Automating the development of physical mobile workflows: a model driven engineering approach

• Autores: Pau Giner Blasco
• Directores de la Tesis: Vicente Pelechano Ferragud (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de València ( España ) en 2010
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Oscar Pastor López (presid.) , Joan Fons (secret.) , Paolo Giorgini (voc.) , Jordi Cabot Sagrera (voc.) , Antonio Vallecillo Moreno (voc.)
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
• Resumen

  • The Internet of Things vision proposes a tight integration between real-world elements and Information Systems, Information Systems can be aware of physical objects thanks to Automatic Identification (Auto-ID) technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). When physical elements participate actively in business processes, the use of humans as information carriers is avoided. Thus, errors are reduced and process efficiency is improved.

    Although developing this kind of systems is feasible, the technological heterogeneity in Auto-ID and the fast-changing requirements of business processes hinders their construction, maintenance and evolution. Therefore, there is a need to move from ad-hoc solutions to sound development methods in order to assure the quality of the final product.

    This thesis, based on Model Driven Engineering foundations, presents a development process for the construction of this kind of systems. The main goal of the present work is to systematize the development of business process-supporting systems that integrate physical elements. The development process defined covers from the system specification to its implementation and it is focused on the particular requirements of the linkage between physical and virtual worlds.

    For the system specification, a modeling language is defined to cope with the particular requirements of the Internet of Things domain. From this specification, following a set of systematic steps, a software solution is obtained. This solution is supported by an architecture specifically designed to cope with the Internet of Things requirements and to survive to technological evolution.

    The proposal has been applied in practice with end-users. Although the development process is not completely automated, the guidance offered and the formalization of the involved concepts was proven helpful to raise the abstraction level of development avoiding to deal with technological details.