System Design in the Era of IoT --- Meeting the Autonomy Challenge
For system designers of IoT and autonomous systems, this work offers a conceptual framework to address autonomy challenges, but it is largely visionary without empirical validation.
The paper proposes a knowledge-based design approach for autonomous IoT systems that integrates adaptive control to handle uncertainty and mixed criticality, aiming to compensate for the lack of human intervention. It emphasizes resilience through runtime adaptation without providing concrete performance numbers.
The advent of IoT is a great opportunity to reinvigorate Computing by focusing on autonomous system design. This certainly raises technology questions but, more importantly, it requires building new foundation that will systematically integrate the innovative results needed to face increasing environment and mission complexity. A key idea is to compensate the lack of human intervention by adaptive control. This is instrumental for system resilience: it allows both coping with uncertainty and managing mixed criticality services. Our proposal for knowledge-based design seeks a compromise: preserving rigorousness despite the fact that essential properties cannot be guaranteed at design time. It makes knowledge generation and application a primary concern and aims to fully and seamlessly incorporate the adaptive control paradigm in system architecture.