AGILE-IoT: More Than Just Another IoT Project

The AGILE-IoT project (www.agile-iot.eu), co-funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union, aims to address this concern, by providing a solution based on four main pillars:

• Agnosticity: depending on the technical background of the platform user, the background of his organisation or the software components he has to (re-) use, we cannot predict what would be the programming language of the solution. It might be built with a combination of languages, some of them being compiled (e.g., C, C++), others translated into intermediate languages (e.g., Java, Python) and, finally, some others interpreted (e.g., JavaScript). If the user chooses one platform because of the programming language(s) it supports, he may limit his options for developing his solution. AGILE-IoT, by leveraging a micro-service-based architecture, supports all the programming languages a platform user might require to implement their solution.
• Openness: Lots of platforms are provided by makers. Obviously, these makers will do their best to promote their product with respect to competitors’ counterparts. Fortunately, the IoT is an open and growing world. Every day a new device is created with some cool new features. If the user stays hooked on one maker by using its development platform, he might limit the ability of his product or project to reach large portions of the market. This is true at the device level, as well as at cloud level. It is for this reason that AGILE-IoT made the choice to provide an open architecture that you can connect to any device (with the freedom to implement the missing driver and protocol) as well as connecting to almost any existing public cloud service provider.
• Extensibility: it is clear that openness goes hand in hand with extensibility. Knowing that the IoT landscape is changing rapidly every day, it is challenging (or maybe impossible) to know which protocol and which technology will be available when the product developed with the platform will reach the market. It is for this reason that providing APIs able to extend the default architecture by adding support to new devices, new cloud providers, and even new persistence components represents a key feature for a platform. By putting into place an architecture based on Docker, coupled with a powerful restful API, the AGILE-IoT represents an up-to-date platform which will be able to evolve at the same pace as the IoT world.
• Business Friendliness: where is the added value of the built solution? Is it in the new protocol it supports or is it in the unique solution it implements for its customers? Put another way, should an organisation consume most of its time and resources in maintaining code that its competitors have to maintain as well? Or, would it make more sense to mutualize such resources with its competitors, freeing up time and resources that could be used to improve the unique added value of the solution? AGILE-IoT decided to pursue the latter option: by open-sourcing the entire platform under the business-friendly Eclipse Public License, it will provide the basis for mutualizing resources. This strategic choice is an invitation to not only re-use freely the code but to practice open collaboration and open innovation in one of the most active IoT working groups, namely the Eclipse IoT Working Group [4].

Anonymous said: “Don’t tell people about your plans, show them your results”. As the Agile-IoT reaches its official end as an EU funded project, it will be looked upon to prove the validity of its approach. To achieve this goal, the project executed three major milestones, namely the Adaptation artist contest, the Pilot Project Milestone, and the Open Calls Milestone.

Read full article >>>