A model-based approach for developing event-driven architectures with AsyncAPI

Abstract

In this Internet of Things (IoT) era, our everyday objects have evolved into the so-called cyber-physical systems (CPS). The use and deployment of CPS has especially penetrated the industry, giving rise to the Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT (IIoT). Typically, architectures in IIoT environments are distributed and asynchronous, communication being guided by events such as the publication of (and corresponding subscription to) messages. While these architectures have some clear advantages (such as scalability and flexibility), they also raise interoperability challenges among the agents in the network. Indeed, the knowledge about the message content and its categorization (topics) gets diluted, leading to consistency problems, potential losses of information and complex processing requirements on the subscriber side to try to understand the received messages. In this paper, we present our proposal relying on AsyncAPI to automate the design and implementation of these architectures using model-based techniques for the generation of (part of) event-driven infrastructures. We have implemented our proposal as an open-source tool freely available online.