A look at cloud architecture interoperability through standards

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform while preserving integrity raises interoperability issues. How components are connected needs to be addressed. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication encoding technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement universal strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Corresponding modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed

Mobile support in CSCW applications and groupware development frameworks

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an established subset of the field of Human Computer Interaction that deals with the how people use computing technology to enhance group interaction and collaboration. Mobile CSCW has emerged as a result of the progression from personal desktop computing to the mobile device platforms that are ubiquitous today. CSCW aims to not only connect people and facilitate communication through using computers; it aims to provide conceptual models coupled with technology to manage, mediate, and assist collaborative processes. Mobile CSCW research looks to fulfil these aims through the adoption of mobile technology and consideration for the mobile user. Facilitating collaboration using mobile devices brings new challenges. Some of these challenges are inherent to the nature of the device hardware, while others focus on the understanding of how to engineer software to maximize effectiveness for the end-users. This paper reviews seminal and state-of-the-art cooperative software applications and development frameworks, and their support for mobile devices

A Survey on the Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems

Towards a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud through Operable Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines

In last decade, the paradigm of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has integrated industrial manufacturing systems with Cloud Computing technologies for Cloud Manufacturing. Up to 2015, there were many CPS-based manufacturing systems that collected real-time machining data to perform remote monitoring, prognostics and health management, and predictive maintenance. However, these CPS-integrated and network ready machines were not directly connected to the elements of Cloud Manufacturing and required human-in-the-loop. Addressing this gap, we introduced a new paradigm of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) that bridges a gap between physical machines and virtual space in 2017. CPMC virtualizes machine tools in cloud through web services for direct monitoring and operations through Internet. Fundamentally, CPMC differs with contemporary modern manufacturing paradigms. For instance, CPMC virtualizes machining tools in cloud using remote services and establish direct Internet-based communication, which is overlooked in existing Cloud Manufacturing systems. Another contemporary, namely cyber-physical production systems enable networked access to machining tools. Nevertheless, CPMC virtualizes manufacturing resources in cloud and monitor and operate them over the Internet. This dissertation defines the fundamental concepts of CPMC and expands its horizon in different aspects of cloud-based virtual manufacturing such as Digital Twins and Virtual Production Lines. Digital Twin (DT) is another evolving concept since 2002 that creates as-is replicas of machining tools in cyber space. Up to 2018, many researchers proposed state-of-the-art DTs, which only focused on monitoring production lifecycle management through simulations and data driven analytics. But they overlooked executing manufacturing processes through DTs from virtual space. This dissertation identifies that DTs can be made more productive if they engage directly in direct execution of manufacturing operations besides monitoring. Towards this novel approach, this dissertation proposes a new operable DT model of CPMC that inherits the features of direct monitoring and operations from cloud. This research envisages and opens the door for future manufacturing systems where resources are developed as cloud-based DTs for remote and distributed manufacturing. Proposed concepts and visions of DTs have spawned the following fundamental researches. This dissertation proposes a novel concept of DT based Virtual Production Lines (VPL) in CPMC in 2019. It presents a design of a service-oriented architecture of DTs that virtualizes physical manufacturing resources in CPMC. Proposed DT architecture offers a more compact and integral service-oriented virtual representations of manufacturing resources. To re-configure a VPL, one requirement is to establish DT-to-DT collaborations in manufacturing clouds, which replicates to concurrent resource-to-resource collaborations in shop floors. Satisfying the above requirements, this research designs a novel framework to easily re-configure, monitor and operate VPLs using DTs of CPMC. CPMC publishes individual web services for machining tools, which is a traditional approach in the domain of service computing. But this approach overcrowds service registry databases. This dissertation introduces a novel fundamental service publication and discovery approach in 2020, OpenDT, which publishes DTs with collections of services. Experimental results show easier discovery and remote access of DTs while re-configuring VPLs. Proposed researches in this dissertation have received numerous citations both from industry and academia, clearly proving impacts of research contributions

Mashup Ecosystems: Integrating Web Resources on Desktop and Mobile Devices

The Web is increasingly used as an application platform, and recent development of it has introduced software ecosystems where different actors collaborate. This collaboration is international from day one, and it evolves and grows rapidly. In web ecosystems applications are provided as services, and interdependencies between ecosystem parts can vary from very strong and obvious to loose and recondite. Mashups -- web application hybrids that combine resources from different services into an integrated system that has increased value from user perspective -- are exploiting services of the Web and creating ecosystems where end-users, mashup authors, and service providers collaborate. The term "resources" is used here in a broad sense, and it can refer to user's local data, infinite content of the Web, and even executable code. This dissertation presents mashups as a new breed of web applications that are intended for parsing the web content into an easily accessed form on both regular desktop computers as well as on mobile devices. Constantly evolving web technologies and new web services open up unforeseen possibilities for mashup development. However, developing mashups with current methods and tools for existing deployment environments is challenging. First, the Web as an application platform faces numerous shortcomings, second, web application development practices in general are still immature, and third, development of mashups has additional requirements that need to be addressed. In addition, mobility sets even more challenges for mashup authoring. This dissertation describes and addresses numerous issues regarding mashup ecosystems and client-side mashup development. To achieve this, we have implemented technical research artifacts including mashup ecosystems and different kinds of mashup compositions. The artifacts are developed with numerous runtime environments and tools and targeted at different end-user platforms. This has allowed us to evaluate methods, tools, and practises used during the implementation. As result, this dissertation identifies the fundamental challenges of mashup ecosystems and describes how service providers and mashup ecosystem authors can address these challenges in practice. In addition, example implementation of a specialized multimedia mashup ecosystem for mobile devices is described. To address mashup development issues, this dissertation introduces practical guidelines and a reference architecture that can be applied when mashups are created with traditional web development tools. Moreover, environments that can be used on mobile devices to create mashups that have access to both web and local resources are introduced. Finally, a novel approach to web software development -- creating software as a mashup -- is introduced, and a realization of such concept is described