Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

Semantic Gateway as a Service architecture for IoT Interoperability

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to occupy a substantial component of future Internet. The IoT connects sensors and devices that record physical observations to applications and services of the Internet. As a successor to technologies such as RFID and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the IoT has stumbled into vertical silos of proprietary systems, providing little or no interoperability with similar systems. As the IoT represents future state of the Internet, an intelligent and scalable architecture is required to provide connectivity between these silos, enabling discovery of physical sensors and interpretation of messages between things. This paper proposes a gateway and Semantic Web enabled IoT architecture to provide interoperability between systems using established communication and data standards. The Semantic Gateway as Service (SGS) allows translation between messaging protocols such as XMPP, CoAP and MQTT via a multi-protocol proxy architecture. Utilization of broadly accepted specifications such as W3C's Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology for semantic annotations of sensor data provide semantic interoperability between messages and support semantic reasoning to obtain higher-level actionable knowledge from low-level sensor data.Comment: 16 page

Generic framework for the personal omni-remote controller using M2MI

A Generic Framework for the Personal Omni-Remote Controller Using M2MI is a master’s thesis outlining a generic framework for the wireless omni-remote controller that controls neighboring appliances by using Many-to-Many Invocation (M2MI). M2MI is an object-oriented abstraction of broadcast communication. First, this paper introduces the history of remote controllers and analyzes omni-remote controller projects made by other researchers in this area, such as the Pebbles PDA project at Carnegie Mellon University and HP’s COOLTOWN project. Second, this paper depicts a generic framework of the personal omni-remote controller system including architecture, type hierarchy, and service discovery. In this framework, a module approach and a decentralized dual-mode service discovery scheme are introduced. When users request a certain type of service, their omni-remote controller application will first discover the available appliances in the vicinity and then bring up the corresponding control module for the target appliance. Thus, users can control the appliance through the User Interface of the control module. To join the omni-remote controller system, servers and clients need to follow the type hierarchy convention of the system. Finally, several implementations are given to show the control of different appliances with different capabilities. These appliances include thermostats, TVs with parental control, and washing machines

Smart Sensor Webs For Environmental Monitoring Integrating Ogc Standards

Sensor webs are the most recent generation of data acquisition systems. The research presented looks at the concept of sensor webs from three perspectives: node, user, and data. These perspectives are different but are nicely complementary, and all extend an enhanced, usually wireless, sensor network. From the node perspective, sensor nodes collaborate in response to environmental phenomena in intelligent ways; this is referred to as the collaborative aspect. From the user perspective, a sensor web makes its sensor nodes and resources accessible via the WWW (World Wide Web); this is referred to as the accessible aspect. From the data perspective, sensor data is annotated with metadata to produce contextual information; this is referred to as the semantic aspect. A prototype that is a sensor web in all three senses has been developed. The prototype demonstrates theability of managing information in different knowledge domains. From the low-level weather data, information about higher-level weather concepts can be inferred and transferred to other knowledge domains, such as specific human activities. This produces an interesting viewpoint of situation awareness in the scope of traditional weather data

Implementation of a building automation system based on semantic modeling

This paper presents an Ontology-Based multi-technology platform designed to avoid some issues of Building Automation Systems. The platform allows the integration of several building automation protocols, eases the development and implementation of different kinds of services and allows sharing information related to the infrastructure and facilities within a building. The system has been implemented and tested in the Energy Efficiency Research Facility at CeDInt-UPM

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL

Proximal business intelligence on the semantic web

This is the post-print version of this article. The official version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer.Ubiquitous information systems (UBIS) extend current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between devices and software components with relation to people and process. Adapting business data and management information to support specific user actions in context is an ongoing topic of research. Approaches typically focus on providing mechanisms to improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information can be accessed in a mobile, dynamic and ad-hoc manner. Although web ontology has been used to facilitate the loading of data warehouses, less research has been carried out on ontology based mobile reporting. This paper explores how business data can be modeled and accessed using the web ontology language and then re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access; uncovering more effective architectural models for adaptive information system strategies of this type. This exploratory work is guided in part by a vision of business intelligence that is highly distributed, mobile and fluid, adapting to sensory understanding of the underlying environment in which it operates. A proof-of concept mobile and ambient data access architecture is developed in order to further test the viability of such an approach. The paper concludes with an ontology engineering framework for systems of this type – named UBIS-ONTO

An integrated framework utilising software agent reasoning and ontology models for sensor based building monitoring

Smart building monitoring demands a new software infrastructure that can elaborate building domain knowledge in order to provide advanced and intelligent functionalities. Conventional facility management (FM) software tools lack semantically rich components, and that limits the capability of supporting software for automatic information sharing, resource negotiation and to assist in timely decision making. Recent hardware innovation on compact ZigBee sensor devices, software developments on ontology and intelligent software agent paradigms provide a good opportunity to develop tools that can further improve current FM practices. This paper introduces an integrated framework which includes a ZigBee based sensor network and underlying multi-agent software (MAS) components. Several different types of sensors were integrated with the ZigBee host devices to produce compact multi-functional sensor units. The MAS framework incorporates the belief-desire-intention (BDI) abstraction with ontology support (provided via explicit knowledge bases). The different software agent types have been developed to work with sensor hardware to conduct resource negotiation, to optimize battery utilization, to monitor building space in a non-intrusive way and to reason about its usage through real time ontology model queries. The deployed sensor network shows promising intelligent characteristics, and it has been applied in several on-going research projects as an underlying decision making service. More applications and larger deployments have been planned for future work