Industrial application development exploiting IoT vision and model driven programming

In recent years there has been a huge discussion about the IoT (Internet of Things) concept, and even more about IoT within industrial environment. The real IoT is a network of devices with local intelligence (sensors, lights, gas pumps, HVAC systems), which shares access & control mechanisms to push and pull status and command information from the networked world. However, there are still some issues, limiting the IoT diffusion: the devices involved are heterogeneous, with proprietary system of chips, protocols and interface; furthermore, there is a lack of development toolkits, enabling developers to create and evaluate IoT prototypes in simple and flexible manner. The ebbits [1] platform addressed those issues, taking advantages from the IoT vision and providing a middleware infrastructure for the integration of heterogeneous industrial devices and sensors, transforming them into web services and thus enabling their seamless integration into existing legacy systems. This paper will introduce the platform and its software architecture, describing features like semantic devices interoperability and entity virtualization. Furthermore, the paper will describe an innovative, IoT oriented, model driven development toolkit. This toolkit leverages on the semantic discovery service, allowing to dynamically selecting and locating available resources or devices, and provides a flexible instrument, including a graphical interface, that enables developers to compose mashup applications.