IoT Services Orchestration and Choreography in the Healthcare Domain

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, multiple smart devices communicate among themselves and with people. Similarly, they are primarily characterized by remarkable detection and processing capabilities. On the other hand, a services composition (SC) task involves performing the orchestration or choreography of services. Services orchestration is a centralized process for organizing interactions among the services of an activity or business process; however, orchestrators involved in a same services orchestration task rarely know each other. The choreography of services is collaborative, allowing each involved party to describe their participation in the interaction. The choreography follows the sequences of the messages between the multiple parties and typically obtains the exchanges in the public messages that occur between the services, instead of a specific business process that a single party executes. SC is frequently studied in the context of Web services (WS), where a series of standards have been developed and used in real-world implementations to support SC. Unfortunately, these standards are inadequate in the IoT paradigm, since IoT devices are based on data/events and the resources are restricted. Healthcare is an important application area of the IoT, since is reducing costs and improves to improve service quality. On the other hand, in the healthcare supply chain, the flow of diverse services that allow the integration and coordination of processes to satisfy the patient’s requirements is required. This book chapter proposes the design of language for IoT services composition, which considers the services orchestration and choreography to define business processes in a supply chain in the healthcare domain, while simultaneously discussing important literature on SC, business process, IoT services orchestration, IoT services choreography and IoT services coordination. Additionally, we propose the design of our language for IoT services composition, presenting the expressivity of language, the services orchestrating process characteristics and the services choreography process characteristics. In addition, as a proof-of-concept, we present a study case of the IoT services orchestration and choreography in the healthcare domain, in a timely procurement process of services for overweight or obese patients. Finally, the modeling of the study case and the mapping of the labels of the services’ orchestration and choreography process for the language for IoT services composition are presented.