Developing IoT Artifacts in a MAS Platform

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing computational paradigm where all kinds of everyday objects are interconnected, forming a vast cyberphysical environment at the edge between the virtual and the real world. Since the emergence of the IoT, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) technology has been successfully applied in this area, proving itself to be an appropriate paradigm for developing distributed, intelligent systems containing sets of IoT devices. However, this technology still lacks effective mechanisms to integrate the enormous diversity of existing IoT devices systematically. In this context, this paper introduces the concept of the IoT artifact as a new interface abstraction for the development of MAS based on IoT devices. The IoT artifact strictly conforms to the Agents and Artifacts (A&A) meta-model, and it also adopts the programming model of the SPADE multi-agent platform, providing both a consistent theoretical framework and a practical model for real-world applications.