Compositional models for the internet of things

Abstract The modularity of components has enhanced the ability to create IoT systems by composing them from off the shelf. However, the breadth of technological choices and capabilities of component devices has made designing these systems harder to select, compose, implement and test, especially for dynamic systems. In this paper, we adopt formal tools from category theory (CT), a branch of mathematics whose central tenet is compositionality, to generate models for IoT systems. More specifically, we introduce a port-graph operad to represent the architectural designs of IoT systems. We use presheaf categories to construct generic IoT schemas to support modularity. Given this information, we briefly describe its relationship to control strategies of dynamical systems that model the interaction of components. Our approach balances genericity and specificity, providing interlinked schematic representations of system architecture and component representation.