Application of MDE in the Development of IoT Systems: A Simulation-Based Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) systems are based on heterogeneous hardware components ranging from microcontrollers to powerful cloud servers. The development of IoT applications requires expertise in many fields. Therefore, developing IoT applications is a challenging issue. This paper presents an approach that can help users to build and test IoT applications. We propose to use the ThingML domain-specific language to describe the application in a platform-independent way. In order to facilitate the modeling process, we develop a modeling editor for the ThingML language. This editor combines textual and graphical notations to accumulate their advantages. After modeling, the resulting models will be used to generate the application source code for multiple platforms using the ThingML code generation framework. We adopt a simulation approach using the Proteus software to test the application. Proteus enables the design of the application hardware circuit. Furthermore, it allows simulation of the execution of the previously generated source code. Experimental results show that our approach can reduce the effort and time needed to build IoT applications. Thanks to the ThingML framework, which allows the generation of fully operational code. Also, the users can test their applications without the availability of IoT components.