Equipment management trial : final report

Executive Summary The Equipment Management (EM) trial was one of the practical initiatives conceived and implemented by members of The Application Home Initiative (TAHI) to demonstrate the feasibility of interoperability between white and brown goods, and other domestic equipment. The trial ran from October 2002 to June 2005, over which period it achieved its core objectives through the deployment in early 2005 of an integrated system in trials in 15 occupied homes. Prior to roll out into the field, the work was underpinned by soak testing, validation, laboratory experiments, case studies, user questionnaires, simulations and other research, conducted in a single demonstration home in Loughborough, as well as in Universities in the East Midlands and Scotland. Throughout its life, the trial faced significant membership changes, which had a far greater impact than the technical issues that were tackled. Two blue chip companies withdrew at the point of signing the collaborative agreement; another made a major change in strategic direction half way through and withdrew the major portion of its backing; another corporate left at this point, a second one later; one corporate was a late entrant; the technical leader made a boardroom decision not to do the engineering work that it had promised; one company went into liquidation; another went up for sale whilst others reorganised. The trial was conducted against this backdrop of continual commercial change. Despite this difficult operating environment, the trial met its objectives, although not entirely as envisaged initially – a tribute to the determination of the trial’s membership, the strength of its formal governance and management processes, and especially, the financial support of the dti. The equipment on trial featured a central heating/hot water boiler, washing machine, security system, gas alarm and utility meters, all connected to a home gateway, integrated functionally and presented to the users via a single interface. The trial met its principal objective to show that by connecting appliances to each other and to a support system, benefits in remote condition monitoring, maintenance, appliance & home controls optimisation and convenience to the customer & service supplier could be provided. This is one of two main reports that form the trial output (the other, the Multi Home Trial Report, is available to EM Trial members only as it contains commercially sensitive information). A supporting library of documents is also available and is held in the virtual office hosted by Loughborough University Centre for the Integrated Home Environment

Internet of Things (IoT) for Automated and Smart Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is a recent technology paradigm that creates a global network of machines and devices that are capable of communicating with each other. Security cameras, sensors, vehicles, buildings, and software are examples of devices that can exchange data between each other. IoT is recognized as one of the most important areas of future technologies and is gaining vast recognition in a wide range of applications and fields related to smart homes and cities, military, education, hospitals, homeland security systems, transportation and autonomous connected cars, agriculture, intelligent shopping systems, and other modern technologies. This book explores the most important IoT automated and smart applications to help the reader understand the principle of using IoT in such applications

Bringing Order into Things Decentralized and Scalable Ledgering for the Internet-of-Things

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is simultaneously the largest and the fastest growing distributed system known to date. With the expectation of 50 billion of devices coming online by 2020, far surpassing the size of the human population, problems related to scale, trustability and security are anticipated. Current IoT architectures are inherently flawed as they are centralized on the cloud and explore fragile trust-based relationships over a plethora of loosely integrated devices, leading to IoT platforms being non-robust for every party involved and unable to scale properly in the near future. The need for a new architecture that addresses these concerns is urgent as the IoT is progressively more ubiquitous, pervasive and demanding regarding the integration of devices and processing of data increasingly susceptible to reliability and security issues. In this thesis, we propose a decentralized ledgering solution for the IoT, leveraging a recent concept: blockchains. Rather than replacing the cloud, our solution presents a scalable and fault-tolerant middleware for recording transactions between peers, under verifiable and decentralized trustability assumptions and authentication guarantees for IoT devices, cloud services and users. Following on the emergent trend in modern IoT architectures, we leverage smart hubs as blockchain gateways, aggregating, pre-processing and forwarding small amounts of data and transactions in proximity conditions, that will be verified and processed as transactions in the blockchain. The proposed middleware acts as a secure ledger and establishes private channels between peers, requiring transactions in the blockchain to be signed using threshold signature schemes and grouporiented verification properties. The approach improves the decentralization and robustness characteristics under Byzantine fault-tolerance settings, while preserving the blockchain distributed nature

Coordinated autonomic loops for target identification, load and error-aware Device Management for the IoT

International audienceWith the expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) that relies on heterogeneous, dynamic, and massively deployed devices, device management (DM) (i.e., remote administration such as firmware update, configuration, troubleshooting and tracking) is required for proper quality of service and user experience, deployment of new functions, bug corrections and security patches distribution. Existing industrial DM platforms and approaches do not suit IoT devices and are already showing their limits with a few static home devices (e.g., routers, TV Decoders). Indeed, undetected buggy firmware deployment and manual target device identification are common issues in existing systems. Besides, these platforms are manually operated by experts (e.g., system administrators) and require extensive knowledge and skills. Such approaches cannot be applied on massive and diverse devices forming the IoT. To tackle these issues, our work in an industrial research context proposes to apply autonomic computing to DM platforms operation and impact tracking. Specifically, our contribution relies on of automated device targeting (i.e., aiming only suitable devices) and impact-aware DM (i.e., error and anomalies detection preceding patch generalization on all suitable devices of a given fleet). Our solution is composed of three coordinated autonomic loops and allows more accurate and faster irregularity diagnosis, vertical scaling along with simpler IoT DM platform administration. For experimental validation, we developed a prototype that demonstrates encouraging results compared to simulated legacy telecommunication operator approaches (namely Orange)

Using Privacy Impact Assessment to Inspect Privacy Issues in a Smart Home

IoT has an ever-increasing amount of development as more and more different devices connect to the Internet and become IoT devices. For the regular private user, the smart home may be the most enticing domain of IoT as it can be used to ease their lives. Smart home and smart home devices are one of the subfields of the Internet of Things. They allow the inhabitants to control various home devices remotely from anywhere within the house or anywhere in the world at any particular time. Smart homes have several benefits. They are improving the quality of individuals' lives, as individuals can control their various smart devices at any time. In addition, a smart home allows individuals to have greater control of their energy use. Other pros of smart homes include complete control over devices, increased convenience, and insurance benefits. However, regardless of the many benefits of smart homes, they are also associated with various challenges. Security and privacy are significant challenges related to the smart home environment. This thesis will discuss the privacy impact of smart homes and smart devices. Four different devices have been included, and each device will be analyzed to conclude what private sensitive information they collect. Moreover, a privacy impact assessment (PIA) tool will be used to conclude whether our manual analysis of the devices was correct or not. Lastly, we will propose some solutions that we consider will increase the protection of users' privacy

Privacy in Smart Homes Using Privacy Impact Assessment to Inspect Privacy Issues in a Smart Home

IoT has an ever-increasing amount of development as more and more different devices connect to the Internet and become IoT devices. For the regular private user, the smart home may be the most enticing domain of IoT as it can be used to ease their lives. Smart home and smart home devices are one of the subfields of the Internet of Things. They allow the inhabitants to control various home devices remotely from anywhere within the house or anywhere in the world at any particular time. Smart homes have several benefits. They are improving the quality of individuals' lives, as individuals can control their various smart devices at any time. In addition, a smart home allows individuals to have greater control of their energy use. Other pros of smart homes include complete control over devices, increased convenience, and insurance benefits. However, regardless of the many benefits of smart homes, they are also associated with various challenges. Security and privacy are significant challenges related to the smart home environment. This thesis will discuss the privacy impact of smart homes and smart devices. Four different devices have been included, and each device will be analyzed to conclude what private sensitive information they collect. Moreover, a privacy impact assessment (PIA) tool will be used to conclude whether our manual analysis of the devices was correct or not. Lastly, we will propose some solutions that we consider will increase the protection of users' privacy

Technology as an economic catalyst in rural and depressed places in Massachusetts

This paper uses case studies, including two cities (Lynn and New Bedford), a sub-city district (Roxbury) and two towns in rural Franklin County (Greenfield and Orange), to examine the role of technology as a potential economic catalyst in rural and depressed places in Massachusetts. Though the five target areas vary in size, density, geographic area, demographic characteristics and economic resources, each exhibits chronic patterns of economic distress related to the decline of manufacturing, construction and other key industries

Acquisitions as a Response to Deregulation: Evidence from the Cable Television Industry

This paper studies the dynamics of an industry that is subject to exclusive geographical licensing. I develop a model of license ownership that predicts the evolution of profit-maximizing entry and acquisition decisions by firms over time, starting from an initial allocation of licenses. The entry and acquisition process is modeled as a one-sided coalition-formation game as in Farrell and Scotchmer (1988), where acquisition payoffs depend on economies of scale and agglomeration (economies of density). I estimate the model for the cable television industry in Canada using a panel that I have constructed from 1990 to 1996. The dataset builds up from the national regulator's license ownership decision files, and contains license-level information on acquisition decisions, subscribership, and subscription profits. The model is estimated in two steps. I first estimate firms' license-level profit functions, and then estimate the parameters of the fixed, merger and entry cost functions by Simulated Maximum Likelihood. Through counterfactual simulations, I use the estimated model to quantify the extent to which economies of scale and density drive acquisition behaviour, and to evaluate how merger activity reacts to a partial deregulation that occurs in 1994. Counterfactual experiments are also used to evaluate policies that stimulate entry or reduce acquisitions in the early years of the sample. The main finding is that these policies can lead to more productive dominant firms in the long-run as the industry consolidates.Acquisition, Entry, Coalition Formation, Economies of Density, Economies of Scale, Simulated Maximum Likelihood, Cable Television

Dumb Cities: Spatial Media, Urban Communication, and the Right to the Smart City

A majority of the global population is now concentrated in cities, and the "smart city" model has emerged as the predominant paradigm for contemporary urban development. Employing networked infrastructures and big data for urban governance, the smart city promises innovative solutions for longstanding urban problems—using computer technologies to automate or monitor everything from traffic patterns to voting practices—while also posing new questions and dilemmas for city dwellers. The smart city model reworks traditional notions of urban rights, such as access to housing and public space, by implementing communication technologies that offer new possibilities for connection even as they create conditions for division and unequal access. How do the communication infrastructures deployed in smart city programs alter the communicative functions of urban spaces, and how might critical urban theory be updated in order to account for these emerging technologies? Focusing primarily on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this project addresses these questions by investigating policies, practices, and infrastructures mediating civic engagement and urban communication in technologically-driven urban development. I survey several salient examples of smart city approaches including the use of “big data” approaches for urban governance, networked transportation infrastructures, and media interfaces for visualizing and interacting with space. This work focuses especially on how notions of citizenship and civic engagement are constructed in "smart" urban imaginaries, as well as the role of emergent technologies in mediating experiences of space and place. I advance the rhetorical skill and cunning intelligence of mêtis as a conceptual lens for assessing and cultivating an engaged urban citizenship. I argue that rhetorics of “smart” urbanism discursively delegate ideals of civic engagement to technical infrastructures and processes, thereby occluding both longstanding and emergent disparities in urban communities

μGIM - Microgrid intelligent management system based on a multi-agent approach and the active participation of end-users

[ES] Los sistemas de potencia y energía están cambiando su paradigma tradicional, de sistemas centralizados a sistemas descentralizados. La aparición de redes inteligentes permite la integración de recursos energéticos descentralizados y promueve la gestión inclusiva que involucra a los usuarios finales, impulsada por la gestión del lado de la demanda, la energía transactiva y la respuesta a la demanda. Garantizar la escalabilidad y la estabilidad del servicio proporcionado por la red, en este nuevo paradigma de redes inteligentes, es más difícil porque no hay una única sala de operaciones centralizada donde se tomen todas las decisiones. Para implementar con éxito redes inteligentes, es necesario combinar esfuerzos entre la ingeniería eléctrica y la ingeniería informática. La ingeniería eléctrica debe garantizar el correcto funcionamiento físico de las redes inteligentes y de sus componentes, estableciendo las bases para un adecuado monitoreo, control, gestión, y métodos de operación. La ingeniería informática desempeña un papel importante al proporcionar los modelos y herramientas computacionales adecuados para administrar y operar la red inteligente y sus partes constituyentes, representando adecuadamente a todos los diferentes actores involucrados. Estos modelos deben considerar los objetivos individuales y comunes de los actores que proporcionan las bases para garantizar interacciones competitivas y cooperativas capaces de satisfacer a los actores individuales, así como cumplir con los requisitos comunes con respecto a la sostenibilidad técnica, ambiental y económica del Sistema. La naturaleza distribuida de las redes inteligentes permite, incentiva y beneficia enormemente la participación activa de los usuarios finales, desde actores grandes hasta actores más pequeños, como los consumidores residenciales. Uno de los principales problemas en la planificación y operación de redes eléctricas es la variación de la demanda de energía, que a menudo se duplica más que durante las horas pico en comparación con la demanda fuera de pico. Tradicionalmente, esta variación dio como resultado la construcción de plantas de generación de energía y grandes inversiones en líneas de red y subestaciones. El uso masivo de fuentes de energía renovables implica mayor volatilidad en lo relativo a la generación, lo que hace que sea más difícil equilibrar el consumo y la generación. La participación de los actores de la red inteligente, habilitada por la energía transactiva y la respuesta a la demanda, puede proporcionar flexibilidad en desde el punto de vista de la demanda, facilitando la operación del sistema y haciendo frente a la creciente participación de las energías renovables. En el ámbito de las redes inteligentes, es posible construir y operar redes más pequeñas, llamadas microrredes. Esas son redes geográficamente limitadas con gestión y operación local. Pueden verse como áreas geográficas restringidas para las cuales la red eléctrica generalmente opera físicamente conectada a la red principal, pero también puede operar en modo isla, lo que proporciona independencia de la red principal. Esta investigación de doctorado, realizada bajo el Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Informática de la Universidad de Salamanca, aborda el estudio y el análisis de la gestión de microrredes, considerando la participación activa de los usuarios finales y la gestión energética de lascarga eléctrica y los recursos energéticos de los usuarios finales. En este trabajo de investigación se ha analizado el uso de conceptos de ingeniería informática, particularmente del campo de la inteligencia artificial, para apoyar la gestión de las microrredes, proponiendo un sistema de gestión inteligente de microrredes (μGIM) basado en un enfoque de múltiples agentes y en la participación activa de usuarios. Esta solución se compone de tres sistemas que combinan hardware y software: el emulador de virtual a realidad (V2R), el enchufe inteligente de conciencia ambiental de Internet de las cosas (EnAPlug), y la computadora de placa única para energía basada en el agente (S4E) para permitir la gestión del lado de la demanda y la energía transactiva. Estos sistemas fueron concebidos, desarrollados y probados para permitir la validación de metodologías de gestión de microrredes, es decir, para la participación de los usuarios finales y para la optimización inteligente de los recursos. Este documento presenta todos los principales modelos y resultados obtenidos durante esta investigación de doctorado, con respecto a análisis de vanguardia, concepción de sistemas, desarrollo de sistemas, resultados de experimentación y descubrimientos principales. Los sistemas se han evaluado en escenarios reales, desde laboratorios hasta sitios piloto. En total, se han publicado veinte artículos científicos, de los cuales nueve se han hecho en revistas especializadas. Esta investigación de doctorado realizó contribuciones a dos proyectos H2020 (DOMINOES y DREAM-GO), dos proyectos ITEA (M2MGrids y SPEAR), tres proyectos portugueses (SIMOCE, NetEffiCity y AVIGAE) y un proyecto con financiación en cascada H2020 (Eco-Rural -IoT)