Fluidware: An approach towards adaptive and scalable programming of the IoT

The objective of this paper is to present the vision and structure of Fluidware, an approach towards an innovative programming model to ease the development of flexible and robust large-scale IoT services and applications. The key distinctive idea of Fluidware is to abstract collectives of devices of the IoT fabric as sources, digesters, and targets of distributed “flows” of contextualized events, carrying information about data produced and actuating commands. Accordingly, programming of services and applications relies on declarative specification of “funnel processes” to channel, elaborate, and re-direct such flows in a fully-distributed way, as a means to coordinate the activities of devices and realize services and applications. The potential applicability of Fluidware and its expected advantages are exemplified via a case study scenario in the area of ambient assisted living.