Self-Organizing Software Models for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) envisions the integration of physical objects into software systems for automating crucial aspects of our lives, such as healthcare, security, agriculture, and city management. Although the vision is promising, with the rapid advancement of hardware and communication technologies, IoT systems are becoming increasingly dynamic, large, and complex to the extent that manual management becomes infeasible. Thus, it is of paramount importance to provide software engineering foundations for constructing autonomic IoT systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel paradigm referred to as self-organizing software models in which IoT software systems are not explicitly programmed, but emerge in a decentralized manner during system operation, with minimal or without human intervention. We particularly present an overview of these models by including their definition, motivation, research challenges, and potential directions.