Towards a cognitive engineering of transactional services in IoT based systems

Cognitive computing is the capability of a system to mimic the ability of human brain to learn and adapt from the surroundings. Cognitive systems have decision-making capabilities based on new information, actions and outcomes. Similarly, Internet of Things (IoT) aims at making things smart, and enabling them to perform complex tasks. Reliability and flexibility are persistent challenges in the IoT context where the promise is managing a multitude of devices and delivering real-time responses for critical smart applications. A limited number of studies examine these challenges while considering cognitive capabilities of things and have failed to handle thing’s specificities in terms of communication bandwidth, power availability and storage capacity. Following the service oriented architecture (SOA), the functionality can be encapsulated as services. Thus, automating the management of transactional services in smart IoT ecosystem can be fulfilled through the coupling of transactional properties to cognitive things. This paper provides a comprehensive approach to alleviate reliability restrictions in cognitive IoT service compositions. The concept of cognitive faculty (CF) is introduced to leverage transactional properties of services and can be customized to specific requirements of IoT applications. A proof-of-concept is included in this paper based on a self-monitoring IoT application for diabetic patients. •Injecting cognitive capabilities into things while providing application reliability and adaptability in presence of failures.•Exploring the trial of merging transactional properties with cognitive things.•Reliability and adaptability issues that affect service execution when handling smart things.•Mechanisms that can operate across multiple applications context while fostering self-awareness of things.•Service compositions enriched by cognitive features and transactional properties can provide CIoT systems with a greater flexibility.