Flow Semantics for Intellectual Control in Smart City IoT Systems
Internet of Things (IoT) systems for Smart Cities will be comprised of massive numbers of hardware, software, and network components, all sensing, computing, communicating, and controlling in dynamic architectures and state spaces of extraordinary complexity. Nodes, connections, and users will come and go, quality and reliability will be unpredictable, and failures and intrusions will be ever present. It is vital that these systems be rigorously designed, developed, and governed; but how can a rigorous engineering discipline be defined for an environment where the capability, connectivity, and integrity of components will vary from moment to moment? Current IoT reference architectures specify system structures, but provide little guidance for the semantic foundations required to create and verify system functionality, security, and quality attributes. In this paper, we focus on Flow Semantics as a rigorous engineering foundation for analysis, development, evolution, operation, and governance of IoT systems in such unpredictable environments. Flow Semantics are overarching engineering artifacts that exhibit desirable properties for IoT system development and operation. They are based on scale free mathematical foundations of functions and relations, and capitalize on recent advances in automated computation of software behavior. The goal of this research is to develop engineering principles and practices for maintaining intellectual control in Smart City IoT systems.