The intelligent industry of the future: A survey on emerging trends, research challenges and opportunities in Industry 4.0

Strongly rooted in the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems-enabled manufacturing, disruptive paradigms like the Factory of the Future and Industry 4.0 envision knowledge-intensive industrial intelligent environments where smart personalized products are created through smart processes and procedures. The 4th industrial revolution will be based on Cyber-Physical Systems that will monitor, analyze and automate business processes, transforming production and logistic processes into smart factory environments where big data capabilities, cloud services and smart predictive decision support tools are used to increase productivity and efficiency. This survey provides insights into the latest developments in these domains, and identifies relevant research challenges and opportunities to shape the future of intelligent manufacturing environments.status: publishe

Workflows for Quantitative Data Analysis in The Social Sciences

The background is given to how statistical analysis is used by quantitative social scientists. Developing statistical analyses requires substantial effort, yet there are important limitations in current practice. This has motivated the authors to create a more systematic and effective methodology with supporting tools. The approach to modelling quantitative data analysis in the social sciences is presented. Analysis scripts are treated abstractly as mathematical functions and concretely as web services. This allows individual scripts to be combined into high-level workflows. A comprehensive set of tools allows workflows to be defined, automatically validated and verified, and automatically implemented. The workflows expose opportunities for parallel execution, can define support for proper fault handling, and can be realised by non-technical users. Services, workflows and datasets can also be readily shared. The approach is illustrated with a realistic case study that analyses occupational position in relation to health

A System for Controlling, Monitoring and Programming the Home

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities. In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home. This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality. Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables. The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home

Enabling Domain-Specific Rule-Based Automation With Semantic Stream Technology

The aim of this study is to consolidate semantics, streaming and user-centered rulebased home automation with the goal of thereby enabling more powerful and more user-friendly home automation systems. To reach this goal this thesis incorporates the rather new field of semantic streaming into home automation taking into account the users\u27 needs and perspective. This thesis contributes a structured literature review on rule-based home automation use cases including their classification by new criteria. As part of the analysis a participatory design study was conducted yielding that users prefer visual languages in the domain of home automation. Furthermore a new pattern in semantic streaming was discovered called dynamic sensor selection. As main contribution of this thesis a home automation system based on semantic streaming called ERAS (Event and Rule Automation System) was developed using two hierarchically-aligned visual languages called Event Language (EL) and Rule Language (RL). ERAS was completely implemented also containing an editor for each of the two visual languages. As existing semantic streaming engines and benchmarks for semantic streaming engines did proof not suitable a custom semantic streaming engine called ECQELS (Extended Continuous Query Evaluation over Linked Stream) was designed and implemented as well as a corresponding benchmark introducing the average response time as relevant feature for comparison of semantic streaming engines. The system developed in this thesis was evaluated by performing the implemented benchmark on ECQELS comparing it to CQELS, probably the most powerful existing semantic streaming engine, which yielded that ECQELS can compete with CQELS for rather simple queries. When executing multiple queries simultaneously ECQELS event outperforms CQELS. Furthermore a user acceptance study was conducted as part of the evaluation comparing the visual language EL and the textual language ECQELS regarding usability. As outcome of the study EL was slightly preferred by the users in most cases but differences could not be proven significantly. On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that the use of semantic streaming technologies in the domain of home automation has the potential to provide great benefits for developing more powerful and nevertheless more userfriendly home automation systems

Flexible Management of Smart Homes

An approach is presented for flexible management of smart homes, covering both home automation and telecare. The aim is to allow end users to manage their homes without requiring detailed technical knowledge or programming ability. This is achieved at three levels: managing home components and their interactions, stating policies for how the home system should react to events, and defining high-level goals for what the user wishes to achieve. The component architecture is based on OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative). Policies and goals are fomulated in the APPEL language (Adaptable and Programmable Policy Environment and Language), and supported by the ACCENT policy system (Advanced Component Control Enhancing Network Technologies). At run-time, high-level goals lead to selection of an optimal and conflict-free set of policies. These in turn determine how the home should react to various events. The paper closes with an evaluation of the approach from the points of view of functionality and usability