Operation of Site Running StratusLab toolkit v1.0

This document reports on one of the significant project milestones concerning the operation of a cloud site running StratusLab's cloud distribution (or toolkit). It is currently running v0.3 of the StratusLab distribution-a beta release of the upcoming 1.0 production release. In particular it presents the WP5 reference cloud service, the evolution of the service up to Month 10 of the project, and the way this service has been exploited to date. A major milestone regarding the exploitation has been the deployment of the first virtualized production grid site running on the project's reference cloud service

LHC Collimators Low Level Control System

The low level control system (LLCS) of the LHC collimators is responsible for accurate synchronization of 500 axes of motion at microsecond level. Stepping motors are used in open loop ensuring a high level of repeatability of the position. In addition, a position survey system based on Resolver and LVDT sensors and operating at approximately 100 Hz, verifies in real-time the position of each axis with some tens of micrometers accuracy with respect to the expected position. The LLCS is characterized by several challenging requirements such as high reliability, redundancy, strict timing constraints and compactness of the low level hardware because of the limited space available in the racks underground. The National Instruments PXI platform has been proposed and evaluated as real-time low level hardware. In this paper the architecture of the LHC collimators LLCS is presented. The solution adopted for implementing motion control and positioning sensors reading on the PXI platform are detailed

The Simulation Model Partitioning Problem: an Adaptive Solution Based on Self-Clustering (Extended Version)

This paper is about partitioning in parallel and distributed simulation. That means decomposing the simulation model into a numberof components and to properly allocate them on the execution units. An adaptive solution based on self-clustering, that considers both communication reduction and computational load-balancing, is proposed. The implementation of the proposed mechanism is tested using a simulation model that is challenging both in terms of structure and dynamicity. Various configurations of the simulation model and the execution environment have been considered. The obtained performance results are analyzed using a reference cost model. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is promising and that it can reduce the simulation execution time in both parallel and distributed architectures

Modeling Digital Twin Data and Architecture: A Building Guide with FIWARE as Enabling Technology

The use of Digital Twins in the industry has become a growing trend in recent years, allowing to improve the lifecycle of any process by taking advantage of the relationship between the physical and the virtual world. Existing literature formulates several challenges for building Digital Twins, as well as some proposals for overcoming them. However, in the vast majority of the cases, the architectures and technologies presented are strongly bounded to the domain where the Digital Twins are applied. This article proposes the FIWARE Ecosystem, combining its catalog of components and its Smart Data Models, as a solution for the development of any Digital Twin. We also provide a use case to showcase how to use FIWARE for building Digital Twins through a complete example of a Parking Digital Twin. We conclude that the FIWARE Ecosystem constitutes a real reference option for developing DTs in any domain.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

PIXHAWK: A micro aerial vehicle design for autonomous flight using onboard computer vision

We describe a novel quadrotor Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) system that is designed to use computer vision algorithms within the flight control loop. The main contribution is a MAV system that is able to run both the vision-based flight control and stereo-vision-based obstacle detection parallelly on an embedded computer onboard the MAV. The system design features the integration of a powerful onboard computer and the synchronization of IMU-Vision measurements by hardware timestamping which allows tight integration of IMU measurements into the computer vision pipeline. We evaluate the accuracy of marker-based visual pose estimation for flight control and demonstrate marker-based autonomous flight including obstacle detection using stereo vision. We also show the benefits of our IMU-Vision synchronization for egomotion estimation in additional experiments where we use the synchronized measurements for pose estimation using the 2pt+gravity formulation of the PnP proble

Knowledge Rich Natural Language Queries over Structured Biological Databases

Increasingly, keyword, natural language and NoSQL queries are being used for information retrieval from traditional as well as non-traditional databases such as web, document, image, GIS, legal, and health databases. While their popularity are undeniable for obvious reasons, their engineering is far from simple. In most part, semantics and intent preserving mapping of a well understood natural language query expressed over a structured database schema to a structured query language is still a difficult task, and research to tame the complexity is intense. In this paper, we propose a multi-level knowledge-based middleware to facilitate such mappings that separate the conceptual level from the physical level. We augment these multi-level abstractions with a concept reasoner and a query strategy engine to dynamically link arbitrary natural language querying to well defined structured queries. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by presenting a Datalog based prototype system, called BioSmart, that can compute responses to arbitrary natural language queries over arbitrary databases once a syntactic classification of the natural language query is made

Evaluating FAIR Digital Object and Linked Data as distributed object systems

FAIR Digital Object (FDO) is an emerging concept that is highlighted by European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as a potential candidate for building a ecosystem of machine-actionable research outputs. In this work we systematically evaluate FDO and its implementations as a global distributed object system, by using five different conceptual frameworks that cover interoperability, middleware, FAIR principles, EOSC requirements and FDO guidelines themself. We compare the FDO approach with established Linked Data practices and the existing Web architecture, and provide a brief history of the Semantic Web while discussing why these technologies may have been difficult to adopt for FDO purposes. We conclude with recommendations for both Linked Data and FDO communities to further their adaptation and alignment.Comment: 40 pages, submitted to PeerJ C

A Decentralized Architecture for Active Sensor Networks

This thesis is concerned with the Distributed Information Gathering (DIG) problem in which a Sensor Network is tasked with building a common representation of environment. The problem is motivated by the advantages offered by distributed autonomous sensing systems and the challenges they present. The focus of this study is on Macro Sensor Networks, characterized by platform mobility, heterogeneous teams, and long mission duration. The system under consideration may consist of an arbitrary number of mobile autonomous robots, stationary sensor platforms, and human operators, all linked in a network. This work describes a comprehensive framework called Active Sensor Network (ASN) which addresses the tasks of information fusion, decistion making, system configuration, and user interaction. The main design objectives are scalability with the number of robotic platforms, maximum flexibility in implementation and deployment, and robustness to component and communication failure. The framework is described from three complementary points of view: architecture, algorithms, and implementation. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of the ASN architecture. Its design follows three guiding principles: decentralization, modularity, and locality of interactions. These principles are applied to all aspects of the architecture and the framework in general. To achieve flexibility, the design approach emphasizes interactions between components rather than the definition of the components themselves. The architecture specifies a small set of interfaces sufficient to implement a wide range of information gathering systems. In the area of algorithms, this thesis builds on the earlier work on Decentralized Data Fusion (DDF) and its extension to information-theoretic decistion making. It presents the Bayesian Decentralized Data Fusion (BDDF) algorithm formulated for environment features represented by a general probability density function. Several specific representations are also considered: Gaussian, discrete, and the Certainty Grid map. Well known algorithms for these representations are shown to implement various aspects of the Bayesian framework. As part of the ASN implementation, a practical indoor sensor network has been developed and tested. Two series of experiments were conducted, utilizing two types of environment representation: 1) point features with Gaussian position uncertainty and 2) Certainty Grid maps. The network was operational for several days at a time, with individual platforms coming on and off-line. On several occasions, the network consisted of 39 software components. The lessons learned during the system's development may be applicable to other heterogeneous distributed systems with data-intensive algorithms