Digital Dices: Towards the Integration of Cyber-Physical Systems Merging the Web of Things and Microservices

摘要

One of the main issues of devices and platforms related to Internet of Things (IoT) is that there exists a broad spectrum of different protocols addressing those devices. Management and connection to those things create integrability and usability issues. Hence, there is a need for a solution that facilitates the communication between different devices and platforms. The Web of Things (WoT) tries to handle interoperability issues by describing interfaces and interaction patterns among things. Thanks to the models proposed by the WoT, it is possible to decouple the description of things from the protocols handling the communication and implementation strategies. This article proposes Digital Dice as an abstraction of IoT devices inspired by the concept of Digital Twin, but capable of leveraging the advantages of microservices architectures. We focus on the creation of Digital Dices from WoT models. A Digital Dice consists in different facets that are able to handle a particular aspect of a thing, hence different WoT descriptions models will result in different microservices related to that particular thing. An architecture to handle multiple Digital Dices and their replicas is also proposed.