IOT-ADL: An ADL for describing cloud IoT applications

IoT Applications coordinate the interaction of business services and IoT Devices, that automate business processes. The trend in building IoT Applications is to deploy their services on cloud platforms, which allow applications to take advantage of the cloud platform capabilities (e.g., large and dynamic storage and processing capacities). However, in spite of the growing number of IoT Applications, currently, their implementation is realized in an ad-hoc manner, without taking into account the heterogeneity of cloud platforms and IoT Devices. In this context, the interoperability among business services, IoT Devices and cloud resources available is a primary concern. In this article, we propose an Architecture Description Language (ADL) to specify the integration and interaction between IoT Devices and application services deployed in cloud environments, independently of their technologies. In addition, we propose an intelligent automation tool that provides: (i) a graphical editor for the ADL, and (ii) an automated code generator, that uses the architectural descriptions to generate software artifacts that implement the integration and interaction between the application services and IoT Devices. To illustrate the use of this ADL, the implementation of a Geographic Information System that supports the analysis of spatial data collected by air quality sensors, with geo-services deployed in the Google Cloud platform, is presented.