A Comprehensive Framework for Analyzing IoT Platforms: A Smart City Industrial Experience
This addresses a critical knowledge gap for IoT platform consumers and providers in smart city contexts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing design science methods.
The paper tackles the lack of guidelines for evaluating IoT platform architectures by developing a novel evaluation framework using design science research, which aims to enable unbiased competition among providers and informed decisions for consumers.
The compliance of IoT platforms to quality is paramount to achieve users satisfaction. Currently, we do not have a comprehensive set of guidelines to appraise and select the most suitable IoT platform architectures that meet relevant criteria. This paper is a tentative response to this critical knowledge gap where we adopted the design science research approach to develop a novel evaluation framework. Our research, on the one hand, stimulates an unbiased competition among IoT platform providers and, on the other hand, establishes a solid foundation for IoT platform consumers to make informed decisions in this multiplicity. The application of the framework is illustrated in example scenarios. Moreover, lessons learned from applying design science research are shared.