Achieving Autonomic Computing through the Use of Variability Models at Run-time

Increasingly, software needs to dynamically adapt its behavior at run-time in response to changing conditions in the supporting computing infrastructure and in the surrounding physical environment. Adaptability is emerging as a necessary underlying capability, particularly for highly dynamic systems such as context-aware or ubiquitous systems. By automating tasks such as installation, adaptation, or healing, Autonomic Computing envisions computing environments that evolve without the need for human intervention. Even though there is a fair amount of work on architectures and their theoretical design, Autonomic Computing was criticised as being a \hype topic" because very little of it has been implemented fully. Furthermore, given that the autonomic system must change states at runtime and that some of those states may emerge and are much less deterministic, there is a great challenge to provide new guidelines, techniques and tools to help autonomic system development. This thesis shows that building up on the central ideas of Model Driven Development (Models as rst-order citizens) and Software Product Lines (Variability Management) can play a signi cant role as we move towards implementing the key self-management properties associated with autonomic computing. The presented approach encompass systems that are capable of modifying their own behavior with respect to changes in their operating environment, by using variability models as if they were the policies that drive the system's autonomic recon guration at runtime. Under a set of recon guration commands, the components that make up the architecture dynamically cooperate to change the con guration of the architecture to a new con guration. This work also provides the implementation of a Model-Based Recon guration Engine (MoRE) to blend the above ideas. Given a context event, MoRE queries the variability models to determine how the system should evolve, and then it provides the mechanisms for modifying the system.Cetina Englada, C. (2010). Achieving Autonomic Computing through the Use of Variability Models at Run-time [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/7484Palanci

Designing for user attention: a method for supporting unobtrusive routine tasks

NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Science of Computer Programming. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Science of Computer Programming, [Volume 78, Issue 10, 1 October 2013, Pages 1987–2008] DOI 10.1016/j.scico.2013.03.002The automation of user routine tasks is one of the most important challenges in the development of Ambient Intelligence systems. However, this automation may be annoying since some tasks may grab users attention in inappropriate situations. Since user attention is a valuable resource, task automation must behave in a considerate manner demanding user attention only when it is required. To address this issue, this work presents a systematic method for supporting the design and automation of unobtrusive routine tasks that can adjust their obtrusiveness level at runtime according to the user attentional resources and context. This method proposes to design the routine tasks that the system must carry out and how they must interact with users in terms of obtrusiveness. The method also provides a software infrastructure that makes the execution of the tasks at the appropriate obtrusiveness degree a reality. Finally, the system has been validated by means of usefulness and performance tests and a practical case study that demonstrates the correctness and applicability of our approach without compromising system performance.This work has been developed with the support of MICINN under the project EVERYWARE TIN2010-18011 and co-financed with ERDF, in the grants program FPU, and it has also been supported by the Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft and the BMWFJ, Austria.Gil Pascual, M.; Serral Asensio, E.; Valderas Aranda, PJ.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2013). Designing for user attention: a method for supporting unobtrusive routine tasks. Science of Computer Programming. 78(10):1987-2008. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2013.03.002S19872008781

Bio-inspired anatomy for autonomous DPWS-compliant automation components

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Engenharia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresThis thesis approaches the use of the DPWS technology to implement web-services on small devices, addresses its limitations, and explains an architecture to solve it. An approach to an autonomous device’s simple architecture was realized, using DPWS, and was called Simple DPWS. The objective was to implement/simplify some features in a device in a way that the device can work on its own. The designed architecture is based on that each component has its framework of modules, having always at least the skeleton modules communication and Event Router-Scheduler. The communication module controls all the communication between the devices and the ERS is the responsible for the other modules’ real-time communication. The DPWS toolkit offers no capability of interacting with run-time-appearing services. Thus there was a necessity to do enhancements over the DPWS toolkit to have a dynamic stub and skeleton. This service was called the dynamic service. An experience was done connecting a DPWS toolkit sample service with the corresponding hand-created dynamic service. It was used the lighting service that consists on turning a lamp ON or OFF and getting its status. A GUI was done for the application to be more user-friendly. The results were satisfactory, as the connection worked

Design of a graphical user interface for home energy monitoring system

Excellent graphics are the instruments used for representing quantitative information. Graphics help people to understand complex things easily. Hence the user interfaces developed should be clear, illustrative and designed from the user point of view with respect to their applications. The thesis work deals with the design of a graphical user interface (GUI) developed for a home energy monitoring system. Design methodologies like user centric design and empathic design are followed while creating the user interface and also the effect of various colors on human perception is studied. Hence the final design of user interface provides the end-users a visualization of the energy produced and consumed in a monitored environment. The monitoring devices are connected to ThereGate system (data logger) via the M-Bus communication protocol. The ThereGate platform uses an Open Source Linux system as the operating language. The other communication platform used over the ThereGate platform is an oBIX bridge, a web based service interface rich in XML support for transferring the data. The interface has been programmed by using Visual basics 2008 and VB.NET, developed by Microsoft. The work progresses with an initial explanation on the availability of various home energy monitoring systems on the market and their comparison. The other units discuss the architecture of the ThereGate system, give a brief overview of the M-bus system, and discuss the development of graphical user interface (GUI) from a user centric design perspective using Microsoft's Visual Basics and VB.NET and configuration of M-Bus. The last unit contains a discussion of the goals achieved at the end of the design and the future developments that can be made to have more user interactions with the user interface

An Ontology Based Approach Towards A Universal Description Framework for Home Networks

Current home networks typically involve two or more machines sharing network resources. The vision for the home network has grown from a simple computer network, to every day appliances embedded with network capabilities. In this environment devices and services within the home can interoperate, regardless of protocol or platform. Network clients can discover required resources by performing network discovery over component descriptions. Common approaches to this discovery process involve simple matching of keywords or attribute/value pairings. Interest emerging from the Semantic Web community has led to ontology languages being applied to network domains, providing a logical and semantically rich approach to both describing and discovering network components. In much of the existing work within this domain, developers have focused on defining new description frameworks in isolation from existing protocol frameworks and vocabularies. This work proposes an ontology-based description framework which takes the ontology approach to the next step, where existing description frameworks are in- corporated into the ontology-based framework, allowing discovery mechanisms to cover multiple existing domains. In this manner, existing protocols and networking approaches can participate in semantically-rich discovery processes. This framework also includes a system architecture developed for the purpose of reconciling existing home network solutions with the ontology-based discovery process. This work also describes an implementation of the approach and is deployed within a home-network environment. This implementation involves existing home networking frameworks, protocols and components, allowing the claims of this work to be examined and evaluated from a ‘real-world’ perspective

Carbook: A Platform for Mobile Automotive Services

Wireless mobile technologies have triggered a rapid development of secondary network technologies. One such prominent field of technology is interoperability for consumer devices. This field is mostly based on XML and Web Services and it includes technologies such as Universal Plug-and-Play, open media container formats, open codecs and Rich Internet Application technologies for mobile devices. Automotive field has been relatively slow and conservative in embracing these new Internet technologies. This is about to change as European Union and other substantial players are pressing forward with the safety and environmental technologies in cars. These technologies depend heavily on wireless Internet connectivity. As part of this thesis work, I have played a central role in defining the core concept of a distributed framework for mobile automotive services, Carbook System. I have also outlined the first phase of a shared research environment, Carlab, for these kinds of services. Carlab is used to demonstrate different technologies in accordance to Elektrobit’s vision for the future automotive Internet services. Carbook System will be implemented incrementally jointly with the continuation of the Carlab implementation. In this master of science thesis I have mapped and evaluated the essential technologies and created a preliminary outline for Carbook System and a set of services. The first phase Carlab network topology and emulation of different domains in Carbook System are also drafted in this thesis work

Stratégies pour le raisonnement sur le contexte dans les environnements d assistance pour les personnes âgées

Tirant parti de notre expérience avec une approche traditionnelle des environnements d'assistance ambiante (AAL) qui repose sur l'utilisation de nombreuses technologies hétérogènes dans les déploiements, cette thèse étudie la possibilité d'une approche simplifiée et complémentaire, ou seul un sous-ensemble hardware réduit est déployé, initiant un transfert de complexité vers le côté logiciel. Axé sur les aspects de raisonnement dans les systèmes AAL, ce travail a permis à la proposition d'un moteur d'inférence sémantique adapté à l'utilisation particulière à ces systèmes, répondant ainsi à un besoin de la communauté scientifique. Prenant en compte la grossière granularité des données situationnelles disponible avec une telle approche, un ensemble de règles dédiées avec des stratégies d'inférence adaptées est proposé, implémenté et validé en utilisant ce moteur. Un mécanisme de raisonnement sémantique novateur est proposé sur la base d'une architecture de raisonnement inspiré du système cognitif. Enfin, le système de raisonnement est intégré dans un framework de provision de services sensible au contexte, se chargeant de l'intelligence vis-à-vis des données contextuelles en effectuant un traitement des événements en direct par des manipulations ontologiques complexes. L ensemble du système est validé par des déploiements in-situ dans une maison de retraite ainsi que dans des maisons privées, ce qui en soi est remarquable dans un domaine de recherche principalement cantonné aux laboratoiresLeveraging our experience with the traditional approach to ambient assisted living (AAL) which relies on a large spread of heterogeneous technologies in deployments, this thesis studies the possibility of a more stripped down and complementary approach, where only a reduced hardware subset is deployed, probing a transfer of complexity towards the software side, and enhancing the large scale deployability of the solution. Focused on the reasoning aspects in AAL systems, this work has allowed the finding of a suitable semantic inference engine for the peculiar use in these systems, responding to a need in this scientific community. Considering the coarse granularity of situational data available, dedicated rule-sets with adapted inference strategies are proposed, implemented, and validated using this engine. A novel semantic reasoning mechanism is proposed based on a cognitively inspired reasoning architecture. Finally, the whole reasoning system is integrated in a fully featured context-aware service framework, powering its context awareness by performing live event processing through complex ontological manipulation. the overall system is validated through in-situ deployments in a nursing home as well as private homes over a few months period, which itself is noticeable in a mainly laboratory-bound research domainEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

Design Time Methodology for the Formal Modeling and Verification of Smart Environments

Smart Environments (SmE) are intelligent and complex due to smart connectivity and interaction of heterogeneous devices achieved by complicated and sophisticated computing algorithms. Based on their domotic and industrial applications, SmE system may be critical in terms of correctness, reliability, safety, security and other such vital factors. To achieve error-free and requirement-compliant implementation of these systems, it is advisable to enforce a design process that may guarantee these factors by adopting formal models and formal verification techniques at design time. The e-Lite research group at Politecnico di Torino is developing solutions for SmE based on integration of commercially available home automation technologies with an intelligent ecosystem based on a central OSGi-based gateway, and distributed collaboration of intelligent applications, with the help of semantic web technologies and applications. The main goal of my research is to study new methodologies which are used for the modeling and verification of SmE. This goal includes the development of a formal methodology which ensures the reliable implementation of the requirements on SmE, by modeling and verifying each component (users, devices, control algorithms and environment/context) and the interaction among them, especially at various stages in design time, so that all the complexities and ambiguities can be reduced

An OSGi implementation for autonomous Goal-Oriented deployment

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2017.Com a expansão da tecnologia de Internet das coisas, novos desafios computacionais têm surgido. Estes possuem como característica principal seu alto grau de heterogeneidade de recursos, uma vez que são compostos pelos mais variados dispositivos, os quais se utilizam de uma infraestrutura de orientação a serviços para publicarem e descobrirem funcionalidades por meio de serviços. Tendo em vista a natureza complexa de tais sistemas, torna-se necessário o uso de ambientes de gerenciamento de deployment desses recursos heterogêneos. Dentre eles, um potencial framework é o padrão OSGi, que se caracteriza por ser um framework Java para desenvolvimento e deployment de programas modulares (em bundles). Nesse trabalho, será abordada a integração do OSGi ao GoalD, uma plataforma para deployment de recursos heterogêneos conforme a abordagem orientada a objetivos, por meio da descrição detalhada da implementação de cada uma das atividades do processo de deployment autônomo, definida pelo GoalD, utilizando os conceitos e técnicas apresentados pela tecnologia OSGi.With the expansion of the Internet of Things technology, new computational challenges have risen. Their main characteristic is the high degree of resource heterogeneity, once they are composed by the most variant kinds of devices, which make use of a serviceoriented infrastructure to publish and discover functionalities through services. Seeing the complex nature of such systems, it is necessary the use of deployment management environments to handle such heterogeneous resources. Amongst them, a potential framework is the OSGi standard, which is known for being a Java framework for the development and deployment of modular applications (bundles). In this work, it will be addressed the integration of OSGi to GoalD, a platform for the deployment of heterogeneous resources that follows the goal-oriented approach, through the detailed description of the implementation of each activity of the autonomous deployment process, defined by GoalD, by using the concepts and techniques presented by the OSGi technology