A middleware for creating physical mashups of things

Nowadays, “things” deployed in cities are crucial to gather data to support decision making systems. Unfortunately, there is a low level of reuse of “things” between smart city applications of different organizations because “things” were unknown to developers or because it was harder to reuse them than use new ones due to technical details. In this ongoing work, we propose to convert “things” into active entities capable of discovering and organizing themselves driven by the applications goals’ satisfaction. Moreover, “things” are capable of collaborating between them in order to satisfy or maintain satisfied the published goals of applications. To validate the feasibility of our proposal, we are building mashThings, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform to build smart city applications as physical mashups, where the middleware layer is augmented by a multiagent layer of broker agents representing the available “things” in the city.