On the cloud deployment of a session abstraction for service/data aggregation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe global cyber-infrastructure comprehends a growing number of resources, spanning over several abstraction layers. These resources, which can include wireless sensor devices or mobile networks, share common requirements such as richer inter-connection capabilities and increasing data consumption demands. Additionally, the service model is now widely spread, supporting the development and execution of distributed applications. In this context, new challenges are emerging around the “big data” topic. These challenges include service access optimizations, such as data-access context sharing, more efficient data filtering/ aggregation mechanisms, and adaptable service access models that can respond to context changes. The service access characteristics can be aggregated to capture specific interaction models. Moreover, ubiquitous service access is a growing requirement, particularly regarding mobile clients such as tablets and smartphones. The Session concept aggregates the service access characteristics, creating specific interaction models, which can then be re-used in similar contexts. Existing Session abstraction implementations also allow dynamic reconfigurations of these interaction models, so that the model can adapt to context changes, based on service, client or underlying communication medium variables. Cloud computing on the other hand, provides ubiquitous access, along with large data persistence and processing services. This thesis proposes a Session abstraction implementation, deployed on a Cloud platform, in the form of a middleware. This middleware captures rich/dynamic interaction models between users with similar interests, and provides a generic mechanism for interacting with datasources based on multiple protocols. Such an abstraction contextualizes service/users interactions, can be reused by other users in similar contexts. This Session implementation also permits data persistence by saving all data in transit in a Cloud-based repository, The aforementioned middleware delivers richer datasource-access interaction models, dynamic reconfigurations, and allows the integration of heterogenous datasources. The solution also provides ubiquitous access, allowing client connections from standard Web browsers or Android based mobile devices

Anturidatan lähettäminen fyysiseltä kaksoselta digitaaliselle kaksoselle

A digital twin is a digital counterpart of a physical thing such as a machine. The term digital twin was first introduced in 2010. Thereafter, it has received an extensive amount of interest because of the numerous benefits it is expected to offer throughout the product life cycle. Currently, the concept is developed by the world’s largest companies such as Siemens. The purpose of this thesis is to examine which application layer protocols and communication technologies are the most suitable for the sensor data transmission from a physical twin to a digital twin. In addition, a platform enabling this data transmission is developed. As the concept of a digital twin is relatively new, a comprehensive literature view on the definition of a digital twin in scientific literature is presented. It has been found that the vision of a digital twin has evolved from the concepts of ‘intelligent products’ presented at the beginning of the 2000s. The most widely adopted definition states that a digital twin accurately mirrors the current state of its corresponding twin. However, the definition of a digital twin is not yet standardized and varies in different fields. Based on the literature review, the communication needs of a digital twin are derived. Thereafter, the suitability of HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, XMPP, AMQP, DDS, and OPC UA for sensor data transmission are examined through a literature review. In addition, a review of 4G, 5G, NB-IoT, LoRa, Sigfox, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, ZigBee, and WirelessHART is presented. A platform for the management of the sensors is developed. The platform narrows the gap between the concept and realization of a digital twin by enabling sensor data transmission. The platform allows easy addition of sensors to a physical twin and provides an interface for their configuration remotely over the Internet. It supports multiple sensor types and application protocols and offers both web user iterface and REST API.Digitaalinen kaksonen on fyysisen tuotteen digitaalinen vastinkappale, joka sisältää tiedon sen nykyisestä tilasta. Digitaalisen kaksosen käsite otettiin ensimmäisen kerran käyttöön vuonna 2010. Sen jälkeen digitaalinen kaksonen on saanut paljon huomiota, ja sitä ovat lähteneet kehittämään maailman suurimmat yritykset, kuten Siemens. Tämän työn tarkoituksena tutkia, mitkä sovelluskerroksen protokollat ja langattomat verkot soveltuvat parhaiten anturien keräämän datan lähettämiseen fyysiseltä kaksoselta digitaaliselle kaksoselle. Sen lisäksi työssä esitellään alusta, joka mahdollistaa tämän tiedonsiirron. Digitaalisen kaksosesta esitetään laaja kirjallisuuskatsaus, joka luo pohjan työn myöhemmille osioille. Digitaalisen kaksosen konsepti pohjautuu 2000-luvun alussa esiteltyihin ajatuksiin ”älykkäistä tuotteista”. Yleisimmän käytössä olevan määritelmän mukaan digitaalinen kaksonen heijastaa sen fyysisen vastinparin tämän hetkistä tilaa. Määritelmä kuitenkin vaihtelee eri alojen välillä eikä se ole vielä vakiintunut tieteellisessä kirjallisuudessa. Kirjallisuuskatsauksen avulla johdetaan digitaalisen kaksosen kommunikaatiotarpeet. Sen jälkeen arvioidaan seuraavien sovelluskerroksen protokollien soveltuvuutta anturidatan lähettämiseen kirjallisuuskatsauksen avulla: HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, XMPP, AMQP, DDS ja OPC UA. Myös seuraavien langattomien verkkojen soveltuvuutta tiedonsiirtoon tutkitaan: 4G, 5G, NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, ZigBee ja WirelessHART. Osana työtä kehitettiin myös ohjelmistoalusta, joka mahdollistaa anturien hallinnan etänä Internetin välityksellä. Alusta on pieni askel kohti digitaalisen kaksosen käytän-nön toteutusta, sillä se mahdollistaa tiedon keräämisen fyysisestä vastinkappaleesta. Sen avulla sensorien lisääminen fyysiseen kaksoseen on helppoa, ja se tukee sekä useita sensorityyppejä että sovelluskerroksen protokollia. Alusta tukee REST API –rajapintaa ja sisältää web-käyttöliittymän

Engineering self-awareness with knowledge management in dynamic systems: a case for volunteer computing

The complexity of the modem dynamic computing systems has motivated software engineering researchers to explore new sources of inspiration for equipping such systems with autonomic behaviours. Self-awareness has recently gained considerable attention as a prominent property for enriching the self-adaptation capabilities in systems operating in dynamic, heterogeneous and open environments. This thesis investigates the role of knowledge and its dynamic management in realising various levels of self-awareness for enabling self­adaptivity with different capabilities and strengths. The thesis develops a novel multi-level dynamic knowledge management approach for managing and representing the evolving knowledge. The approach is able to acquire 'richer' knowledge about the system's internal state and its environment in addition to managing the trade-offs arising from the adaptation conflicting goals. The thesis draws on a case from the volunteer computing, as an environment characterised by openness, heterogeneity, dynamism, and unpredictability to develop and evaluate the approach. This thesis takes an experimental approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the of the dynamic knowledge management approach. The results show the added value of the approach to the self-adaptivity of the system compared to classic self­adaptation capabilities

A Hybrid Modelling Framework for Real-time Decision-support for Urgent and Emergency Healthcare

In healthcare, opportunities to use real-time data to support quick and effective decision-making are expanding rapidly, as data increases in volume, velocity and variety. In parallel, the need for short-term decision-support to improve system resilience is increasingly relevant, with the recent COVID-19 crisis underlining the pressure that our healthcare services are under to deliver safe, effective, quality care in the face of rapidly-shifting parameters. A real-time hybrid model (HM) which combines real-time data, predictions, and simulation, has the potential to support short-term decision-making in healthcare. Considering decision-making as a consequence of situation awareness focuses the HM on what information is needed where, when, how, and by whom with a view toward sustained implementation. However the articulation between real-time decision-support tools and a sociotechnical approach to their development and implementation is currently lacking in the literature. Having identified the need for a conceptual framework to support the development of real-time HMs for short-term decision-support, this research proposed and tested the Integrated Hybrid Analytics Framework (IHAF) through an examination of the stages of a Design Science methodology and insights from the literature examining decision-making in dynamic, sociotechnical systems, data analytics, and simulation. Informed by IHAF, a HM was developed using real-time Emergency Department data, time-series forecasting, and discrete-event simulation. The application started with patient questionnaires to support problem definition and to act as a formative evaluation, and was subsequently evaluated using staff interviews. Evaluation of the application found multiple examples where the objectives of people or sub-systems are not aligned, resulting in inefficiencies and other quality problems, which are characteristic of complex adaptive sociotechnical systems. Synthesis of the literature, the formative evaluation, and the final evaluation found significant themes which can act as antecedents or evaluation criteria for future real-time HM studies in sociotechnical systems, in particular in healthcare. The generic utility of IHAF is emphasised for supporting future applications in similar domains

Development of a grid service for multi-objective design optimisation

The emerging grid technology is receiving great attention from researchers and applications that need computational and data capabilities to enhance performance and efficiency. Multi-Objective Design Optimisation (MODO) is computationally and data challenging. The challenges become even more with the emergence of evolutionary computing (EC) techniques which produce multiple solutions in a single simulation run. Other challenges are the complexity in mathematical models and multidisciplinary involvement of experts, thus making MODO collaborative and interactive in nature. These challenges call for a problem solving environment (P SE) that can provide computational and optimisation resources to MODO experts as services. Current PSEs provide only the technical specifications of the services which is used by programmers and do not have service specifications for designers that use the system to support design optimisation as services. There is need for PSEs to have service specification document that describes how the services are provided to the end users. Additionally, providing MODO resources as services enabled designers to share resources that they do not have through service subscription. The aim of this research is to develop specifications and architecture of a grid service for MODO. The specifications provide the service use cases that are used to build MODO services. A service specification document is proposed and this enables service providers to follow a process for providing services to end users. In this research, literature was reviewed and industry survey conducted. This was followed by the design, development, case study and validation. The research studied related PSEs in literature and industry to come up with a service specification document that captures the process for grid service definition. This specification was used to develop a framework for MODO applications. An architecture based on this framework was proposed and implemented as DECGrid (Decision Engineering Centre Grid) prototype. Three real-life case studies were used to validate the prototype. The results obtained compared favourably with the results in literature. Different scenarios for using the services among distributed design experts demonstrated the computational synergy and efficiency in collaboration. The mathematical model building service and optimisation service enabled designers to collaboratively build models using the collaboration service. This helps designers without optimisation knowledge to perform optimisation. The key contributions in this research are the service specifications that support MODO, the framework developed which provides the process for definining the services and the architecture used to implement the framework. The key limitations of the research are the use of only engineering design optimisation case studies and the prototype is not tested in industry.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for Information Fusion (Collected Works), Vol. 4

The fourth volume on Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for information fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics. The contributions (see List of Articles published in this book, at the end of the volume) have been published or presented after disseminating the third volume (2009, http://fs.unm.edu/DSmT-book3.pdf) in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals. First Part of this book presents the theoretical advancement of DSmT, dealing with Belief functions, conditioning and deconditioning, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Decision Making, Multi-Criteria, evidence theory, combination rule, evidence distance, conflicting belief, sources of evidences with different importance and reliabilities, importance of sources, pignistic probability transformation, Qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, Imprecise belief structures, 2-Tuple linguistic label, Electre Tri Method, hierarchical proportional redistribution, basic belief assignment, subjective probability measure, Smarandache codification, neutrosophic logic, Evidence theory, outranking methods, Dempster-Shafer Theory, Bayes fusion rule, frequentist probability, mean square error, controlling factor, optimal assignment solution, data association, Transferable Belief Model, and others. More applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the third book of DSmT 2009. Subsequently, the second part of this volume is about applications of DSmT in correlation with Electronic Support Measures, belief function, sensor networks, Ground Moving Target and Multiple target tracking, Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device, Belief Interacting Multiple Model filter, seismic and acoustic sensor, Support Vector Machines, Alarm classification, ability of human visual system, Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Evaluation Framework, Threat Assessment, Handwritten Signature Verification, Automatic Aircraft Recognition, Dynamic Data-Driven Application System, adjustment of secure communication trust analysis, and so on. Finally, the third part presents a List of References related with DSmT published or presented along the years since its inception in 2004, chronologically ordered

Production Scheduling

Generally speaking, scheduling is the procedure of mapping a set of tasks or jobs (studied objects) to a set of target resources efficiently. More specifically, as a part of a larger planning and scheduling process, production scheduling is essential for the proper functioning of a manufacturing enterprise. This book presents ten chapters divided into five sections. Section 1 discusses rescheduling strategies, policies, and methods for production scheduling. Section 2 presents two chapters about flow shop scheduling. Section 3 describes heuristic and metaheuristic methods for treating the scheduling problem in an efficient manner. In addition, two test cases are presented in Section 4. The first uses simulation, while the second shows a real implementation of a production scheduling system. Finally, Section 5 presents some modeling strategies for building production scheduling systems. This book will be of interest to those working in the decision-making branches of production, in various operational research areas, as well as computational methods design. People from a diverse background ranging from academia and research to those working in industry, can take advantage of this volume

Agent-Based Modelling of Public Space Activity in Real-Time

Understanding how urban space is used by its inhabitants is vital in improving the overall quality of a city's built environment, as it can highlight needs and requirements of everyday life to be addressed in any urban development. Our investigation of urban activity is often approached through spatial models and simulations on the one hand, and urban data on the other. The work presented here explores potential combinations of the two, by coupling urban models with real-time urban data feeds for continuous short-term forecasting of urban activity. This aim is approached through the development of a model of activity in urban public spaces using the agent-based modelling paradigm, calibrated to real-time data input, and applied to the simulation of current activity in public spaces at a fine spatio-temporal scale. Observations about human spatial behaviour are identified in the literature on public spaces and implemented within a 3D modelling framework, thereby extending existing pedestrian and crowd agent-based modelling approaches. Furthermore, a review and evaluation of real-time data feeds pertaining to activity in public spaces is performed, focussing on open and publicly available datasets, and a forecasting model is developed using social media and other datasets as a proxy for current user activity. The resulting real-time model of public space activity is then evaluated through two case studies focussing on two major urban parks in London, UK. The model performs well in capturing park visitor activity in terms of spatial dispersion. Real-time data feeds examined are found to be capable of capturing park visitor activity to some degree; however they are found to be inadequate in supporting a fully fledged, detailed real-time model of public space activity. Finally, potential future trajectories of the approaches are identified in the increasing availability of online 3D mapping data when combined with advances in computational efficiency and data availability, in extending current data visualisation approaches into expansive, fine-scale simulations of real-time urban activity

Evaluation of Efficiency of Cybersecurity

Uurimistöö eesmärgiks on uurida, kuidas tõhus küberjulgeolek on olnud edukas. Uurimistöö kasutab parima võimaliku tulemuse saamiseks mitmesuguseid uurimismeetodeid ja kirjanduse ülevaade on süstemaatiline. Kuid uurimistöö järeldus on see, et uuring ei suuda kinnitada või tagasi lükata peamist töö hüpoteesi. Uuring ei õnnestunud, sest puuduvad korralikud teooriad, mis näitavad ohutuse ja küberjulgeoleku nähtusi ning puuduvad head näitajad, mis annaksid küberohutuse tõhususe kohta kehtivaid ja ratsionaalseid tulemusi, kui hästi on küberkuritegevuse abil õnnestunud küberkuritegevuse tõhusaks võitmiseks ja küberkuritegude tõhusaks vähendamiseks. Seepärast on küberjulgeoleku teadusteooria ja julgeoleku teadusteooria vähearenenud 2018. aastal. Uuringud on teinud küberjulgeoleku ja turvalisuse arendamise põhilisi avastusi. Edasiste põhiuuringute suund on luua üldine turbeteooria, mis kirjeldab ohtlike muutujate ohtlike muutujate kavatsust, ressursse, pädevust ja edusamme ohtlike muutujate ja aksioomide puhul, kus ohtlike muutujate mõõtmisel saab teha selle sisse loodetavas ja teooria kirjeldab, millised on tõhusad meetmed, et vältida ja leevendada ning millised ei ole ja lõpuks kehtestada nõuetekohased mõõdikud, et mõõta turvalisuse ja küberjulgeoleku tõhusust loodetavus ja kehtivusega.The purpose of the thesis is to research how effectively cybersecurity has succeeded on its mission. The thesis used multiple research methods to get best possible answer and the literature review has been systematic. However, the conclusion of the research was that the study is unable to either confirm or reject the main working hypothesis. The study is unable to do it because of the lack of proper theories to describe what are the phenomena in secu-rity and cybersecurity and the lack of proper metrics to give valid and sound conclusion about the effective of cybersecurity and how well have cybersecurity succeed on its mis-sion to effectively prevent and mitigate cybercrime. Therefore, the science of security and science of cybersecurity are underdeveloped in 2018. The research has made basic discov-eries of development of cybersecurity and security. A direction of further basic research is to establish a general theory of security which describes threat variables, threat variables intention, resources, competence and progress of the threat variables and axioms where measurement of threat variables can be made with reliability and the theory would describe which are effective measures to prevent and mitigate and which are not and finally, estab-lish proper metrics to measure efficiency of security and cybersecurity with reliability and validity