INTER-METH Methodology

INTER-METH is the first engineering methodology that aims at fully supporting the integration process of heterogeneous IoT platforms to (i) obtain interoperability among them and (ii) allow implementation and deployment of IoT applications on top of them. It is widely recognized that using an engineering methodology is fundamental in any engineering application domain (e.g. software engineering, codesign hardware/software, civil engineering, etc.). Moreover, the manual and non-systematic application of complex techniques, methods and frameworks would very likely lead to an increase of the degree of errors during integration. Thus, INTER-METH has the objective to avoid such errors. Specifically, INTER-METH is based on an iterative waterfall process that relies on the following phases (or functionalities of a process):

  • Analysis phase supports the definition the IoT platform integration requirements (both functional and non-functional).

  • Design phase produces the design of the integration in terms of design artifacts (e.g. diagrams) of layer interoperability infrastructures and related interfaces (see INTER- LAYER), and INTER-FW programming and management patterns, to fulfill the elicited requirements. The design phase is strongly based on the INTER-PATTERNS (See Deliverable D5.2)

  • Implementation phase focuses on driving the implementation of the design work-product to obtain the full-working (hardware and/or software implemented) system.

  • Deployment phase involves the support to the operating set-up and configuration of the integrated IoT platform.

  • Testing phase defines the performance evaluation tests to validate the integrated platform according to the functional and non-functional requirements.

  • Maintenance phase manages the upgrade and evolution of the integrated system.

Each phase produces work-products that are inputs for the successive phase(s). INTER-METH is supported by a CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool (INTER-CASE) that helps supporting each aforementioned phase of the integration process and specifically provides the following functionalities:

(i) Support for workflow execution in each phase;

(ii) Web-based Graphical facilities;

(iii) XML-based project data repositories.