A metamodel framework for edge-based smart environments

Smart Environments (SEs) are pervasive systems usually built on top of IoT-based sensing and actuation devices which are spread in an environment. The increase of the on-board computational capacity of the used devices opens to the possibility of naturally exploiting the edge computing paradigm in which the computation is pushed at the edge of the network. Anyway, despite the huge interest towards SEs, there is a lack of approaches for their design. This paper proposes an enhancement of the existing Smart Environment Metamodel (SEM) framework suited for designing SEs. The provided extension aims at taking into account issues related to edge computing, management of timing information and definition of the data types involved in data sources. The effectiveness of the whole proposal is assessed through a case study describing the development of a Smart Office.