A Semantics-Rich Information Technology Architecture for Smart Buildings

The design of smart homes, buildings and environments currently suffers from a low maturity of available methodologies and tools. Technologies, devices and protocols strongly bias the design process towards vertical integration, and more flexible solutions based on separation of design concerns are seldom applied. As a result, the current landscape of smart environments is mostly populated by defectively designed solutions where application requirements (e.g., end-user functionality) are too often mixed and intertwined with technical requirements (e.g., managing the network of devices). A mature and effective design process must, instead, rely on a clear separation between the application layer and the underlying enabling technologies, to enable effective design reuse. The role of smart gateways is to enable this separation of concerns and to provide an abstracted view of available automation technology to higher software layers. This paper presents a blueprint for the information technology (IT) architecture of smart buildings that builds on top of established software engineering practices, such as model-driven development and semantic representation, and that avoids many pitfalls inherent in legacy approaches. The paper will also present a representative use case where the approach has been applied and the corresponding modeling and software tools

An Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment for On-Demand Internet Computing

The Internet has evolved into a global and ubiquitous communication medium interconnecting powerful application servers, diverse desktop computers and mobile notebooks. Along with recent developments in computer technology, such as the convergence of computing and communication devices, the way how people use computers and the Internet has changed people´s working habits and has led to new application scenarios. On the one hand, pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing and nomadic computing become more and more important since different computing devices like PDAs and notebooks may be used concurrently and alternately, e.g. while the user is on the move. On the other hand, the ubiquitous availability and pervasive interconnection of computing systems have fostered various trends towards the dynamic utilization and spontaneous collaboration of available remote computing resources, which are addressed by approaches like utility computing, grid computing, cloud computing and public computing. From a general point of view, the common objective of this development is the use of Internet applications on demand, i.e. applications that are not installed in advance by a platform administrator but are dynamically deployed and run as they are requested by the application user. The heterogeneous and unmanaged nature of the Internet represents a major challenge for the on demand use of custom Internet applications across heterogeneous hardware platforms, operating systems and network environments. Promising remedies are autonomic computing systems that are supposed to maintain themselves without particular user or application intervention. In this thesis, an Autonomic Cross-Platform Operating Environment (ACOE) is presented that supports On Demand Internet Computing (ODIC), such as dynamic application composition and ad hoc execution migration. The approach is based on an integration middleware called crossware that does not replace existing middleware but operates as a self-managing mediator between diverse application requirements and heterogeneous platform configurations. A Java implementation of the Crossware Development Kit (XDK) is presented, followed by the description of the On Demand Internet Computing System (ODIX). The feasibility of the approach is shown by the implementation of an Internet Application Workbench, an Internet Application Factory and an Internet Peer Federation. They illustrate the use of ODIX to support local, remote and distributed ODIC, respectively. Finally, the suitability of the approach is discussed with respect to the support of ODIC

iPOJO flow:a declarative service workflow architecture for ubiquitous cloud applications

The growth of innovative services backed up by various sensors and devices provides an unprecedented potential for ubiquitous computing applications and systems. However, in order to benefit from the recent developments, the current service middleware technology needs a catch-up of being able to fully support interactions among the services. OSGi is considered as a viable service framework solution due to its ability to deal with the dynamism inherent with ubiquitous cloud environments. iPOJO has also emerged as a service component model that simplifies the development of OSGi applications. However, the technology runs short of providing adequate support to foster declarative service compositions of realistic interaction topologies. Noticing this deficiency, we propose an iPOJO component-based service workflow architecture, named iPOJO Flow, where component services can easily be composed together to form realistic, complicated applications. Along with the architectural design, the paper also introduces a new DSL to specify service workflow topologies in a declarative way. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is validated through a prototype demonstration, comparative design analysis, and performance experiments

An event detection framework for the representation of the AGGIR variables

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a framework to study the AGGIR (Autonomy Gerontology Iso-Resources Groups) grid model, in order to evaluate the level of independency of elderly people, according to their capabilities of performing activities and interact with their environments over the time. To model the Activities of Daily Living (ADL), we also extend a previously proposed Domain Specific Language (DSL), in order to employ operators to deal with constraints related to time and location of activities, and event recognition. Our framework aims at providing an analysis tool regarding the performance of elder-ly/handicapped people within a home environment by means of data recovered from sensors using the iCASA simulator. To evaluate our approach, we pick three of the AGGIR variables (i.e., dressing, toileting, and transfers) and evaluate their testability in many scenarios, by means of records representing the occurrence of activities of the elderly. Results demonstrate the accuracy of our framework to manage the obtained records correctly and thus generate the appropriate event information

Uma solução de implantação auto-adaptativa para plataformas Android

Orientador: Cecília Mary Fischer RubiraDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Os dispositivos móveis, hoje em dia, fornecem recursos semelhantes aos de um computador pessoal de uma década atrás, permitindo o desenvolvimento de aplicações complexas. Consequentemente, essas aplicações móveis podem exigir tolerar falhas em tempo de execução. No entanto, a maioria das aplicações móveis de hoje são implantados usando configurações estáticas, tornando difícil tolerar falhas durante a sua execução. Nós propomos uma infraestrutura de implantação auto-adaptativa para lidar com este problema. A nossa solução oferece um circuito autônomo que administra o modelo de configuração atual da aplicação usando um modelo de características dinâmico associado com o modelo arquitetônico da mesma. Em tempo de execução, de acordo com a seleção dinâmica de características, o modelo arquitetônico implantado na plataforma se re-configura para fornecer uma nova solução. Uma aplicação Android foi implementada utilizando a solução proposta, e durante sua execução, a disponibilidade de serviços foi alterada, de tal forma que sua configuração corrente foi dinamicamente alterada para tolerar a indisponibilidade dos serviçosAbstract: Mobile devices, nowadays, provide similar capabilities as a personal computer of a decade ago, allowing the development of complex applications. Consequently, these mobile applications may require tolerating failures at runtime. However, most of the today¿s mobile applications are deployed using static configurations, making difficult to tolerate failure during their execution. We propose an adaptive deployment infrastructure to deal with this problem. Our solution offers an autonomic loop that manages the current configuration model of the application using a dynamic feature model associated with the architectural model. During runtime, according to the dynamic feature selection, the deployed architectural model can be modified to provide a new deployment solution. An Android application was implemented using the proposed solution, and during its execution, the services availability was altered so that its current configuration was changed dynamically in order to tolerate the unavailability of servicesMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação131830/2013-9CNP

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this propos

Ubiquitous Robotics System for Knowledge-based Auto-configuration System for Service Delivery within Smart Home Environments

The future smart home will be enhanced and driven by the recent advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), which advocates the integration of computational devices within an Internet architecture on a global scale [1, 2]. In the IoT paradigm, the smart home will be developed by interconnecting a plethora of smart objects both inside and outside the home environment [3-5]. The recent take-up of these connected devices within home environments is slowly and surely transforming traditional home living environments. Such connected and integrated home environments lead to the concept of the smart home, which has attracted significant research efforts to enhance the functionality of home environments with a wide range of novel services. The wide availability of services and devices within contemporary smart home environments make their management a challenging and rewarding task. The trend whereby the development of smart home services is decoupled from that of smart home devices increases the complexity of this task. As such, it is desirable that smart home services are developed and deployed independently, rather than pre-bundled with specific devices, although it must be recognised that this is not always practical. Moreover, systems need to facilitate the deployment process and cope with any changes in the target environment after deployment. Maintaining complex smart home systems throughout their lifecycle entails considerable resources and effort. These challenges have stimulated the need for dynamic auto-configurable services amongst such distributed systems. Although significant research has been directed towards achieving auto-configuration, none of the existing solutions is sufficient to achieve auto-configuration within smart home environments. All such solutions are considered incomplete, as they lack the ability to meet all smart home requirements efficiently. These requirements include the ability to adapt flexibly to new and dynamic home environments without direct user intervention. Fulfilling these requirements would enhance the performance of smart home systems and help to address cost-effectiveness, considering the financial implications of the manual configuration of smart home environments. Current configuration approaches fail to meet one or more of the requirements of smart homes. If one of these approaches meets the flexibility criterion, the configuration is either not executed online without affecting the system or requires direct user intervention. In other words, there is no adequate solution to allow smart home systems to adapt dynamically to changing circumstances, hence to enable the correct interconnections among its components without direct user intervention and the interruption of the whole system. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient, adaptive, agile and flexible system that adapts dynamically to each new requirement of the smart home environment. This research aims to devise methods to automate the activities associated with customised service delivery for dynamic home environments by exploiting recent advances in the field of ubiquitous robotics and Semantic Web technologies. It introduces a novel approach called the Knowledge-based Auto-configuration Software Robot (Sobot) for Smart Home Environments, which utilises the Sobot to achieve auto-configuration of the system. The research work was conducted under the Distributed Integrated Care Services and Systems (iCARE) project, which was designed to accomplish and deliver integrated distributed ecosystems with a homecare focus. The auto-configuration Sobot which is the focus of this thesis is a key component of the iCARE project. It will become one of the key enabling technologies for generic smart home environments. It has a profound impact on designing and implementing a high quality system. Its main role is to generate a feasible configuration that meets the given requirements using the knowledgebase of the smart home environment as a core component. The knowledgebase plays a pivotal role in helping the Sobot to automatically select the most appropriate resources in a given context-aware system via semantic searching and matching. Ontology as a technique of knowledgebase representation generally helps to design and develop a specific domain. It is also a key technology for the Semantic Web, which enables a common understanding amongst software agents and people, clarifies the domain assumptions and facilitates the reuse and analysis of its knowledge. The main advantages of the Sobot over traditional applications is its awareness of the changing digital and physical environments and its ability to interpret these changes, extract the relevant contextual data and merge any new information or knowledge. The Sobot is capable of creating new or alternative feasible configurations to meet the system’s goal by utilising inferred facts based on the smart home ontological model, so that the system can adapt to the changed environment. Furthermore, the Sobot has the capability to execute the generated reconfiguration plan without interrupting the running of the system. A proof-of-concept testbed has been designed and implemented. The case studies carried out have shown the potential of the proposed approach to achieve flexible and reliable auto-configuration of the smart home system, with promising directions for future research

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications