Integration of Legacy Appliances into Home Energy Management Systems

The progressive installation of renewable energy sources requires the coordination of energy consuming devices. At consumer level, this coordination can be done by a home energy management system (HEMS). Interoperability issues need to be solved among smart appliances as well as between smart and non-smart, i.e., legacy devices. We expect current standardization efforts to soon provide technologies to design smart appliances in order to cope with the current interoperability issues. Nevertheless, common electrical devices affect energy consumption significantly and therefore deserve consideration within energy management applications. This paper discusses the integration of smart and legacy devices into a generic system architecture and, subsequently, elaborates the requirements and components which are necessary to realize such an architecture including an application of load detection for the identification of running loads and their integration into existing HEM systems. We assess the feasibility of such an approach with a case study based on a measurement campaign on real households. We show how the information of detected appliances can be extracted in order to create device profiles allowing for their integration and management within a HEMS

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

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

A semantic web service-based architecture for the interoperability of e-government services

We propose a semantically-enhanced architecture to address the issues of interoperability and service integration in e-government web information systems. An architecture for a life event portal based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) is described. The architecture includes loosely-coupled modules organized in three distinct layers: User Interaction, Middleware and Web Services. The Middleware provides the semantic infrastructure for ontologies and SWS. In particular a conceptual model for integrating domain knowledge (Life Event Ontology), application knowledge (E-government Ontology) and service description (Service Ontology) is defined. The model has been applied to a use case scenario in e-government and the results of a system prototype have been reported to demonstrate some relevant features of the proposed approach

Semantic Web Technologies in Support of Service Oriented Architecture Governance

As Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments gradually mature they also grow in size and complexity. The number of service providers, services, and service consumers increases, and so do the dependencies among these entities and the various artefacts that describe how services operate, or how they are meant to operate under specific conditions. Appropriate governance over the various phases and activities associated with the service lifecycle is therefore indispensable in order to prevent a SOA deployment from dissolving into an unmanageable infrastructure. The employment of Semantic Web technologies for describing and reasoning about service properties and governance requirements has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of SOA Governance solutions by increasing the levels of automation in a wide-range of tasks relating to service lifecycle management. The goal of the proposed research work is to investigate the application of Semantic Web technologies in the context of service lifecycle management, and propose a concrete theoretical and technological approach for supporting SOA Governance through the realisation of semantically-enhanced registry and repository solutions

Investigation Interoperability Problems in Pharmacy Automation: A Case Study in Saudi Arabia

The aim of this case study is to investigate the nature of interoperability problems in hospital systems automation. One of the advanced healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia is the host of the study. The interaction between the pharmacy system and automated medication dispensing cabinets is the focus of the case system. The research method is a detailed case study where multiple data collection methods are used. The modelling of the processes of inpatient pharmacy systems is presented using Business Process Model Notation. The data collected is analysed to study the different interoperability problems. This paper presents a framework that classifies health informatics interoperability implementation problems into technical, semantic, organisational levels. The detailed study of the interoperability problems in this case illustrates the challenges to the adoption of health information system automation which could help other healthcare organisations in their system automation projects

An open standard for the exchange of information in the Australian timber sector

The purpose of this paper is to describe business-to-business (B2B) communication and the characteristics of an open standard for electronic communication within the Australian timber and wood products industry. Current issues, future goals and strategies for using business-to-business communication will be considered. From the perspective of the Timber industry sector, this study is important because supply chain efficiency is a key component in an organisation's strategy to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Strong improvement in supply chain performance is possible with improved business-to-business communication which is used both for building trust and providing real time marketing data. Traditional methods such as electronic data interchange (EDI) used to facilitate B2B communication have a number of disadvantages, such as high implementation and running costs and a rigid and inflexible messaging standard. Information and communications technologies (ICT) have supported the emergence of web-based EDI which maintains the advantages of the traditional paradigm while negating the disadvantages. This has been further extended by the advent of the Semantic web which rests on the fundamental idea that web resources should be annotated with semantic markup that captures information about their meaning and facilitates meaningful machine-to-machine communication. This paper provides an ontology using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for the Australian Timber sector that can be used in conjunction with semantic web services to provide effective and cheap B2B communications

Grid Metadata Lifetime Control in ActOn

In the Semantic Grid, metadata, as first class citizens, should be maintained up to-date in a cost-effective manner. This includes maxi missing the automation of different aspects of the metadata lifecycle, managing the evolution and change of metadata in distributed contexts, and synchronizing adequately the evolution of all these related entities. In this paper, we introduce a semantic model and its operations which is designed for supporting dynamic metadata management in Active Ontology (Act On), a semantic information integration approach for highly dynamic information sources. Finally, we illustrate the Act On-based metadata lifetime control by EGEE examples

Enabling Machine Understandable Exchange of Energy Consumption Information in Intelligent Domotic Environments

In the 21st century, all the major countries around the world are coming together to reduce the impact of energy generation and consumption on the global environment. Energy conservation and its efficient usage has become a top agenda on the desks of many governments. In the last decade, the drive to make homes automated and to deliver a better assisted living picked pace and the research into home automation systems accelerated, usually based on a centralized residential gateway. However most devised solutions fail to provide users with information about power consumption of different house appliances. The ability to collect power consumption information can lead us to have a more energy efficient society. The goal addressed in this paper is to enable residential gateways to provide the energy consumption information, in a machine understandable format, to support third party applications and services. To reach this goal, we propose a Semantic Energy Information Publishing Framework. The proposed framework publishes, for different appliances in the house, their power consumption information and other properties, in a machine understandable format. Appliance properties are exposed according to the existing semantic modeling supported by residential gateways, while instantaneous power consumption is modeled through a new modular Energy Profile ontolog