ViLanIoT: A visual language for improving Internet of Things systems representation

With the rapidly evolving and changing nature of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, there is an absence of tools to support the IoT system design and development. For example, there is not a specialized tool for representing IoT systems. The common solution to this problem is to use general-purpose modeling tools, such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its extensions, which have some disadvantages when representing IoT systems. This paper proposes a new visual language, called ViLanIoT, for making representations of IoT systems conceived as cyber–physical systems. We argue that diagrams obtained with ViLanIoT are more understandable and intuitive compared to improvised representations found in literature. To illustrate the use of ViLanIoT, we represent a smart campus system with visual elements according to our proposal. In addition, we also present a study of the application of ViLanIoT. In ViLanIoT, the inclusion of visual elements for each component reflecting semantic meaning improves the understandability, clarity, and simplicity of IoT system representations.