An ontology-driven semantic bus for autonomic communication elements

Recently, autonomics have been proposed as a solution to tackle the ever-increasing management complexity of large-scale computing and communications infrastructures. Over time, the control loops used to orchestrate the intelligent behaviour of autonomic management architectures have evolved from fully static to highly-dynamic loops comprised of loosely coupled management components. Communication and other interactions between these components is facilitated by a communications substrate. Additionally, in order to achieve truly autonomic behaviour, the interacting components need to be able to understand each other, justifying the need for semantically enriched communications. In this paper, we present a novel semantic communications bus that orchestrates interactions between the components of an autonomic control loop. It employs ontology-based reasoning in order to establish communication contracts, validate message consistency and support semantic topic subscriptions. Additionally, a prototype was designed, implemented and its performance evaluated

Hybrid ToF and RSSI real-time semantic tracking with an adaptive industrial internet of things architecture

Real-time asset tracking in indoor mass production manufacturing environments can reduce losses associated with pausing a production line to locate an asset. Complemented by monitored contextual information, e.g. machine power usage, it can provide smart information, such as which components have been machined by a worn or damaged tool. Although sensor based Internet of Things (IoT) positioning has been developed, there are still key challenges when benchmarked approaches concentrate on precision, using computationally expensive filtering and iterative statistical or heuristic algorithms, as a trade-off for timeliness and scalability. Precise but high-cost hardware systems and invasive infrastructures of wired devices also pose implementation issues in the Industrial IoT (IIoT). Wireless, selfpowered sensors are integrated in this paper, using a novel, communication-economical RSSI/ToF ranging method in a proposed semantic IIoT architecture. Annotated data collection ensures accessibility, scalable knowledge discovery and flexibility to changes in consumer and business requirements. Deployed at a working indoor industrial facility the system demonstrated comparable RMS ranging accuracy (ToF 6m and RSSI 5.1m with 40m range) to existing systems tested in non-industrial environments and a 12.6-13.8m mean positioning accuracy

Federated and Autonomic Management of Multimedia Services

Abstract-Over the years, the Internet has significantly evolved in size and complexity. Additionally, the modern multimedia services it offers have considerably more stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements than traditional static services. These factors contribute to the ever-increasing complexity and cost to manage the Internet and its services. In the dissertation, a novel network management architecture is proposed to overcome these problems. It supports QoS-guarantees of multimedia services across the Internet, by setting up end-to-end network federations. A network federation is defined as a persistent crossorganizational agreement that enables the cooperating networks to share capabilities. Additionally, the architecture incorporates aspects from autonomic network management to tackle the evergrowing management complexity of modern communications networks. Specifically, a hierarchical approach is presented, which guarantees scalable collaboration of huge amounts of selfgoverning autonomic management components

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results

A Model of Emotion as Patterned Metacontrol

Adaptive agents use feedback as a key strategy to cope with un- certainty and change in their environments. The information fed back from the sensorimotor loop into the control subsystem can be used to change four different elements of the controller: parameters associated to the control model, the control model itself, the functional organization of the agent and the functional realization of the agent. There are many change alternatives and hence the complexity of the agent’s space of potential configurations is daunting. The only viable alternative for space- and time-constrained agents —in practical, economical, evolutionary terms— is to achieve a reduction of the dimensionality of this configuration space. Emotions play a critical role in this reduction. The reduction is achieved by func- tionalization, interface minimization and by patterning, i.e. by selection among a predefined set of organizational configurations. This analysis lets us state how autonomy emerges from the integration of cognitive, emotional and autonomic systems in strict functional terms: autonomy is achieved by the closure of functional dependency. Emotion-based morphofunctional systems are able to exhibit complex adaptation patterns at a reduced cognitive cost. In this article we show a general model of how emotion supports functional adaptation and how the emotional biological systems operate following this theoretical model. We will also show how this model is also of applicability to the construction of a wide spectrum of artificial systems1

A semantic middleware architecture focused on data and heterogeneity management within the Smart Grid

There is an increasing tendency of turning the current power grid, essentially unaware of variations in electricity demand and scattered energy sources, into something capable of bringing a degree of intelligence by using tools strongly related to information and communication technologies, thus turning into the so-called Smart Grid. In fact, it could be considered that the Smart Grid is an extensive smart system that spreads throughout any area where power is required, providing a significant optimization in energy generation, storage and consumption. However, the information that must be treated to accomplish these tasks is challenging both in terms of complexity (semantic features, distributed systems, suitable hardware) and quantity (consumption data, generation data, forecasting functionalities, service reporting), since the different energy beneficiaries are prone to be heterogeneous, as the nature of their own activities is. This paper presents a proposal on how to deal with these issues by using a semantic middleware architecture that integrates different components focused on specific tasks, and how it is used to handle information at every level and satisfy end user requests

The MASSIF platform : a modular and semantic platform for the development of flexible IoT services

In the Internet of Things (IoT), data-producing entities sense their environment and transmit these observations to a data processing platform for further analysis. Applications can have a notion of context awareness by combining this sensed data, or by processing the combined data. The processes of combining data can consist both of merging the dynamic sensed data, as well as fusing the sensed data with background and historical data. Semantics can aid in this task, as they have proven their use in data integration, knowledge exchange and reasoning. Semantic services performing reasoning on the integrated sensed data, combined with background knowledge, such as profile data, allow extracting useful information and support intelligent decision making. However, advanced reasoning on the combination of this sensed data and background knowledge is still hard to achieve. Furthermore, the collaboration between semantic services allows to reach complex decisions. The dynamic composition of such collaborative workflows that can adapt to the current context, has not received much attention yet. In this paper, we present MASSIF, a data-driven platform for the semantic annotation of and reasoning on IoT data. It allows the integration of multiple modular reasoning services that can collaborate in a flexible manner to facilitate complex decision-making processes. Data-driven workflows are enabled by letting services specify the data they would like to consume. After thorough processing, these services can decide to share their decisions with other consumers. By defining the data these services would like to consume, they can operate on a subset of data, improving reasoning efficiency. Furthermore, each of these services can integrate the consumed data with background knowledge in its own context model, for rapid intelligent decision making. To show the strengths of the platform, two use cases are detailed and thoroughly evaluated