Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869

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Ad Hoc Networks
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/adhoc

Towards socially enabled internet of industrial things: Architecture,

semantic model and relationship management
Nancy Gulati∗, Pankaj Deep Kaur
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Guru Nanak Dev University, RC, Jalandhar, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The progression of Internet of Things (IoT) has culminated from merely communicating objects towards
Received 6 May 2018 smart objects. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of social networking is leading us into a new era of
Revised 19 October 2018
social objects. Under this vision, the idea of Social Internet of Things (SIoT) involving integration of so-
Accepted 16 April 2019
cial networking concepts into IoT was carved. Also, in the past few years application of IoT technologies
Available online 18 April 2019
into industry termed as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has gained significant attention worldwide.
Keywords: This paper examines the major opportunities emerging from the introduction of novel concept of SIoT
Internet of things into manufacturing industry along with proposing reference architecture for the same. The proposed ar-
Social internet of things chitecture is explored from a semantic point of view and an ontological model is designed. In addition,
Industrial internet of things a novel approach for relationship management among manufacturing resources (assets) has been intro-
Social asset duced. Further, to support the theoretical framework, a use case scenario and a simulation model for the
Relationship management
performance management of an automated bottle filling industrial plant has been designed. The proposed
Asset performance management
model is certain to serve as a solid foundation for the future development of industrial IoT applications
by researchers and developers.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction technologies such as IoT to ensure prolonged market survival in the

The IoT technology is on a growing curve and has a bright fu-
ture in IT industry. It has been widely adopted by researchers and
developers throughout the world. The current research trend in IoT
is being shifted from prevailing object to human interaction to-
wards object to object interaction where objects rely on each other
for services. In the contest of emulating their human counterparts,
the machines are adapting to social behavior (M2M communica-
tion). To realize this paradigm shift, the notion of Social Internet
of Things (SIoT) [1] was burgeoned. Briefly, SIoT can be designated
as an IoT where things or objects can build their own social asso-
ciation autonomously without the intervention of human. On the
other hand, the use of IoT in industry has been a matter of concern
for various business organizations lately and is gaining momen-
tum with the development of the concept of Industrial Internet
of Things (IIoT) [2]. Industrial IoT has widespread applications in
multiple domains such as healthcare, transportation and logistics,
disaster management etc [3]. Another noteworthy application of
IIoT is in the domain of automated manufacturing industry. Manu-
facturing industries these days tend to incorporate with prevailing
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: nancygulati91@gmail.com (N. Gulati).
world of competition. It is believed that IoT is the next big thing
which can transform the face of this industry [4]. Keeping in mind,
the ongoing drift towards SIoT from the prevailing IoT, the vision
of employing SIoT in Industry was conceptualized, designated as
Social Internet of Industrial Things (SIoIT). SIoIT envisions the use
of intelligent assets (machines or machine parts) possessing social
behavior equipped with sensors, actuators and some identification
technology. However, our area of interest primarily lies in manu-
facturing industry. In the domain of manufacturing, machines or
resources are also termed as assets. Therefore, the term machine
and asset is being used interchangeably throughout the course of
the paper. Li et. al. in [5] first investigated the opportunities and
challenges arising from integrating Social IoT in industrial domain.
Also, a theoretic foundation for the development of smart manu-
facturing systems was established which allows assets to interact
and share information with each other thereby enabling efficient
performance monitoring, analysis and management of the system.
We performed a meticulous study of the use of IoT in industry
and its potentials as well as the benefits of deploying socially ac-
tive objects in an IoT system. The investigation revealed that some
of the principal obstacles occurring in the path of smart industry
implementation are lack of standardized overall architecture de-
sign, inefficient management of resources (assets) as well as their

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2019.101869
1570-8705/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869
interactions and non availability of up to the mark performance
management techniques. Thus, it is crucial for existing industry
standards to adopt smart manufacturing practices such as SIoIT
and Industry 4.0 [6] in order to develop a highly efficient produc-
tion system. This paper attempts to resolve the addressed issues
by proposing a framework for advanced manufacturing industry
assimilating the best of Social IoT into smart industry techniques.
The incorporation of these intelligent technologies into existing in-
dustrial routines will contribute towards the construction of a high
level, real time and accurately performing manufacturing industry.
The prophecy of espousing these high end technologies to effort-
lessly cope with the impending technologies provided us the mo-
tivation for conducting this research.
The primitive goal of the paper is to build a platform for
co-operative industrial environment by establishing friendship re-
lationships between machines (assets). The notion of friendship
among peers will result in the collective participation of various
assets to bring about the realization of one common objective of
any industry setup which is performance enhancement. In order
to achieve the aspired objectives, a novel architecture for SIoIT sys-
tems is developed and its implementation details with the help of
an industrial use case environment (Automated Bottle Packaging)
are discussed. Previous research work in Industrial IoT primarily
concentrated on integration of IoT into industrial environment. Lit-
tle or no attention was paid towards building a socially enabled
IoT technology for industries. Keeping in mind the potential ben-
efits of Social IoT, the presented architecture strengthen the smart
manufacturing systems by adding up the additional power of So-
cial IoT technologies. The main aim is to develop a system capable
of providing real time performance monitoring, analysis and con-
trol of industrial manufacturing systems. In the proposed system,
the industrial assets are embedded with smart sensors and actua-
tors, capable of socially interacting with each other to facilitate the
performance optimization of manufacturing systems. Therefore, the
proposed architecture can act as a foundation for future develop-
ment of socially active Industrial IoT systems. In view of the fact
that IoT based industrial systems has not been entirely put into ac-
tion so far, implementing the recommended platform in real indus-
trial environment was undeniably a challenge for us. Nevertheless,
an industrial setup was simulated in order to perform the testing
of the proposed system. Simulation results divulged that the de-
veloped platform is able to effortlessly monitor the activities of an
industrial setup as well as efficiently utilize and manage the social
interactions between the industrial assets.
The state of the art in SIoIT systems has theoretically estab-
lished the basis for integrating IoT technologies to industrial do-
main so far. This article contributes by building a solid architecture
and framework based on the groundwork laid by the researchers in
the domain to completely overhaul the existing system. It further
contributes by bringing forward a proposal supporting the amal-
gamation of SIoT to manufacturing industry through the formation
of social relationship between machines; supported by an ontolog-
ical architecture and a use case scenario. It also attempts to extend
the concept of Industrial Internet of Things by advancing the ma-
chines with social behavior and encouraging the M2M communica-
tions along with human-machine interactions. The major purpose
of developing friendship relationships among assets is to establish
a cooperative network. Interaction between machines (assets) will
increase with increase in the number of relationships. Need of one
friend could be served by another friend or some common friend
(friend of a friend). For example, if an asset needs a resource which
cant be accessed directly, it can take the help of a friend asset i.e.
accessing the required resource via a trusted friend just like a hu-
man friendship network.
The major findings of this research work can be partitioned into
following three aspects:
1. The presented article begins with illustrating state of the art in
the domain of Industrial and Social IoT. Further, a generic three
layered architecture for socially enabled IIoT systems is devel-
oped and the functionality of each layer and its components is
examined. Also, the interaction between different components
is analyzed with the help of semantic technologies. In addition,
an ontological model to explicitly illustrate the relationship be-
tween components is built.
2. The concept of Social Asset and its lifecycle from the In-
dustrial IoT perspective is explored. A novel approach for
friendship management and service discovery in industrial ma-
chines/assets is developed.
3. To ascertain the validity of the suggested approach, the pro-
posed architecture is deployed on a simulated industrial envi-
ronment (Automated Bottle Filling Plant) with the help of an
IoT simulation tool (NODERED) and its performance is evalu-
ated.
Rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the
current state of research in the domains of Social and Industrial
IoT. Section 3 brings forward the architecture design for SIoIT. In
Section 4, a semantic model for SIoIT systems is proposed. Further,
Section 5 outlines the lifecycle of a social asset and service discov-
ery among assets. Section 6 puts forward an approach for manag-
ing relationship among these assets.While in Section 7, an algorith-
mic approach for friendship discovery among assets is proposed.
Finally, Section 8 emphasizes on implementation of the proposed
architecture with the help of a use case scenario and a simulation
model.
2. State of the art
IoT has come a long way since its introduction in 1999 by
Kevin Ashton who phrased the term Internet of Things to repre-
sent a network connecting physical day to day objects with inter-
net. However, research work in the field of IoT has advanced to
a great level in the past decade. Due to the widespread attention
IoT has gained in the recent years, a huge amount of data is being
exchanged over numerous IoT networks existing worldwide. Thus,
IoT is all set to become a ubiquitous technology in the near future.
Also, the notion of integrating social components into IoT has been
there for past few years, resulting in development of the Social IoT.
The SIoT possess some potential benefits over the traditional IoT
networks which contribute to the primary reasons for envisioning
the deployment of SIoT in industry. The significant ones are im-
proved communication, flexibility, scalability and network naviga-
bility [7,8]. One of the major driving forces behind the use of SIoT
over IoT is enhanced resource discovery in network. Researchers
are working on improvising the search efficiency of a Social IoT
network without increasing the overall system overhead [9]. An-
other advantage of Social IoT lies in its resemblance with a human
social network which makes it easier to model and implement. The
objects in a SIoT network try to mimic human behavior while es-
tablishing relationships in order to build their own social network.
Therefore, the prototypes built to analyze human social behavior
and social networks can be implemented on SIoT as well. Various
projects have been proposed and developed in past few years fo-
cusing on social perspective of IoT. For instance, several SIoT plat-
forms such as Toyota Friend Network, Nike+, Xively, Paraimpu, So-
cial Web of Things, Evrythng has been developed in past years [10].
Recently, SIoT has been used in combination with other technolo-
gies to extend its existing capabilities. One such example is the
idea of integrating Social Cloud in SIoT [11] which exhibit a great
potential to facilitate resource sharing.
The IT industry today is on the verge of another industrial revo-
lution (Industry 4.0) in terms of building more and more intelligent
 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869
automation systems. Industry 4.0 involves the use of cyber
physical systems to completely transform the face of existing
manufacturing paradigms enabling the deployment of smart fac-
tory solutions [12]. In [3], Li Da Xu et. al. presented an extensive
survey of the research performed in the area of industrial IoT in-
cluding various industries such as healthcare [13], transportation
and logistics [14], disaster management [15,16] etc. The use of IoT
in these industries has opened up the doors to new possibilities for
building more innovative solutions in order to enhance the over-
all performance. However, with the increase in number of devices
connected to an IoT network which is expected to be huge in
case of Industrial IoT, it becomes complicated to handle the avail-
able resources efficiently. A lot of research is ongoing in the area
of resource and service discovery. One such example is fog com-
puting based indexing model proposed by authors in [17] for ef-
fective service discovery in Industrial IoT. Persistent research and
development of increasingly efficient Industrial IoT models is set-
ting a path for the successful application of smart manufacturing
methods.
Industry 4.0 has a significant role to play in remodeling the fu-
ture of manufacturing industry. Since the current trend is to use
smart and intelligent machines (assets) and, it becomes necessary
to effectively manage the manufacturing resources and assets. It is
generally believed that well maintained assets form the basis of
an effective industrial process. The emergence of IoT technologies
has significantly influenced the evolution of modern manufactur-
ing systems. Also, IoT could be deployed to augment APM (Asset
Performance Management) in industrial environment. In [18], ref-
erence architecture for IoT enabled factories is proposed that in-
volves the integration of smart manufacturing devices, machine,
processes and products. It also encourages the use of smart logis-
tics with incessant monitoring and analysis of data. The authors
in [19] studied the evolution of manufacturing techniques and dis-
cussed the potential of integrating prevailing technologies such as
IoT to the modern manufacturing techniques in enterprises. Fur-
ther, Zhang et. al. [20] designed architecture for IoT enabled manu-
facturing termed as Internet of Manufacturing Things for real time
performance analysis of the production process. Wang et. al. in
[21], made use of RFID for Asset Monitoring and inventory man-
agement.While, Wan et.al. [22] proposed a software defined Indus-
trial IoT architecture to enable interaction and exchange of impor-
tant information between industrial assets. Availability of timely
and accurate information will lead to effective decision making in
the context of Asset Performance Management (APM). Zhang et.
al. in [23] designed an IoT based framework for manufacturing in-
dustry for real time performance monitoring and optimization of
manufacturing things (assets). Since we have already discussed the
potential benefits of Social IoT over IoT networks, it will be pru-
dent to deploy Social IoT in industrial domain. Li et. al. in [5] first
proposed the idea of incorporating Social IoT in manufacturing
claiming that the addition of a social dimension to the Indus-
trial IoT will lead to the effective management of industrial assets.
Moving along these lines, this paper attempts to design and de-
velop a Social IoT based performance monitoring system for smart
manufacturing. Table 1 elicits some significant research performed
Table 1
Comparison between existing research and proposed approach in Industrial IoT domain.
Reference Application Domain
[19] Bi et. al. (2014) Impact of IoT on Enterprise Systems in Modern Manufacturing
[20] Zhang et. al. (2014) Real Time Performance Analysis of Manufacturing Enterprises using IoT
[21] Wang et. al. (2015) IoT Based Enterprise Asset Management
[22] Wan et. al. (2016) Software Defined Network for Industrial Internet of Things
[5] Li et. al. (2016) Social IoT Based System for Industrial and Manufacturing Assets
[23] Zhang et. al. (2017) IoT enabled Advanced Manufacturing System
Proposed Approach Social IoT Based System for Asset Performance Monitoring and
Management in Manufacturing Industry
3
in Industrial IoT domain in recent years and a comparison of exist-
ing work with the proposed approach.
3. SIoIT architecture design
Even though various frameworks have already been designed in
the past by researchers for Social IoT and Industrial IoT systems but
little or no work has been focused on designing a specialized ar-
chitecture for socially enabled Industrial IoT systems. This section
portrays the major design goals to be considered for designing ar-
chitecture of such systems. Further, a novel architecture for SIoIT
systems in manufacturing based upon the integration of existing
Social IoT architectures with the essential components of an IIoT
[18] and SIoIT network [5] is proposed.
3.1. Design goals
Although the applications of Social and Industrial IoT are still
in its infancy yet has gained considerable attention in the past few
years. Thus, the emphasis is on the applications emerging out of
the integration of the two technologies (SIoT and IIoT) resulting in
the development of socially enabled Industrial IoT i.e. SIoIT appli-
cations. The major design goals one must consider prior to design-
ing the system framework are delineated in Fig. 1.
The first important consideration is resource management. Re-
sources here mainly refer to the machines or their sub parts
termed as industrial assets. Asset management includes everything
from the design of sensors integrated into the assets to the choice
of communication protocols and networking technologies. The next
important issue is the strategy adopted for managing social rela-
tionships between the assets. Although, Nitti et. al. in [8] presented
different friendship models for objects in an IoT network but these
friendship models cannot be completely adapted in an industrial
environment. Therefore, we have designed a novel friendship man-
agement algorithm (Section 7) to manage relationships among as-
sets. Another major concern is of data management, which in-
cludes the selection of the database to maintain data generated
by the system. Further, we must consider some significant de-
sign issues such as system interface modeling, middleware design
and interoperability issues. It is possible that system is built up
from heterogeneous components. Design of an appropriate inter-
face and middleware makes it possible for such a system to work
efficiently. Trustworthiness is another major concern to maintain
the integrity of the system. An evaluation system that works by as-
signing trust score to each node (asset) might help differentiating
trustworthy and malicious assets. Finally, one must focus on imple-
menting appropriate schemes to ensure the security and privacy
of the system. Section 3.2 throws light on some of the candidate
technologies for design of the proposed system as well as the tech-
nologies selected for implementation.
3.2. Proposed SIoIT architecture
In this section we present reference architecture for Social In-
ternet of Industrial Things in manufacturing. Different researchers
have proposed different architectures for IoT. However, the basic
IoT Based Framework Social Asset Performance
Proposed Dimension Management (APM)
Yes Yes No No
Yes Yes No Yes
Yes Yes No Yes
Yes Yes No No
Yes No Yes No
Yes Yes No Yes
Yes Yes Yes Yes
4 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869

Fig. 1. Design Considerations for SIoIT architecture.

Fig. 2. SIoIT reference architecture.

three layered framework [24] (consisting of physical, network and
application layer) is widely accepted as reference architecture for
IoT. Further, researchers focused on developing a standard architec-
ture for Social IoT by introducing an additional layer comprising of
Social IoT components [10]. On the other hand, various frameworks
in the context of Industrial IoT have also been proposed in last few
years as discussed in Section 2 (Table 1). These layered architec-
tures provide a general idea on Social IoT and Industrial IoT net-
works. However, for research purpose context oriented specialized
architecture is needed to be designed. The proposed three layered
architecture design focuses on building a model to abstract the
interfacing of manufacturing resources (assets) with IoT compo-
nents. It is specially designed for modern manufacturing systems
incorporating prevailing technologies like IIoT and SIoT and is the
first ever designed architecture for SIoIT systems so far to the
best of our knowledge. Thus, the proposed system architecture is
unique and different from the existing architectures in the domain
of Industrial IoT and Social IoT. It intends to enable interaction
between different services and modules with the help of a mid-
dleware component. The essential building blocks of a SIoIT sys-
tem [5] have been deployed as the basic components for design-
ing of the proposed model (Fig. 2). Table 2 highlights the analogy
 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869 5

Table 2
Analogy of SIoIT and SIoT layered architecture.

SIoIT Layer SIoT Analogy

Base Layer (Infrastructure Sub Layer, Communication Sub Layer) Sensing Layer, Network Layer
SIoIT Middleware SIoT Components Sub Layer, Base Sub Layer
Application Layer Application Layer, Interface Sub Layer

Table 3
SIoIT Framework Implementation Technologies.

S.No. Framework Component Description Potential Technology Candidates IoT Technology Used
(Proposed Approach)

1 Asset ID A method to uniquely identify an asset RFID, EPIC, NFC, Barcode EPIC
in a given network
2 IoT Network Technology used to connect objects Bluetooth, Low Power WiFi, Cellular, IEEE 802.11 (WiFi)
(assets) in the network Zigbee
3 IoT Communication Protocols Standard set of protocols built to MQTT, CoAP, AMQP MQTT (Restful)
enable communication among assets
in the network
4 Social Networking Platform A common platform to post and Specially Designed Platform or Existing Twitter
retrieve periodic system updates Platforms (Twitter, Facebook etc.)
5 Semantics and Ontology Semantic Web technologies to build an RDF, OWL OWL
abstract model for the system
6 Data Management A Database System required to store, MySQL, SQLite DB, MongoDB SQLite
retrieve and analyze the system
generated data
7 Context Management To filter contextual information (of a Observer, Pub/Sub Pattern Topic Based
particular topic) from system Subscription
generated updates (Pub/Sub Pattern)
8 Performance Monitoring To continuously monitor the Manual or Automated, Periodic or Real Automated, Real Time
performance of industrial process Time
9 Security and Access Control To ensure the security and privacy of Data Encryption (Bcrypt Algorithm), Password Based
the IoT network Password Based Authentication
Schemes

between the layers present in existing SIoT architecture [10] and
the proposed SIoIT architecture.
The presence of each component grouped into layers con-
tributes to some specific functionality to the system. Further, we
briefly avert the functionality of the three architectural layers
stated in the proposed architecture. Table 3 delineates implemen-
tation details for different architectural components and potential
Industrial IoT components and acts as an interface between
the assets and user applications. In the proposed architecture,
a separate SIoIT layer outlines the essential components that
comprise the specially designed SIoIT middleware for modern
manufacturing systems. The detailed analysis of various sec-
tions present in the proposed middleware is depicted further.
• Social Network Platform: The social network platform en-

technology candidates. ables the socially enabled machines/assets to share infor-

A Base Layer: The base layer is the basic component of the pro-
posed architecture and is functionally analogous to the physical
layer in a layered IoT architecture. It comprises of two sub lay-
ers: infrastructure and communication. The infrastructure layer
supports the necessary foundations at the ground level to build
a SIoIT system. It includes no. of manufacturing assets, identity
tags, sensors and actuators. Each of these assets has a unique
identity and is equipped with sensors and actuators. Technolo-
gies like RFID, EPIC Code or NFC [25] can be deployed for iden-
mation on social media. Any existing social networking
mediums can be used for the purpose. For some applica-
tions, application specific platforms are specially designed
fulfilling basic requirements of a social network such as
creating and managing profiles, building relationships and
posting status messages etc. For implementation purposes,
we have proposed a new approach for relationship manage-
ment (Section 7). However, twitter is used as a social media
platform to simulate real time updates and notifications.
• Semantic and Ontology: Semantic technologies provide a

tifying the assets uniquely. These assets are interconnected to
each other via some communication network. The communica-
tion layer is responsible for any sort of interaction among the
assets. It includes all the communication devices, technologies
and protocols essential to enable communication among assets.
The infrastructure layer is more or less similar to the sensing
layer while the communication layer is nearly equivalent to the
network layer in SIoT architecture.
B SIoIT Middleware: The SIoIT middleware not only acts as a
standard way to store, define and inter-relate data with the
help of semantic web languages such as RDF (Resource De-
scription Framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language) etc.
The ontological structures are used to define relationships
between major classes/entities existing in a domain. In
Section 4, an ontological architecture for socially enabled In-
dustrial IoT systems is presented which is to the best of our
knowledge is the only SIoIT ontology stated up until now.
• Data Management: Data management includes deploying

communication medium between the hardware and applica-
tion layer but also responsible for the communication and in-
teraction among various components present in the SIoIT layer.
Its chief role is to provide abstraction between the hardware
and application thereby facilitating the use of all the services
suitable methods and techniques for storage, retrieval and
analysis of data generated by the system. For IoT networks,
cloud based or lightweight database management systems
such as SQLite DB [26] are preferred.
• Context Management: IIoT networks may generate huge

and functionalities provided by the system. It provides a com- amount of data as sensors produce continuous readings.
mon standard for exchange of information between diverse Contextual filters need to be applied to discrete relevant
6 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869
data from irrelevant which is accomplished with the help of
contextual management. RESTful APIs [27] can be deployed
to filter topic based information in the given context.
• Security and Access Control: To maintain integrity of the
system, secure communication is desirable. Various secu-
rity models exist for IoT systems that enable the sensors to
transmit data in encrypted form or in a highly secured man-
ner without the fear of being eavesdropped. On the other
hand, it is evenly essential to set up strong access control
policies to ensure the safety of system resources and autho-
rize the access to all the valuable resources in the system.
Only trustworthy machines or users should be provided ac-
cess to sensitive resources. Thus, building an effective access
control policy plays an integral part when it comes to build-
ing security model for IoT systems [28].
• Performance Management: Performance management is an-
other crucial utility desirable in an IIoT system. It includes
performance monitoring and control. Performance is con-
stantly being monitored while the system is in working
mode i.e. industrial manufacturing or production process is
going on. Periodic reports and status messages are updated
on the social network platform. Alert notifications are gen-
erated by the system in case of any discrepancy. An auto-
mated action could be initiated by the system depending
on the decision taken by the system as per the urgency of
the situation. Since, the system needs to take decisions it
must possess reasoning abilities. The proposed system im-
plements real time performance tracking and management
by generating system alerts.
C Application Layer: The purpose and components of application
layer remain same for different IoT architectures and systems.
Therefore, it is discussed here briefly. The major role of appli-
cation layer is to provide access to specific applications and ser-
vices to the application users. There are multiple ways in which
Industrial IoT applications can be accessed such as mobile apps,
web portals and API Gateways etc. The application layer enables
various applications to access the system making sure its wide
accessibility. In the proposed architecture, the components ap-
plication layer include are different APIs (Application Program-
ming Interfaces), industrial applications as well as integration
to other ERP applications. It also provides interfacing between
application user and industrial objects (manufacturing assets)
Fig. 3. Class diagram for SIoIT ontology.
enabling the developers to utilize available APIs to build exten-
sive industrial applications. In a socially enabled manufacturing
environment, the proposed SIoIT architecture can provide ser-
vices such as the assets performance tracking, monitoring and
management.
In the following sections, implementation of the proposed ar-
chitecture is discussed with the help of semantic technologies.
A novel approach for relationship management between indus-
trial assets is presented. Finally, the proposed framework is imple-
mented with the help of a use case scenario. The system prototype
is built and simulated on an IoT platform. The proposed system
is likely to face some challenges and issues when implemented
as an Industrial IoT application in a real time environment. One
of the significant challenges is power constraint. Since IoT appli-
cations are implemented with light weight devices and protocols,
CPU power availability is limited. Thus, it is difficult to impart the
system with complex functionality without depleting the power in
a comparatively shorter period of time. Other potential limitations
of the proposed approach are reliability and scalability. The system
continuously monitors the performance of the industrial process in
real time without any human involvement. Therefore, we cannot
afford the system to go down at any cost. Hence, it is required to
be built as reliable as possible. Due to lack of availability of stan-
dard IoT protocols and development platforms, system is expected
to face scalability issues. With growing number of IoT devices, it is
requisite to develop some standard IoT protocols and frameworks.
Another important concern about the proposed approach is secu-
rity. Building a highly secure system within the power constraints
is a challenging task. The researchers are working towards over-
coming these limitations in the future and building highly reliable,
scalable and secure systems.
4. SIoIT ontology
In SIoIT environment, assets need to interact with each other
constantly. To prompt this interaction semantically, a component
based ontological structure is defined for a SIoIT system with the
help of standard web ontology language (OWL) and tool Protege
(Version 5.1.0) [29]. Various classes required to build the SIoIT on-
tology (SIoIT-Ont) are depicted in Fig. 3.
SIoIT-Ont comprises of three major classes: Assets, Human Op-
erator and SIoIT server. Assets can build relationships with other
 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869
Fig. 4. Ontology of a SIoIT network (SIoIT-Ont).
assets according to the rules defined by the Human Operator. Also,
Human Operator may suggest actions to be performed to enhance
the performance of the manufacturing resources (assets). A SIoIT
server consists of the following essential SIoIT components:
• SN Platform: This is the social network platform which man-
ages the social relationship and communication among the
assets. It manages the IDs (ID Manager) and profiles (Profile
Manager) of assets and enable communication among these as-
sets (Communication Manager). The Posts Manager manages
the status messages and recommended actions posted by the
assets.
• Data Manager: It is accountable for management of data gener-
ated from SN Platform.
• Decision Support System: It monitors (Performance Monitor),
optimizes (Performance Optimizer) and suggests recommended
action to enhance performance (Performance Manager). Finally
these actions are posted in social network (SN Platform) by the
posts manager (Posts Manager).
• Action Controller: It controls the suggested actions to be per-
formed by the assets.
• Security Controller: It is culpable for security and access control
for assets in SN Platform.
The relationship between different entities of a SIoIT system
can be easily understood from the graph (Fig. 4).
5. Social assets’ life cycle
The concept of social asset was firstly introduced by Li et. al.
[5]. In the multi agent approach, each IoT device (asset) has a soft-
ware agent associated to it known as device agent. This software
agent is needed to fulfill various computing needs of the device,
to manage relationships and also helps in decision making. The as-
sociated software agent which enables the assets to build social
relationship with each other is termed as Social Agent. The cor-
responding assets are known as Social Assets. Asset is the ma-
jor building block for a SIoIT system. In the proposed scenario,
7
lifecycle of a social asset begins when it is first created by the
manufacturer. Each asset is assigned with a unique EPC number
depending upon the technology requirements. In addition to the
unique identity, there is a file associated to each asset containing
detailed information about its specifications. This information is re-
quired later in the deployment and installation of the asset. Also,
it provides information about the services it will need and pro-
vide in the form of ListofNeeds and ListofServices. Assets from the
same production batch share a Parental Object Relationship (POR)
with each other. At this stage, POR is the only kind of relationship
that exists among the assets. However, at some point in time the
asset will be procured by some person in industry and will be in-
stalled in the factory as a whole or part of a machine. Once the
machine in installed in an industry the unique id of the opera-
tor will be attached with the asset. A software agent called social
agent will be associated with each asset that will augment the as-
set with intelligent and social behavior. A common broker will be
used to publish/subscribe [30] information which will keep a track
of the topics and availability of information. The social agent will
provide the asset with the following necessary functionality:
• Self monitoring, diagnostics and prognostics: evaluating ma-
chine performance in order to control or predict future failure.
• Relationship Analysis: finding and acknowledging the relation-
ship among various assets.
• Subscription and Publishing of data of interest: Subscribing and
publishing on the topic of interest on social media platform or
to a common broker.
5.1. Service discovery
Since in SIoIT interaction between the assets occur without
any human intervention, the devices and the users make use of
publish-subscribe pattern to offer services and fulfill their needs.
The devices declare their needs and offer their services to the
broker which in turn keeps the devices informed about the up-
dated needs and services. Thus, the process of service discovery
8 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869
is smoothly carried out with the help of social agent and bro-
ker. The agent publishes to the broker the services that an as-
set has to offer and begin to search friends that has needs cor-
responding to those services and subscribes them to the formers
services.
Here is an example that elucidates the concept of social assets
service discovery. After installing the asset on the given machine
(by creating a new profile), the software agent corresponding to
the asset learns from the ListOfNeeds that it needs to monitor the
current temperature conditions to work. The corresponding soft-
ware agent will subscribe the asset to the services published by
HVAC agent in order to access the temperature data or data re-
lated to other environmental conditions. Another example of friend
discovery could be, if a new device is registered to the machine
the software agent of the machine updates its ListofNeeds, Listof-
Services and FriendList according to its initial needs and relation-
ships it shares with its peers. Humans (MachineOperator) need to
interact with software agents in order to interact with the corre-
sponding device. The interactions between humans, machines and
agents must be carried out with the help of smart interfaces and
lightweight IoT protocols such as MQTT (Message Queuing Teleme-
try Transport) [31].
6. Relationship management approach
In [8], the authors deploy a heuristic approach to manage rela-
tionships in a SIoT network. However, we have proposed an agent
based approach to manage relationships among the assets. A social
agent gets attached to the asset as soon as it is registered to the
system. It updates the Friend List of the asset according to some
pre defined conditions. It sends a request of friendship to those
matching the criteria or accepts/rejects the pending requests ac-
cording to the same criteria. Since, the maximum no. of friends
that can be added to the list are finite therefore it keeps track of
the least important friend in the list which could be replaced to
add a new one if the list is already full. The different kinds of rela-
tionships that we presume to exist among the assets are depicted
in Table 4.
Priority value is assigned to each type of friendship. A higher
priority value refers to high priority relationship. A social agent up-
dates the list of needs (ListofNeeds) and services (ListofSevices) of
the given asset. The services it can provide in given context will
be published under the related topic. While it subscribes the as-
set to the topic related to the needed services. For example, if
a machine works in controlled environmental conditions it will
subscribe to the HVAC (Humidity Ventilation and Air Conditioning
Control) to monitor the current room conditions. The concept of
building friendships between the assets was introduced to encour-
age communication and efficient use of resources. If an asset needs
some functionality or a specific resource possessed by another as-
set, mutual cooperation between them will lead to a more efficient
utilization of available resources. For example if one asset has tem-
perature sensor to measure heat and other has pressure sensor to
evaluate atmospheric pressure. They both can entrust each other
and in turn share their set of sensor readings with each other.
This is the sort of mutual cooperation that exists between TYPE
4 friends.
Table 4
Types of Asset Relationships.
Relationship Type Condition
Parental Machine Asset Relationship (PMAR) TYPE 1 Established when the assets are subparts of the same parent machine
Same Functionality Asset Relationship (SFAR) TYPE 2 Establishes when the assets share common functionality
Replacement Asset Relationship (RAR) TYPE 3 Established when one asset can be used as a replacement for the other
Cooperation Asset Relationship (CAR) TYPE 4 Established when mutual cooperation is desirable among the assets
7. Friend discovery
In the proposed approach, friend discovery is performed ini-
tially when the asset is registered to the system for the very first
time. The friend list of each asset is updated when it is first regis-
tered to the system according to the conditions defined in Table 4.
We have developed an algorithm to accomplish the friend discov-
ery process in an Industrial IoT environment. Further, we present
some required presumptions for the friend discovery algorithm.
7.1. Assumptions
Some significant assumptions considered in the algorithm are
discussed here. We have n no. of Industrial assets denoted by Ai
where the value of i varies from 1 to n. Each asset have a friend
list attached to it which is a two dimensional array (Friend_List).
Friend_Listij , stores the friend assets of asset i at jth position where
j reaches up to maximum limit of friends denoted by Friend_Limit.
Each asset has the following six attributes associated with it:
• Ai .Code: Stores the ID (EPC Code) required to uniquely identify
the asset
• Ai .Parent: Stores the parent machine’s ID (EPC Code) of the as-
set
• Ai .Type: Identifies the type of asset whether it is deployed in
a machine or kept as a replacement in case the former fails. It
holds either of the two values: Original and Replacement
• Ai .Function: Depicts the functionality of the asset in the system
• Ai .Needs: Includes the list of needs of the asset
• Ai .Services: Includes the list of services that an asset can pro-
vide
7.2. Friend discovery algorithm
In this section a novel approach for friendship management
(Friend Discovery Algorithm) in an SIOIT network is proposed. The
proposed algorithm (Algorithm 1) takes a set of assets as well as
their attributes as input and produces an updated friend list as
output. In the initial friend discovery process, each asset checks
the attributes of every other asset to determine if any type of li-
aison can be established in the form of friendship. Each type of
friendship is concluded by some specific conditions which if met
leads to a new addition to the friend list.
7.3. Friendship management
The social agent holds the responsibility of the task of manag-
ing friendships. After the initial friend discovery process is com-
pleted, a dynamic friendship management approach is needed to
enable socialization among assets. Out of the four kinds of rela-
tionships defined, TYPE 4 is the only one dynamic in nature. As the
needs and services of the assets do not remain static through the
manufacturing process, different kind of cooperation is desired at
different levels of the process. Also, at any time new assets can be
registered to the system. Therefore, it becomes substantial to use
a friendship management approach. We propose a priority based
approach to manage friendship between the assets. Each of the
friendship type is assigned a priority as illustrated in Table 4. At
Priority Authority Mode
1 LOW Static
2 MEDIUM Static
3 HIGH Static
4 VERY HIGH Dynamic
 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869 9

Algorithm 1 Friend Discovery Algorithm.

1: Begin
2: for i = 1 : n do
3: for j = 1 : n do
4: while k ≤ F riend_Limit do  Type 1 friendship condition
5: if Ai .Parent = A j .Parent then
6: F riend_Listik ← A j .Code
7: F riend_Listik .T ype ← T Y P E1
8: K ←K+1
 Type 2 friendship condition
9: if Ai .F unction = A j .F unction then
10: F riend_Listik ← A j .Code
11: F riend_Listik .T ype ← T Y P E2
12: K ←K+1
 Type 3 friendship condition
13: if Ai .F unction = A j .F unction then
14: if Ai .F unction = RE P LACE ME NT then
15: F riend_Listik ← A j .Code
16: F riend_Listik .T ype ← T Y P E3
17: K ←K+1
 Type 4 friendship condition
18: if Ai .Needs = A j .Services then
19: F riend_Listik ← A j .Code
20: F riend_Listik .T ype ← T Y P E4
21: K ←K+1
22: End

first, the asset adds all the other assets requesting for friendship to
the list of friends. If the limit of friends (Friend_Limit) is reached
and a new friendship request arrives, the following strategy drawn
out in the form of three ordered steps is adopted to handle the
newly arrived friendship proposal.
1. Firstly, the node determines the type of friendship relationship
that will be built with the sender of the new request on accep-
tance of request based on proposed approach (Algorithm 1) and
retrieve its priority value.
2. If the priority of the potential friendship is equal to or lower
than the least prior friendship, friend request is rejected.
3. If the priority of the potential friendship is greater than the
least prior friendship, friend request is accepted. The social
agent removes the latest added friend with least prior friend-
ship and replaces it with the sender of the request.
In order to support the proposed architectural model and pre-
sented relationship management approach, a use case scenario for
socially enabled Industrial IoT has been built using Node Red v
0.16.2. Further, an IoT based integrated approach for modelling and
simulation of bottle packaging industry is presented. In addition,
a simulation model for an automated bottle filling plant is devel-
oped. The solution is meant to be deployed on the factory floor and
its major purpose is to continuously monitor and ultimately en-
hance the performance of bottle packaging process. It plays a cru-
cial role in the maintenance of the system by suggesting as well as
taking appropriate actions as and when necessary. To have a clear
understanding of the scenario, it is important to first understand
the underlying automated bottle filling process. The next subsec-
tion clarifies the actual bottle filling process and briefly explains
the necessary sub processes involved. It also provides a detailed
description of the proposed systems scenario with the help of se-
mantics (ontology) and a simulation model.

8. SIoIT implementation: A Use case scenario

8.1. Proposed system scenario

This section exhibits an overview of potential implementation

On the basis of the design principles illustrated in Section 3, the
of the proposed architecture. Since IoT based Industrial environ-
proposed system scenario is being developed. To understand the
ment has not been completely implemented up till now, testing
automation of bottling plant one must go through the actual bot-
of such an environment is usually carried out with the help of a
tle filling process which occurs at a factory floor in an automated
simulation tool. The authors in [32] discuss and compare some of
bottle packaging industry [34]. The sub processes that constitute
the existing middleware platforms for IoT based applications im-
the bottle filling process are delineated below:
plementation. However, we have deployed the scenario on Node-
Red [33] which is a software platform developed by IBM for sim- • Bottle Transportation using Conveyors: Bottles are kept in posi-
ulation and modelling of an IoT environment. It is available as an tion in their respective holders which are fixed to the conveyor
open source platform for prototyping IoT applications. The reason at the input side. The process begins with loading of bottles
for selecting Node Red over other IoT platforms lies in its ability to into their respective holders attached to conveyors at the input
quickly prototype IoT applications and ease of integration with so- side. In some systems, Infrared sensors detect the presence of
cial networks and real time interaction with sensing devices. It is bottles in the holder. On the basis of results from these sen-
a browser based tool that uses MQTT protocol for communication sors, further cleansing, filling, capping and labeling operations
among devices. Building a prototype model is simple dragging and get started.
dropping the IoT nodes and connecting them to each other. It uses • Filling Operation: If the sensor indicates the presence of the
node as an abstraction for a JavaScript code module designed to bottle under the filling head, the conveyor stops. The fillers are
execute some specific functionality. It is built over node.js which is turned on and the corresponding bottles are filled with liquid
an event driven platform in a distributed environment. up to a desired level. That level is usually pre-defined by the
10 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869

Fig. 5. Proposed system scenario for a bottle-filling plant.

machine operator i.e. fed into the system. After the filling oper-
ation is completed, conveyor starts again.
• Capping Operation: When the bottles reach to the cap-
ping/labeling system, conveyor belt stops moving again. Bottles
are capped and labeled while taking care of their proper posi-
tioning and orientation. After the capping and labeling process,
conveyor starts moving again. At last, bottles are unloaded from
the ending point of the conveyor belt. The filling and capping
process can occur simultaneously on two different lot of bottles
for efficient utilization of the system.
We have taken into account an automated bottle filling plant
equipped with socially enabled intelligent machines/assets. The
machines/assets used in this context are a conveyor machine to
carry and move forward the bottles, an automatic filling machine
to fill liquid into bottles and an automatic capping machine to cap
and seal the bottles. The basic processes occurring in this scenario
are loading, filling, capping and unloading of bottles respectively.
Some systems may include cleansing and rinsing of bottles before
filling but we have not included the cleaning process in current
scenario to reduce complexity and facilitate easier understanding.
A number of sensors are deployed to each of these industrial units
(Conveyor, Filling Machine and Capping Machine) that enable the
machines to communicate over a network thereby making it an
IoT enabled system (Fig. 5).
8.2. Semantic description
To describe proposed approach semantically, ABSS-Ont (Auto-
mated Bottle-Filling Smart Solution Ontology) (Fig. 6) is designed.
It describes the three assets (Conveyor, Filler and Capper) used in
the proposed system along with the deployed sensors.
The sensors make use of three MQTT brokers namely
MQTT_Broker1, MQTT_Broker2 and MQTT_Broker3 to publish in-
formation in the form of topics to which Asset Monitoring Sys-
tems are subscribed to. Each asset is uniquely identified by unique
ID (EPC_Code) and has its own profile (Profile) managed by the
components ID_Manager and Profile_Manager respectively. A no-
tification system (Notification_Manager) is also associated with
the system to generate notifications or alerts (Social_Media_Alert
and System_Alert) for the user or operator of the machine (Ma-
chine_Operator). Four sensors are attached to each of the Con-
veyor (Conveyor_Sensor: CS1, CS2, CS3 and CS4) and Filling system
(Filler_Sensor: FS1, FS2, FS3 and FS4) and two sensors are attached
to the Capping/Labeling system (Capper_Sensor: LS1 and LS2). The

Fig. 6. Schematic diagram of ABSS-Ont.

 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869 11

Fig. 7. The registration tab.

detailed description of these sensors is provided in further sub-
sections. The needs and services of the assets are fulfilled using
publish-subscribe (pub/sub) pattern. Each asset has a social agent
(Social_Agent) associated with it which enable the assets to build
friendship relationships with each other and maintains their friend
list (Friend_List). Semantic rules are applied to the system for ser-
vice discovery and relationship management process as discussed
in previous sections above.
8.3. Simulation setup
The simulation of the proposed system is setup in an automated
bottle filling plant. There exist multiple bottle filling machines and
each machine consists of three major subparts (termed as assets):
Conveyor Belt, Filling Machine and Capping/Labeling Machine re-
spectively. The working of these machines has already been dis-
cussed. Each of these subparts (assets) is equipped with appropri-
ate sensors for performance monitoring and control. The detailed
description of the types of the sensors deployed along with as-
sumptions taken for each of the asset is presented in Tables 5,
6 and 7 respectively.
The probable output range values indicate the set of possi-
ble values that a sensor can generate while the acceptable out-
put range represent the set of permissible values. In case of any
deviation of results from the permissible, the system generates
alerts/notifications. The GUI of the proposed system is represented
with the help of node red dashboard on the local host system
(http://127.0.0.1:1880/ui/#/0). The system can work in two modes:
• Monitoring Mode: In this mode, the operator can passively
monitor the performance of the system. Operator has no con-
trol over the functioning of the system.
• Operator Control: In this mode, the operator can actively con-
trol the system to improve its performance.
Largely, the user interface consists of three main pages/tabs de-
scribed below:
1. Registration Tab: It facilitates the registration of new ma-
chines/assets. Whenever a new machine/asset is installed to the
system, the operator registers the device to new device registra-
tion interface (Fig. 7). Table 8 provides a brief description of the
attributes required to be entered into database for registration.
The new device information will be stored in the database and

Table 5
Sensors description for conveyor system.

S.No Sensor Description Unit of Measurement Probable Output Range Acceptable Output Range
◦
1 CS1 Temperature Value C, Celsius 0–60 20–40
2 CS2 Humidity Level %, Percentage 0-85 37–53
3 CS3 Speed Monitor ips, Inches per second 1–10 5–7
4 CS4 Lubrication Level μ, Coefficient of friction 0.3–0.6 0.30–0.45

Table 6
Sensors Description for Filling System.

S.No Sensor Description Unit of Measurement Probable Output Range Acceptable Output Range

1 FS1 Water Level %, Percentage 0–100 40–100

2 FS2 Bottle Counter NUMBER 0–4 4
3 FS3 Leakage Detector BOOLEAN Present, Absent Absent
4 FS4 Water Purity Level LEVEL 0–10 7–10

Table 7
Sensors Description for Capping/Labeling System.

S.No Sensor Description Unit of Measurement Probable Output Range Acceptable Output Range
◦
1 LS1 Bottle Orientation , Radians 0–360 0–180
2 LS2 Distance Sensor Inches 0–1 ± 0–0.2
12 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869

Table 8
Machine/Asset Registration Attributes.

S.No Attribute Description TYPE

1 MODEL NO
2 EPC CODE
3 FUNCTION
4 PARENTAL CODE
Provides the model no. associated with the machine assigned to it at the time of manufacturing ALPHA NUMERIC
A unique ID used to identify the intelligent machine/asset in a network of machines/assets ALPHA NUMERIC
To identify the role or function of the machine/asset in the system. It could be a part of the parent machine TEXT
(ORIGINAL) or simply available as a replacement to the actual machine part (REPLACEMENT)
To identify the parent machine to which an original asset belongs to or is a part of. It is NULL for a ALPHA NUMERIC
replacement machine part

Fig. 8. Sensors output monitoring tab.

Fig. 9. The Operator-Control Tab.

list of registered assets can be retrieved by clicking on the View
Records button.
2. Performance Monitoring: It is used for continuous monitoring
of the system and provides a display of outputs from various
sensors (Fig. 8).
3. Operator Control: This tab is required when the system is work-
ing in operator control mode. It includes various controls en-
abling the user to take appropriate action for proper function-
ing of the system as depicted in Fig. 9. Unlike automatic mode,
in operator control mode the system does not perform any
action but may recommend the operator with a suitable ac-
tion/solution to the problem.
8.4. Friend discovery process
The system initiates the friend discovery process as soon as a
new asset is registered to the system. It retrieves the attributes of
the asset from the database and starts looking for friends on the
basis of predefined rules. The database used for the proposed sys-
tem is SQLite which is a light weight database suitable for Node
Red.
A preliminary friend list will be created based on the available
assetś profile involving only Parental Asset Friendship (TYPE 1)
and Same Functionality Friendship (TYPE 2).Consider an instance
in which six assets are registered to the system as shown in Fig. 10.
 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869 13

Fig. 10. Display Friend List.

a part of the same PARENT MACHINE (B001) and the relationship is

known as TYPE 1 friendship, b) CONVEYOR (C1100) is friends with
CONVEYOR (C2200) because the latter can be used as a replace-
ment for former and the relationship is known as TYPE 2 friend-
ship.

8.5. Notifications/alerts

The system performance is continuously monitored and

in case of any discrepancy or error the system generates
alerts/notifications intended to alert the machine operator about
the urgent requirement of an action. Along with generating alerts
in case of any exceptional behavior, the system also periodically
reports the performance of the system to the operator. The peri-
odic reports are sent as a social media notification. While a system
alert is generated in case an urgent response is required. Thus, the
proposed system generates two types of messages:

• Social Media Posts: The system automatically posts the system

Fig. 11. Social media notifications. performance parameters values on twitter periodically (Fig. 11).
• System Generated Alerts: In case of an urgent response to a
The system can perform a static search from the database to iden- problem is needed, system alerts are generated. These can be
tify assets which are a part of the same machine i.e. Type 1 friend- blocking or non-blocking. A blocking system alert stops the nor-
ship or those sharing same functionality and/or one could be used mal functioning of the system while a non blocking alert does
as a replacement for another i.e. TYPE 2 friendship. For example: a) not hinder the normal functioning of the system. An example
CONVEYOR (C1100) with is friends with FILLER (F1100) as they are of system generated alerts is represented in Fig. 12.

Fig. 12. System generated alert.

14 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869

Fig. 13. CPU performance evaluation.

berry Pi system with Raspbian OS [35]. The implementation de-

Fig. 14. Rate of system generated alerts/notifications.
8.6. Performance evaluation
This section presents an investigation and performance evalu-
ation of the proposed framework in given scenario. The system
prototype is implemented using Node Red middleware on a Rasp-
tails have already been discussed in previous sections. The sys-
tem flow was deployed on the Node Red platform and monitored
with the help of Node Red dashboard several hours continuously
for 30 days. The system performance was evaluated using differ-
ent metrics which turned out to be uniform in terms of CPU and
memory usage. Fig. 13 depicts the systems CPU usage in running
mode.
The maximum CPU usage occurred during peak intervals when
highest no. of I/O messages were exchanged by the system. It
reached a maximum of 25% while an average of 20% which is quite
reasonable. Further, Fig. 14 represents the speed of alerts and noti-
fications generated by the system i.e. no. of alert/notification mes-
sage generated per unit time. Systems accuracy is calculated by
comparing the no. of faults occurred with the no. of alerts gen-
erated per unit time which is found to be nearly 0.8 (80%).
Since the system is implemented on local host web server us-
ing HTTP, any message to the system is transferred with the help
of HTTP incoming requests. Therefore, other performance evalua-
tion metrics include no. of HTTP Input requests (Fig. 15) and HTTP
throughput (Fig. 16). The HTTP throughput is estimated in terms of

Fig. 15. Rate of HTTP incoming requests.

Fig. 16. HTTP Throughput.

 N. Gulati and P.D. Kaur / Ad Hoc Networks 91 (2019) 101869
no. of message (packet) round trips per unit time which increases
with increase in no. of messages exchanged at a given time.
9. Conclusion
In this paper, an incorporation of Social IoT into industry is con-
templated and a novel architecture for SIoIT systems is proposed. It
also puts forward algorithmic and heuristic approaches to manage
relationships between industrial assets accompanied by a proposal
on practical implementation. An ontology (SIoIT-Ont) is developed
with the purpose of providing a semantic meaning to the pro-
posed strategies. To provide a basis for the deployment of proposed
architecture, an example industrial scenario for automated bottle
packaging plant is discussed. We developed a simulation model for
performance monitoring and control of an automated bottle filling
plant in collaboration with the proposed architecture to establish
its viability in real industrial scenarios.
In future, we aim to implement and test the proposed system
in real industrial environments. The feasibility of the proposed ap-
proach in practical is one of the major concerns. We considered
relationship management strategies pertaining to a static approach.
However, actual asset socializing scenario appears to be more dy-
namic than static in nature. Thus, in future we intend to work on
augmenting the current approach with dynamic clauses. In addi-
tion to performance monitoring and control of the industrial IoT
systems, the future emphasis will be on performance enhance-
ment. Different machine learning strategies can be employed to
encourage automatic friend selection by learning from experience.
It is supposed to add to the more effective relationship manage-
ment strategies.
Conflict of interest
None.
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Ms. Nancy Gulati is working as a Research Scholar in
the Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Guru Nanak Dev University, RC, Jalandhar. She received
her Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineer-
ing from National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar, India
working on Resource Constraints in Wireless Sensor Net-
works. She is currently pursuing Ph.D and her research
interests include applications of Internet of Things (IoT)
and its enabling technologies.
Dr. Pankaj Deep Kaur is working as an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, Guru Nanak Dev University, RC, Jalandhar,
India. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Computer
Applications (20 0 0) and Master’s Degree in Informa-
tion Technology (2003) from Guru Nanak Dev Univer-
sity, Amritsar, India. She completed her Ph.D. in Resource
Scheduling in Cloud Computing from Thapar University,
Patiala (2014) and has over ten years of teaching and re-
search experience. Her research interests include Cloud
Computing and Big data.