Leveraging LLMs for Dynamic IoT Systems Generation through Mixed-Initiative Interaction

IoT systems face significant challenges in adapting to user needs, which are often under-specified and evolve with changing environmental contexts. To address these complexities, users should be able to explore possibilities, while IoT systems must learn and support users in the process of providing proper services, e.g., to serve novel experiences. The IoT-Together paradigm aims to meet this demand through the Mixed-Initiative Interaction (MII) paradigm that facilitates a collaborative synergy between users and IoT systems, enabling the co-creation of intelligent and adaptive solutions that are precisely aligned with user-defined goals. This work advances IoT-Together by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into its architecture. Our approach enables intelligent goal interpretation through a multi-pass dialogue framework and dynamic service generation at runtime according to user needs. To demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology, we design and implement the system in the context of a smart city tourism case study. We evaluate the system's performance using agent-based simulation and user studies. Results indicate efficient and accurate service identification and high adaptation quality. The empirical evidence indicates that the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into IoT architectures can significantly enhance the architectural adaptability of the system while ensuring real-world usability.