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

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

Context-Aware Information Retrieval for Enhanced Situation Awareness

In the coalition forces, users are increasingly challenged with the issues of information overload and correlation of information from heterogeneous sources. Users might need different pieces of information, ranging from information about a single building, to the resolution strategy of a global conflict. Sometimes, the time, location and past history of information access can also shape the information needs of users. Information systems need to help users pull together data from disparate sources according to their expressed needs (as represented by system queries), as well as less specific criteria. Information consumers have varying roles, tasks/missions, goals and agendas, knowledge and background, and personal preferences. These factors can be used to shape both the execution of user queries and the form in which retrieved information is packaged. However, full automation of this daunting information aggregation and customization task is not possible with existing approaches. In this paper we present an infrastructure for context-aware information retrieval to enhance situation awareness. The infrastructure provides each user with a customized, mission-oriented system that gives access to the right information from heterogeneous sources in the context of a particular task, plan and/or mission. The approach lays on five intertwined fundamental concepts, namely Workflow, Context, Ontology, Profile and Information Aggregation. The exploitation of this knowledge, using appropriate domain ontologies, will make it feasible to provide contextual assistance in various ways to the work performed according to a user’s taskrelevant information requirements. This paper formalizes these concepts and their interrelationships

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

AmbieSense: a system and reference architecture for personalised and context-sensitive information services for mobile users

The purpose of AmbieSense is to provide personalised, context-sensitive information to the mobile user. It is about augmenting digital information to physical objects, rooms, and areas. The aim is to provide relevant information to the right user and situation. Digital content is distributed from the surroundings and onto your mobile phone. An ambient information environment is provided by a combination of context tag technology, a software platform to manage and deliver the information, and personal computing devices to which the information is served. This paper describes how the AmbieSense reference architecture has been defined and used in order to deliver information to the mobile citizen at the right time, place and situation. Information is provided via specialist content providers. The application area addresses the information needs of travellers and tourists

Ethics and Design in the Brazilian Context

Often driven by practical and immediate requirements, more and more people are incorporating technology into a variety of aspects of their lives, often without reflecting on the consequences of using them. On the other hand, studies on interactive system development that lead to behavioral change have been gaining ground on the agenda of large HCI conferences. This movement brings to the forefront the fundamental issues of ethics in design and technology use. A designer’s intentions, when directing certain actions or behaviors, are not always explicit or desired by the stakeholders affected by the use of the technology. Systems that induce an undesired purchase, or even those that use conditioning strategies to cause a behavioral change are examples of such intentions. The challenge proposed is therefore about the relationship between design and personal freedom in a way that these technology users do not become victims, either passively or submissively, of the effects of its use. This advance allows for the redefinition of the relationship between man and technology, and the application of new forms of designing and developing interactive systems that take into account the ethical aspects of this relationship