Making many devices discover and interact with each other is the big challenge ahead of the IoT. Companies are already eager to make their solutions be the common denominator of all your devices, usually based on their central cloud. Alidron project aims at finding a different approach based on features seen in industrial control systems, with a distributed twist while keeping a fuzzy limit between edge computing and cloud computing.
Control systems are software usually seen running large industrial, infrastructure and research equipment. They boast certain capabilities like aggregating and distributing data from and to hardware, generating alarms and events based on these data, maintaining the configuration between the data-channels and the real hardware sources, archiving these data, offering integrated diagnostic tools, and providing a consistent view of the monitored processes in a user interface.
Today's solution for control systems are not a close match for the Internet of Things. They are based on a master-slave pattern where devices can't take much decision by cooperating with other devices. All interactions between devices have to happen within a predefined framework of features the provider thought of, which are usually lagging behind the fast-moving IT world by many years, if not decades...
Alidron is an attempt at mixing concepts from control systems with ubiquitous computing and becomes an Ambient Intelligence platform. Its first demonstration is using it for smart home behaviours. Firstly, it links devices with other devices as well as with control programs. Some of these control programs are actually used for learning home users habits and learn how to become proactive for them. It allows these nodes to run indifferently on devices, on a local computer or in a cloud provider.
