A model-driven development framework for developing sense-compute-control applications

A Sense-Compute-Control(SCC) application involves interactions among a large number of heterogeneous devices that can sense the physical world by obtaining information from sensors, compute the captured information, and control the physical world by triggering actions using actuators. SCC applications are pervasive and found in many application domains, including industrial control, robotics systems or building automation. Developing a SCC application is challenging because it implies a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address heterogeneity of target devices. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases such as development, deployment, and evolution.

Existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges. This paper proposes an integrated approach for the development of SCC applications. It separates the application development into different concerns. So, stakeholders can deal with them individually at evolution and reuse them across applications. To support actions of stakeholders, the development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation at various phases of SCC application development.