introduction.tex

   1 \section{Motivation}
   2 \Gls{TOP} and \gls{iTasks} have been designed to offer a high abstraction level
   3 through a \gls{DSL} that describes workflows as \glspl{Task}. \gls{iTasks} has
   4 been shown to be useful in fields such as incident
   5 management~\cite{lijnse_top_2013}. However, there still lacks support for small
   6 devices to be added in the workflow. In principle such adapters can be written
   7 as \glspl{SDS}\footnote{Similar as to resources such as time are available in
   8 the current \gls{iTasks} implementation} but this requires a very specific
   9 adapter to be written for every device and functionality. Oortgiese et al.\
  10 lifted \gls{iTasks} from a single server model to a distributed server
  11 architecture~\todo{Add cite} that is also runnable on smaller devices like
  12 \acrshort{ARM}. However, this is limited to fairly high performance devices
  13 that are equipped with high speed communication lines. Devices in \gls{IoT}
  14 often only have LPLB communication with low bandwidth and a very limited amount
  15 of processing power. \glspl{mTask} will bridge this gap. It can run on devices
  16 as small as Arduino microcontrollers and operates via the same paradigms as
  17 regular \glspl{Task}. The \glspl{mTask} have access to \glspl{SDS} and can run
  18 small imperative programs.
  19
  20 \section{Problem statement}
  21 Therefore the problem statement is as follows:
  22
  23 \section{Document structure}
  24 The structure of the thesis is as follows.
  25 Chapter~\ref{chp:introduction} contains the problem statement, motivation and
  26 the structure of the document
  27 Chapter~\ref{chp:methods} describes the foundations on which the implementation
  28 is built together with the new techniques introduced.
  29 Chapter~\ref{chp:results} shows the results in the form of an example
  30 application accompanied with implementation.
  31 Chapter~\ref{chp:conclusion} concludes by answering the research question (s)
  32 and discusses future research.
  33 Appendix~\ref{app:communication-protocol} shows the concrete protocol used for
  34 communicating between the server and client.