A Plug&Play approach for modeling and simulating applications in the era of internet of social things

This article presents an approach to model and simulate Plug&Play social things. Confined into silos, existing (not social) things are restricted to basic operations like sensing and actuating, which deprive them from participating in the satisfaction of complex business applications. Contrarily, social things are expected to engage in collaborative scenarios and to tap into specific relations that connect them to peers when achieving these scenarios. These relations are referred to as complimentary, antagonism, and competition, and allow to develop networks of things. To capitalize on such networks, the approach to model and simulate Plug&Play social things puts forward four stages that are referred to as connecting to demystify social relations between things, influencing to examine the impact of social relations on things, playing to make things perform while considering influence, and incentivizing to reward things based on their performance. A smart system for elderly the care centers has been developed to showcase the technical doability of Plug&Play social things. The system is an integrated development environment allowing IoT engineers to define the collaboration of social things, thanks to a set of drag&drop operations.