AmIoT: A Microservices-based IoT Platform to Orchestrate AmI Environments
Savvas Pitatzis, Nicolas Drosos, Christos Goumopoulos, Achilles D. Kameas · 2020
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Internet of Things (IoT) are two terms closely related to the vision of embedding sensing, processing and communication capabilities into everyday objects and physical environments whose interaction can support effectively human activities. In this paper we propose the term AmIoT to refer to AmI applications composed by IoT devices available in an AmI environment to serve a specific goal of its owner/creator. AmIoT is characterized by the human-centric perspective of AmI, the capability for thing-to-thing interactions and the shaping of IoT rich environments by end-users. Leveraging on the microservices architectural style to overcome fundamental application development and deployment challenges, a microservices-based platform is developed to support the runtime operation of AmIoT applications. Furthermore, an editing tool is provided to empower end-users to configure such applications using the trigger-action programming paradigm. AmIoT characteristics have been explored in practice by developing prototype IoT devices to realize an example use case scenario. Experiences from a preliminary usability evaluation of the editing tool are also reported.