DRIVE: A tool for developing, deploying, and managing distributed sensor and actuator applications

This paper introduces Distributed Responsive Infrastructure-Virtualization Environment (DRIVE), a tool that provides both an integrated development environment (IDE) and an execution environment and thus supports the entire life cycle of sensor/actuator applications. Developers are only responsible for implementing the core event-handling logic, whereas DRIVE generates the necessary code for message passing and invocation, thus reducing the development skills required. The development methodology, which is component based and model driven, separates the solution model, which captures the business logic, from the deployment model, which reflects the physical computing infrastructure. This allows the administrators to configure and deploy applications on various infrastructure topologies. To illustrate the benefits of DRIVE, we present an example application, dock-door receiving, and show the ways in which DRIVE supports the modeling and development of the application logic and the multiphase deployment of the resulting application in a production environment. Copyright 2008 by International Business Machines Corporation.