A planning method for component placement in smart item environments using heuristic search

Abstract

Smart item environments consist of networked nodes with heterogeneous hardware equipment and intermittent network connections. Using a common component technology allows for flexible distribution of components for processing of smart item data. Finding a good deployment plan for a new set of components in an infrastructure is called Component Placement Problem. We propose an approach for finding suitable deployment plans for components with special regard to the characteristics of smart item environments. Our method evaluates deployment plans in terms of both resource consumption and availability. From the analysis of the solution space we conclude that the number of network link uses is an important criterion for the quality of a deployment plan regarding both cost and availability. Based on this finding, we have derived a heuristic that creates deployment plans, which have a low number of link uses and are thus more likely of high quality. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.