model of the surrounding environment, plan-
ning or possibly predicting new scenarios, and soliciting the actuators
accordingly, in the form of a sequence of actions.
As with any sociotechnical systems, the planning process is usually semi-
automatic, highly interacting with final users to provide the best experi-
ence. Various software services have been developed in the past decade,
leveraging important frameworks developed by the IoT community (e.g.,
protocols and gateways), and leading to a wide range of smart systems in
energy, production systems, robotics, transportation, healthcare, agricul-
ture among others. The smartness of the system comes from the ability
to bring intelligence into the feedback loop. This intelligence primarily
leverages the assimilation and curation of the acquired data. However, as
a sociotechnical system, it is of outermost importance of also considering
broader physical, economic, social and environmental concerns in which
the systems and final users involved. Since such information is difficult
to get from sensors or to hard-code into the software itself, additional in-
formation must be combined with the available data to provide a holistic
and systemic view of the system and its environment, support for making
informed decisions. This need is currently supported by the concept of
digital twins.
When comes the time of designing such a feedback loop, modeling ap-
pears to be key. Modeling is key to capture any sort of knowledge in the
form of descriptive models built from acquired observations or data, and
modeling is also key to drive the development and evolution of complex
?
The vision presented in this extended abstract is the result of the collaboration
with many talented students and bright colleagues. I’m warmly thankful to all of
them. Copyright c 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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2 Benoit Combemale
systems in the form of prescriptive models reducing the accidental en-
gineering complexity. The gap between the descriptive models and the
prescriptive models can be made manually, or automatically through
predictive models.
In this talk, I review the various types of models required for intelligently
designing software services on top of IoT systems, and I discuss the dif-
ferent roles such models are playing in the overall lifecycle. I present
the opportunities for the modeling community, as well as the open chal-
lenges to be tackled to achieve such a vision. In particular, I explore
the required common modeling foundations for seamlessly combining
the different types of models, and the development of complex digital
twins to support informed decision making in the feedback loop of smart
sociotechnical IoT systems.
Keywords: IoT, Sociotechnical system, Cyber-physical system, Model
Composition
Benoit Combemale (http://combemale.fr) is Full Professor of Soft-
ware Engineering at the University of Toulouse, and a Research Scien-
tist at Inria. His research interests are in the field of software engineer-
ing, including Model-Driven Engineering, Software Language Engineer-
ing and Validation & Verification; mostly in the context of (smart) Cyber-
Physical Systems and Internet of Things. He is also teaching worldwide
in various engineering schools and universities. Prof. Combemale received
his Habilitation in Computer Science from the University of Rennes 1 in
2015, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toulouse
in 2008. Before joining the University of Toulouse, he was an Associate
Professor at the University of Rennes 1, and has been visiting professor at
McGill University and Colorado State University. Prof. Combemale co-
authored 3 books, and 100+ journal and conference publications in the
fields of software engineering. He also edited 2 books and various special
issues in scientific journals. He is chairing the Steering Committee of the
conference series SLE, a deputy editor-in-chief of the journal JOT, and a
member of the editorial boards of the journals SoSyM, COLA, and SCP.
He has been the program chair of SLE 2014, ECMFA 2019 and ICT4S
2020, and general chair of MODELS 2016 and SLE 2017. He also serves
as program committee member for various conferences and workshops
in software engineering. Prof. Combemale coordinated and participated
in many collaborative projects, and bilateral collaborations with indus-
tries. He is also a founding member of the GEMOC initiative, and cur-
rently lead the steering committee of the Eclipse Research Consortium
GEMOC.
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