Toward Opportunistic Services for the Industrial Internet of Things

Services are expected to represent the real drivers for all Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios, including Industrial IoT (IIoT). Indeed, rather than focusing only on products, enterprises are now investing on product-service hybrids to improve operational efficiency, boost productivity and, most importantly, build new markets, hence diversifying their revenues. In this direction, IoT service modeling is a crucial activity requiring a multi-facet in-depth examination. In this paper, we first discuss the importance of IoT services by eliciting related benefits and challenges. Then, we tackle service modeling from both a developer-oriented (comprising high-level descriptive metamodels and ontologies) and an enterprise-oriented (comprising operational models subject to formal verification and execution, such as extensions of the conventional Business Process Models, Petri Nets and WorkFlows) perspective, providing a conceptual mapping between these two complementary approaches. The proposed new paradigm of "Opportunistic IoT Service" extends the available models by explicitly considering essential features for service provision, i.e., dynamicity, context-awareness, co-location and transience.