Towards a behavioral description of cyber-physical systems using the thing description

Abstract

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) introduced the Thing Description (TD), a standardized and unified human- and machine-readable semantic description of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that focuses on describing how to interact with the described device using its network-interfaces. However, the TDs lack a way to describe the physical effect of said interactions on the device itself, as well as on the environment around the device, limiting its viability for cyber-physical scenarios. In this paper, we propose an extension for describing the effects of an interaction on the property affordances of a Thing in the TD as a first step towards a TD that is able to fully describe a Cyber-Physical System (CPS). We show this extension permits the generation of accurate Digital Twins, facilitates machine-aided system design and device mashup generation and allows for formal verification of the functionality of CPSs during their deployment and maintenance.