Ontology-based model-driven patterns for notification-oriented data-intensive enterprise information systems

International audienceIn the fourth industrial revolution, the current Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) are facing a set of new challenges raised by the applications of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT). In this scenario, a data-intensive EIS involves networks of physical objects with sensing, data collection, transmission and actuation capabilities, and vast endpoints in the cloud, thereby offering large amounts of data. Such systems can be considered as a multidisciplinary complex system with strong interrelations between the involved components. In order to cope with the big heterogeneousness of those physical objects and their intrinsic information, the authors propose a notification-based approach derived from the so-called Notification Oriented Paradigm (NOP), a new rule and event driven approach for software and hardware specification and execution. However, the heterogeneity of those information and their interpretation relatively to an evolving context impose the definition of model-driven patterns based on some formal knowledge modelled by a set of skill-based ontologies. Thus, the paper focuses on the open issue related to the formalisation of such ontology-based patterns for their verification, ensuring the coherence of the whole set of data in each contextual engineering domain involved in the EIS

Enabling Model-Driven Live Analytics For Cyber-Physical Systems: The Case of Smart Grids

Advances in software, embedded computing, sensors, and networking technologies will lead to a new generation of smart cyber-physical systems that will far exceed the capabilities of today’s embedded systems. They will be entrusted with increasingly complex tasks like controlling electric grids or autonomously driving cars. These systems have the potential to lay the foundations for tomorrow’s critical infrastructures, to form the basis of emerging and future smart services, and to improve the quality of our everyday lives in many areas. In order to solve their tasks, they have to continuously monitor and collect data from physical processes, analyse this data, and make decisions based on it. Making smart decisions requires a deep understanding of the environment, internal state, and the impacts of actions. Such deep understanding relies on efficient data models to organise the sensed data and on advanced analytics. Considering that cyber-physical systems are controlling physical processes, decisions need to be taken very fast. This makes it necessary to analyse data in live, as opposed to conventional batch analytics. However, the complex nature combined with the massive amount of data generated by such systems impose fundamental challenges. While data in the context of cyber-physical systems has some similar characteristics as big data, it holds a particular complexity. This complexity results from the complicated physical phenomena described by this data, which makes it difficult to extract a model able to explain such data and its various multi-layered relationships. Existing solutions fail to provide sustainable mechanisms to analyse such data in live. This dissertation presents a novel approach, named model-driven live analytics. The main contribution of this thesis is a multi-dimensional graph data model that brings raw data, domain knowledge, and machine learning together in a single model, which can drive live analytic processes. This model is continuously updated with the sensed data and can be leveraged by live analytic processes to support decision-making of cyber-physical systems. The presented approach has been developed in collaboration with an industrial partner and, in form of a prototype, applied to the domain of smart grids. The addressed challenges are derived from this collaboration as a response to shortcomings in the current state of the art. More specifically, this dissertation provides solutions for the following challenges: First, data handled by cyber-physical systems is usually dynamic—data in motion as opposed to traditional data at rest—and changes frequently and at different paces. Analysing such data is challenging since data models usually can only represent a snapshot of a system at one specific point in time. A common approach consists in a discretisation, which regularly samples and stores such snapshots at specific timestamps to keep track of the history. Continuously changing data is then represented as a finite sequence of such snapshots. Such data representations would be very inefficient to analyse, since it would require to mine the snapshots, extract a relevant dataset, and finally analyse it. For this problem, this thesis presents a temporal graph data model and storage system, which consider time as a first-class property. A time-relative navigation concept enables to analyse frequently changing data very efficiently. Secondly, making sustainable decisions requires to anticipate what impacts certain actions would have. Considering complex cyber-physical systems, it can come to situations where hundreds or thousands of such hypothetical actions must be explored before a solid decision can be made. Every action leads to an independent alternative from where a set of other actions can be applied and so forth. Finding the sequence of actions that leads to the desired alternative, requires to efficiently create, represent, and analyse many different alternatives. Given that every alternative has its own history, this creates a very high combinatorial complexity of alternatives and histories, which is hard to analyse. To tackle this problem, this dissertation introduces a multi-dimensional graph data model (as an extension of the temporal graph data model) that enables to efficiently represent, store, and analyse many different alternatives in live. Thirdly, complex cyber-physical systems are often distributed, but to fulfil their tasks these systems typically need to share context information between computational entities. This requires analytic algorithms to reason over distributed data, which is a complex task since it relies on the aggregation and processing of various distributed and constantly changing data. To address this challenge, this dissertation proposes an approach to transparently distribute the presented multi-dimensional graph data model in a peer-to-peer manner and defines a stream processing concept to efficiently handle frequent changes. Fourthly, to meet future needs, cyber-physical systems need to become increasingly intelligent. To make smart decisions, these systems have to continuously refine behavioural models that are known at design time, with what can only be learned from live data. Machine learning algorithms can help to solve this unknown behaviour by extracting commonalities over massive datasets. Nevertheless, searching a coarse-grained common behaviour model can be very inaccurate for cyber-physical systems, which are composed of completely different entities with very different behaviour. For these systems, fine-grained learning can be significantly more accurate. However, modelling, structuring, and synchronising many fine-grained learning units is challenging. To tackle this, this thesis presents an approach to define reusable, chainable, and independently computable fine-grained learning units, which can be modelled together with and on the same level as domain data. This allows to weave machine learning directly into the presented multi-dimensional graph data model. In summary, this thesis provides an efficient multi-dimensional graph data model to enable live analytics of complex, frequently changing, and distributed data of cyber-physical systems. This model can significantly improve data analytics for such systems and empower cyber-physical systems to make smart decisions in live. The presented solutions combine and extend methods from model-driven engineering, [email protected], data analytics, database systems, and machine learning

Mapping Big Data into Knowledge Space with Cognitive Cyber-Infrastructure

Big data research has attracted great attention in science, technology, industry and society. It is developing with the evolving scientific paradigm, the fourth industrial revolution, and the transformational innovation of technologies. However, its nature and fundamental challenge have not been recognized, and its own methodology has not been formed. This paper explores and answers the following questions: What is big data? What are the basic methods for representing, managing and analyzing big data? What is the relationship between big data and knowledge? Can we find a mapping from big data into knowledge space? What kind of infrastructure is required to support not only big data management and analysis but also knowledge discovery, sharing and management? What is the relationship between big data and science paradigm? What is the nature and fundamental challenge of big data computing? A multi-dimensional perspective is presented toward a methodology of big data computing.Comment: 59 page

Big data, modeling, simulation, computational platform and holistic approaches for the fourth industrial revolution

Naturally, the mathematical process starts from proving the existence and uniqueness of the solution by the using the theorem, corollary, lemma, proposition, dealing with the simple and non-complex model. Proving the existence and uniqueness solution are guaranteed by governing the infinite amount of solutions and limited to the implementation of a small-scale simulation on a single desktop CPU. Accuracy, consistency and stability were easily controlled by a small data scale. However, the fourth industrial can be described the mathematical process as the advent of cyber-physical systems involving entirely new capabilities for researcher and machines (Xing, 2017). In numerical perspective, the fourth industrial revolution (4iR) required the transition from a uncomplex model and small scale simulation to complex model and big data for visualizing the real-world application in digital dialectical and exciting opportunity. Thus, a big data analytics and its classification are a problem solving for these limitations. Some applications of 4iR will highlight the extension version in terms of models, derivative and discretization, dimension of space and time, behavior of initial and boundary conditions, grid generation, data extraction, numerical method and image processing with high resolution feature in numerical perspective. In statistics, a big data depends on data growth however, from numerical perspective, a few classification strategies will be investigated deals with the specific classifier tool. This paper will investigate the conceptual framework for a big data classification, governing the mathematical modeling, selecting the superior numerical method, handling the large sparse simulation and investigating the parallel computing on high performance computing (HPC) platform. The conceptual framework will benefit to the big data provider, algorithm provider and system analyzer to classify and recommend the specific strategy for generating, handling and analyzing the big data. All the perspectives take a holistic view of technology. Current research, the particular conceptual framework will be described in holistic terms. 4iR has ability to take a holistic approach to explain an important of big data, complex modeling, large sparse simulation and high performance computing platform. Numerical analysis and parallel performance evaluation are the indicators for performance investigation of the classification strategy. This research will benefit to obtain an accurate decision, predictions and trending practice on how to obtain the approximation solution for science and engineering applications. As a conclusion, classification strategies for generating a fine granular mesh, identifying the root causes of failures and issues in real time solution. Furthermore, the big data-driven and data transfer evolution towards high speed of technology transfer to boost the economic and social development for the 4iR (Xing, 2017; Marwala et al., 2017)

Attributes of Big Data Analytics for Data-Driven Decision Making in Cyber-Physical Power Systems

Big data analytics is a virtually new term in power system terminology. This concept delves into the way a massive volume of data is acquired, processed, analyzed to extract insight from available data. In particular, big data analytics alludes to applications of artificial intelligence, machine learning techniques, data mining techniques, time-series forecasting methods. Decision-makers in power systems have been long plagued by incapability and weakness of classical methods in dealing with large-scale real practical cases due to the existence of thousands or millions of variables, being time-consuming, the requirement of a high computation burden, divergence of results, unjustifiable errors, and poor accuracy of the model. Big data analytics is an ongoing topic, which pinpoints how to extract insights from these large data sets. The extant article has enumerated the applications of big data analytics in future power systems through several layers from grid-scale to local-scale. Big data analytics has many applications in the areas of smart grid implementation, electricity markets, execution of collaborative operation schemes, enhancement of microgrid operation autonomy, management of electric vehicle operations in smart grids, active distribution network control, district hub system management, multi-agent energy systems, electricity theft detection, stability and security assessment by PMUs, and better exploitation of renewable energy sources. The employment of big data analytics entails some prerequisites, such as the proliferation of IoT-enabled devices, easily-accessible cloud space, blockchain, etc. This paper has comprehensively conducted an extensive review of the applications of big data analytics along with the prevailing challenges and solutions

Big Data in Critical Infrastructures Security Monitoring: Challenges and Opportunities

Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as smart power grids, transport systems, and financial infrastructures, are more and more vulnerable to cyber threats, due to the adoption of commodity computing facilities. Despite the use of several monitoring tools, recent attacks have proven that current defensive mechanisms for CIs are not effective enough against most advanced threats. In this paper we explore the idea of a framework leveraging multiple data sources to improve protection capabilities of CIs. Challenges and opportunities are discussed along three main research directions: i) use of distinct and heterogeneous data sources, ii) monitoring with adaptive granularity, and iii) attack modeling and runtime combination of multiple data analysis techniques.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-201