A RESTful task allocation mechanism for the Web of Things

The Web of Things extends the Internet of Things with Web technologies to interconnect smart things and build scalable, adaptable, and interoperable applications. In this context, smart things expose their services as RESTful resources, to be combined in composite applications. Though, due to the proliferation of connected objects, multiple smart things often are available to provide a single service, showing the need for a task allocation mechanism for the Web of Things. Our work addresses the task allocation problem, which consists in selecting a set of objects to realize a complex application in a setup where several objects provide the same functionality. We rely on a multi-agent approach to describe this problem as a Distributed Constraint Satisfaction problem. We propose a solution that respects the fundamental principles of the Web by respecting the REST architectural style and design principles. We implemented our solution with a typical smart city scenario to show the applicability of our approach.