Smart Automations for Everybody: When IoT Meets Visual Programming
Yannis Valsamakis, Anthony Savidis · 2020
The Internet of Things introduced pervasive deployment in the environment of a variety of network connected smart objects. In this context, people's daily lives could benefit by using smart objects which can offer them an environment of automations on their everyday activities. However, in practice, the demands for such automations are so highly personalized and fluid resulting in a respective digital market that is either inexistent or marginal. Our vision in this PhD thesis is to provide end-users with the necessary tools enabling them to easily and quickly craft, test and change the automations they desire. The latter implies end-users to directly manipulate smart objects in a developer perspective, ranging from parameterizing and linking together, to actually programming the control and coordination of a set of smart objects. In this paper, we firstly discuss the background of such tools. Then, we analyze the research questions that have to be addressed. Finally, the proposed approach and the roadmap of the work are discussed.