Towards Scalable Deployment of Sensors and Actuators for Industrial Applications

While electronic sensors and actuators have a long history of being used for a broad variety of industrial applications, these applications tend to be self-contained, for example, to control a process or to automate an operation. The recent technology advancements in ubiquitous connectivity and distributed computing have afforded improved business performance or novel business models by narrowing the gap between the real-world conditions and the state of business information systems with sensors and actuators seamlessly integrated in critical business processes. This paper first describes three industry examples to motivate and discuss the key challenges for the ubiquitous applications of sensors and actuators. In particular, it argues for the need of an architecture that promotes component assembly for deployment scalability and supports application-specific QoS requirements such as timeliness, reliability and security. The paper also describes a prototype solution to illustrate our approach and progress.