Hierarchical Modeling of Complex Internet of Things Systems Using Conceptual Modeling Approaches

Popularity of the Internet of things (IoT) is currently on the rise. Academia as well as industry is equally fascinated by this disruptive technology. The IoT research and implementation have succeeded securing their place in numerous domains including, but not limited to, business, transportation and logistics, health care, smart cities, and agriculture. Conceptual modeling is pivotal to the design and implementation of a system. Various modeling approaches have been used for a variety of the IoT applications and case studies. In this paper, we examine various innovative applications of the existing conceptual modeling approaches for the IoT. We analyze the use of these approaches against different concerns in isolation as well as in mutual combination for the IoT. We also define a set of terminologies that we frequently encounter in this manuscript and those likely to be used while adopting proposed modeling approaches for the IoT scenarios. This study also attempts to reconcile different modeling approaches toward a unified modeling system. For this purpose, we map various conceptual modeling approaches against different layers of functional model of the IoT reference architecture. There is also a scenario in the end of the paper which elaborates the use of different modeling approaches in hierarchy for a complex IoT system.