Agent-Oriented Cooperative Smart Objects: From IoT System Design to Implementation

The future Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a new and wide range of decentralized systems (from small-scale smart homes to large-scale smart cities) in which “things” are able to sense/actuate, compute, and communicate, and thus play a central and crucial role. The growing importance of such novel networked cyber-physical context demands suitable and effective computing paradigms to fulfill the various requirements of IoT systems engineering. In this paper, we propose to explore an agent-based computing paradigm to support IoT systems analysis, design, and implementation. The synergic meeting of agents with IoT makes it possible to develop smart and dynamic IoT systems of diverse scales. Our agent-oriented approach is specifically based on the agent-based cooperating smart object (ACOSO) methodology and on the related ACOSO middleware: they provide effective agent design and programming models along with efficient tools for the actual construction of an IoT system in terms of a multiagent system. A case study concerning the development of a complex IoT system, namely a Smart University Campus, is described to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.