Effect-driven selection of web of things services in cyber-physical systems using reinforcement learning

Abstract

Recently, Web of Things (WoT) expands its boundary to Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) that actuate or sense physical environments. However, there is no quantitative metric to measure the quality of physical effects generated by WoT services. Furthermore, there is no dynamic service selection algorithm that can be used to replace services with alternative ones to manage the quality of service provisioning. In this work, we study how to measure the effectiveness of delivering various types of WoT service effects to users, and develop a dynamic service handover algorithm using reinforcement learning to ensure the consistent provision of WoT services under dynamically changing conditions due to user mobility and changing availability of WoT media to deliver service effects. The preliminary results show that the simple distance-based metric is insufficient to select appropriate WoT services in terms of the effectiveness of delivering service effects to users, and the reinforcement-learning-based algorithm performs well with learning the optimal selection policy from simulated experiences in WoT environments.