Integrating Internet of Services and Internet of Things from a Multiagent Perspective

To realize the Internet-based sociotechnical systems, it is necessary to build a comprehensive and effective infrastructure to support the interaction between various cloud services on the Internet and the physical world in which we live. For example, the information produced by the sensors is usually aggregated, processed and analyzed by services in the cloud, which can be used by various stakeholders for decision-making in many different application fields. Therefore, we need to consider integrating the Internet of Services (IoS), which enables the flexible sharing and composition of cloud services on the Internet, with the Internet of Things (IoT), which represents the constellation of things equipped with various sensors and actuators. The integration of IoS and IoT often involves multiple parties and so must deal with complex issues such as interaction, dynamics, scalability and decision making, all of which can be studied from a multiagent perspective. In this paper, we start by discussing the necessities and challenges for integrating IoS and IoT. Then, we propose an integrated architecture and examine it from two multiagent perspectives. One is to regard the integrated architecture of IoS and IoT as a multiagent-based architecture considering various patterns of service composition and interaction. The other is to apply multiagent methodologies when designing sociotechnical systems for various application domains based on the integrated IoS/IoT architecture. Moreover, we use the example application of designing multilingual environments to discuss the above two perspectives with possible future research directions.