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

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa

Entrepreneurial workaround practices in severe institutional voids: Evidence from Kenya

Entrepreneurs in developing economies try to cope with weak or absent formal institutions – often referred to as ‘institutional voids’ – by relying extensively on intermediary organizations such as business incubators and development organizations or informal institutions such as political, kinship, or family relationships. However, in many African countries, intermediary support is limited and informal institutions are also unreliable, adding risks and costs to doing business and increasing the severity of institutional voids in the surrounding ecosystem. We investigate the practices followed by 47 commercial entrepreneurs in Kenya to ‘work around’ these severe institutional voids to achieve their goals of business creation and growth. We find that severe institutional voids stimulate the hybridization of goals to include social value creation, create a need for a more strategic orchestration of business relationships, and motivate entrepreneurs to proactively cross-brace the institutional infrastructure around them. We contribute by unveiling the important role of entrepreneurs as microinstitutional agents in developing economies and by detailing how commercial and social goals become intertwined in the context of African entrepreneurship

The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges

Network orchestration: new role of business incubators?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the performance of incubators in the stages of formationand development of incubated business networks, especially in bottom-up and top-down network models.Design/methodology/approach – The research is defined as qualitative and descriptive, with theapplication of multiple case studies, in which two networks of incubated businesses were investigated, onebeing top-down and the other bottom-up, which emerged within the incubation process of two businessincubators (CIETEC and INCIT). To make the study operational, 11 semi-structured interviews were carriedout and the thematic analysis of content was developed.Findings – The results pointed out that in the top-down network the incubator performs a new assignment,the network orchestration, which corresponds to the actions of formation, coordination and governance of thegroup. In the bottom-up network, it was found that the role of the incubator was to expand the value offersusually practiced.Research limitations/implications – As a limitation of the research, the very limitation of case studiesis pointed out that is they do not allow for generalizations.Practical implications – The research contributes to reflections on the effectiveness of the incubator andsheds light on the complementarity of networks in incubation processes, providing gains for incubators,incubated businesses and society.Originality/value – The originality of this document is the new role of the incubator, which isorchestration, and its categorization. The results allow us to understand the effects of providing networks andrelationships for incubated businesses. In addition, this study broadens the focus of traditional analyses of theincubator–incubated duo to consider the incubator–network–incubated trio

A Calculus for Orchestration of Web Services

Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm for distributed computing based on the use of services, is calling for the development of tools and techniques to build safe and trustworthy systems, and to analyse their behaviour. Therefore, many researchers have proposed to use process calculi, a cornerstone of current foundational research on specification and analysis of concurrent, reactive, and distributed systems. In this paper, we follow this approach and introduce CWS, a process calculus expressly designed for specifying and combining service-oriented applications, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. We show that CWS can model all the phases of the life cycle of service-oriented applications, such as publication, discovery, negotiation, orchestration, deployment, reconfiguration and execution. We illustrate the specification style that CWS supports by means of a large case study from the automotive domain and a number of more specific examples drawn from it

Agent-based interoperability for e-government

The provision of valuable e-government services depends upon the capacity to integrate the disperse provision of services by the public administration and thus upon the availability of interoperability platforms. These platforms are commonly built according to the principles of service oriented architectures, which raise the question of how to dynamically orchestrate services while preserving information security. Recently, it was presented an e-government interoperability model that preserves privacy during the dynamic orchestration of services. In this paper we present a prototype that implements that model using software agents. The model and the prototype are briefly described; an illustrative use case is presented; and the advantages of using software agents to implement the model are discussed. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013

Leveraging Semantic Web Technologies for Managing Resources in a Multi-Domain Infrastructure-as-a-Service Environment

This paper reports on experience with using semantically-enabled network resource models to construct an operational multi-domain networked infrastructure-as-a-service (NIaaS) testbed called ExoGENI, recently funded through NSF's GENI project. A defining property of NIaaS is the deep integration of network provisioning functions alongside the more common storage and computation provisioning functions. Resource provider topologies and user requests can be described using network resource models with common base classes for fundamental cyber-resources (links, nodes, interfaces) specialized via virtualization and adaptations between networking layers to specific technologies. This problem space gives rise to a number of application areas where semantic web technologies become highly useful - common information models and resource class hierarchies simplify resource descriptions from multiple providers, pathfinding and topology embedding algorithms rely on query abstractions as building blocks. The paper describes how the semantic resource description models enable ExoGENI to autonomously instantiate on-demand virtual topologies of virtual machines provisioned from cloud providers and are linked by on-demand virtual connections acquired from multiple autonomous network providers to serve a variety of applications ranging from distributed system experiments to high-performance computing