Resource Choreography in Cyber-Physical-Social Systems: Representation, Modeling and Execution

Myriad of heterogeneous resources are widely distributed in the cyber, physical and social spaces. These resources are integrated by software to form diverse Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSSs). Among them, the CPSSs in the form of resource choreography is receiving more attention. Traditional software development methods may not be suitable for constructing and executing CPSS applications (CPSS-Apps) with the characteristics of loosely-coupled resource collaboration and spatial-temporal constraints sensitive. In this article we propose a comprehensive framework to support resource choreography from the perspectives of representation, modeling and execution. In the framework, a CPSS-App is represented by an application model conforming to a meta-model. An application model is generated by a multi-scene storyboard modeling tool. The model is further used to customize the capability units acting as the abstract unit of the resources providing the same service. An architecture following the microservice style is applied to achieve the choreography of the capability units by asynchronous message communication while a resource is determined by application-level service discovery. The framework is evaluated through a human experiment. The results show that the application construction and execution by the framework is feasible. The modeling tool is usable and the execution architecture is scalable in different environment settings.