A model-driven middleware approach to reduce the semantic gap between application domains and the generic infrastructure of smart cities

In Smart Cities, the city’s IT infrastructure must facilitate the development, deployment and operation of smart city applications for a number of different application domains that need to access a variety of heterogeneous resources. Building these applications becomes a great challenge since: they are used on large scale systems, have dynamic behavior, must access heterogeneous resources, can share resources from different domains, and must deal with the semantics of different domains. In this sense, platforms are commonly used to support application development, but they do not reduce complexity, are generic and deal with resource abstractions, while applications deal with domain abstractions. To overcome this semantic gap, this work proposes the use of domain specific middleware (DSM) with support for the development of model-driven applications defined in terms of a domain specific modeling language (DSML). To facilitate the definition of languages in different domains and, consequently, the execution of applications built according to these languages, a meta-meta language was defined that wraps the generic concepts used for the management of several domains. Furthermore, operational semantics are represented by models that describe domain-specific operations. The set of these elements associated with a middleware built according to the model-driven approach is defined as Model-Driven Domain-Specific Middleware (MDDSM). Therefore, this work proposes an integrated architecture that combines the use of MD-DSM and a smart cities platform to provide a flexible, robust and complete approach to facilitating the creation and execution of applications for different smart city domains. Thus, in the context of Smart Cities, middleware must deal with both application domain-related abstractions and platform-related abstractions (resources). Furthermore, the use of the model-driven approach allows representing such abstractions and relating domain semantics to generic resources. As a result, we have the construction of middleware and related elements in different domains and associated with a smart cities platform, demonstrating the expressiveness of the proposed approach.