CHARIOT: Goal-Driven Orchestration Middleware for Resilient IoT Systems

Subhav Pradhan, Abhishek Dubey, Shweta Khare, Saideep Nannapaneni, Aniruddha Gokhale, Sankaran Mahadevan, Douglas C. Schmidt, Martin Lehofer

ACM Trans. Cyber-Phys. Syst. 2018

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Why This Matters

CHARIOT addresses critical challenges in edge computing where resource availability is dynamic and unpredictable, requiring autonomous management without centralized control. Traditional cloud-based approaches fail for IoT systems with resource constraints and distributed nature. This work is innovative because it combines formal constraint solving with practical middleware to enable self-adaptive systems that maintain service availability despite component failures and changing conditions.

What We Did

This paper introduces CHARIOT, a goal-driven orchestration middleware designed for resilient IoT systems managing edge computing resources. CHARIOT provides a three-layer architecture comprising a design layer with system description language, a data layer with persistent storage, and a management layer with autonomous reconfiguration engines. The system uses Satisfiability Modulo Theories solvers to dynamically compute optimal system configurations that satisfy both functional requirements and resource constraints.

Key Results

The paper demonstrates CHARIOT's effectiveness through a smart parking system case study that automatically manages edge node deployments and handles resource-constrained conditions. The system successfully allocated virtual machines to edge nodes based on predicted workload demands, adapted to node failures through dynamic reconfiguration, and maintained service availability despite resource fluctuations. Experiments showed the middleware could efficiently compute optimal configurations within required time constraints.

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Cite This Paper

@article{Pradhan2018,
  author = {Pradhan, Subhav and Dubey, Abhishek and Khare, Shweta and Nannapaneni, Saideep and Gokhale, Aniruddha and Mahadevan, Sankaran and Schmidt, Douglas C. and Lehofer, Martin},
  journal = {ACM Trans. Cyber-Phys. Syst.},
  title = {CHARIOT: Goal-Driven Orchestration Middleware for Resilient IoT Systems},
  year = {2018},
  issn = {2378-962X},
  month = {jun},
  number = {3},
  volume = {2},
  abstract = {An emerging trend in Internet of Things (IoT) applications is to move the computation (cyber) closer to the source of the data (physical). This paradigm is often referred to as edge computing. If edge resources are pooled together, they can be used as decentralized shared resources for IoT applications, providing increased capacity to scale up computations and minimize end-to-end latency. Managing applications on these edge resources is hard, however, due to their remote, distributed, and (possibly) dynamic nature, which necessitates autonomous management mechanisms that facilitate application deployment, failure avoidance, failure management, and incremental updates. To address these needs, we present CHARIOT, which is orchestration middleware capable of autonomously managing IoT systems consisting of edge resources and applications.CHARIOT implements a three-layer architecture. The topmost layer comprises a system description language, the middle layer comprises a persistent data storage layer and the corresponding schema to store system information, and the bottom layer comprises a management engine that uses information stored persistently to formulate constraints that encode system properties and requirements, thereby enabling the use of satisfiability modulo theory solvers to compute optimal system (re)configurations dynamically at runtime. This article describes the structure and functionality of CHARIOT and evaluates its efficacy as the basis for a smart parking system case study that uses sensors to manage parking spaces.},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  articleno = {16},
  contribution = {lead},
  doi = {10.1145/3134844},
  issue_date = {July 2018},
  keywords = {IoT systems, edge computing, middleware, autonomous management, constraint solving, service reliability},
  numpages = {37},
  project = {cps-middleware,cps-reliability},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  tag = {ai4cps,platform},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3134844},
  month_numeric = {6}
}
Quick Info
Year 2018
DOI 10.1145/3134844
Keywords
IoT systems edge computing middleware autonomous management constraint solving service reliability
Research Areas
middleware CPS emergency
Search Tags

CHARIOT, Goal, Driven, Orchestration, Middleware, Resilient, Systems, IoT systems, edge computing, middleware, autonomous management, constraint solving, service reliability, CPS, emergency, 2018, Pradhan, Dubey, Khare, Nannapaneni, Gokhale, Mahadevan, Schmidt, Lehofer