19SafQB

178 IoT Applications — Value Creation for Industry
From the users prospect the smartness of a smart object is realized within
the service and the application layers. Additional value can be achieved
through generic, reconfigurable Smart Objects. They offer a set of services
and functions for a specific application domain and are adapted to project or
user requirements by reconfiguration by a user or a service provider.
Smart objects are designed as miniaturized, low power microelectronic
systems based on micro controllers, transceivers, sensors and energy supply.
As these microelectronic systems provide very limited resources (i.e.,
processing power, memory) reconfigurable software implementations for
smart objects become a challenge, especially when reconfiguration should be
possible by a user without code programming (requires easy programming)
or if reconfiguration should be done over the air (requires minimum code
size).
In common service oriented approaches a plurality of service components
are defined. Figure 3.10 shows some components for an asset tracking
application. The software interfaces of such components are well defined and
communication is typically handled by a service manager in a message oriented
way.
Reconfiguration is done by adding or changing components or by changing
the functionality behind the interfaces. This is done by code programming of
the components and by software update on the smart object.
Code Programming and data-intensive software update can be avoided by
the new approach of smart applications.
Like in the service oriented approach smart applications consist of software
components. In addition the components are supplemented by rule based
processing and interfaces. Each component has its own rules set and parameters.
The rules processing engines are able to handle events, such as messages,
interrupts and synchronization.
For the definition of rule sets for the application modules a universal configuration
language SAL (smart application language) has been developed at
Fraunhofer IIS. The main goal of this language is, to describe instruction cycles
which are triggered by incoming events. On the one hand the instructions can
have executive characteristics on the other hand they can act as conditions in
if-else constructs. These instructions handle two parameters, which are defined
as variables of well-known data types and can be modified at runtime.