  The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promises to bring many benefits,
including increased productivity, reduced costs, and increased safety to new
generation manufacturing plants. The main ingredients of IIoT are the
connected, communicating devices directly located in the workshop floor (far
edge devices), as well as edge gateways that connect such devices to the
Internet and, in particular, to cloud servers. The field of Edge Computing
advocates that keeping computations as close as possible to the sources of data
can be an effective means of reducing latency, preserving privacy, and improve
the overall efficiency of the system, although building systems where (far)
edge and cloud nodes cooperate is quite challenging. In the present work we
propose the adoption of the Aggregate Programming (AP) paradigm (and, in
particular, the "aggregate process" construct) as a way to simplify building
distributed, intelligent services at the far edge of an IIoT architecture. We
demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the approach with simulated
experiments on FCPP (a C++ library for AP), and with some basic experiments on
physical IIoT boards running an ad-hoc porting of FCPP.

Software Engineering