Runtime Deployment, Management and Monitoring of Web of Things Systems

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Internet of Things (IoT) applications have been traditionally programmed using predefined device-level frameworks, tightly coupling software with the underlying hardware. The Web of Things (WoT) on the other hand abstracts interfacing with devices through the WoT Thing Description (TD) standard, allowing to program applications for Systems of Things, referred to as Mashups. In addition to the benefit of being programmed in high-level languages, WoT Mashups can be ported into serialization formats such as the WoT System Description (SD) for better insight and verification of the Mashup. Although WoT readily facilitates the development of WoT Mashups, it lacks a sound mechanism for remote deployment, management, and monitoring of such. In this paper, we propose a method and its corresponding open-source implementation, the WoT Runtime Framework, to close the development cycle of WoT Mashups. It allows users to deploy WoT Mashups either as code or in System Description format, manage their life cycle, verify the correct functionality and monitor both runtime and Mashup-specific information. The evaluation proves inter-runtime communication between multiple instances of the WoT Runtime is possible, and demonstrates this with examples from the industrial automation and smart agriculture domains.