265,136 research outputs found
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
Resource-aware IoT Control: Saving Communication through Predictive Triggering
The Internet of Things (IoT) interconnects multiple physical devices in
large-scale networks. When the 'things' coordinate decisions and act
collectively on shared information, feedback is introduced between them.
Multiple feedback loops are thus closed over a shared, general-purpose network.
Traditional feedback control is unsuitable for design of IoT control because it
relies on high-rate periodic communication and is ignorant of the shared
network resource. Therefore, recent event-based estimation methods are applied
herein for resource-aware IoT control allowing agents to decide online whether
communication with other agents is needed, or not. While this can reduce
network traffic significantly, a severe limitation of typical event-based
approaches is the need for instantaneous triggering decisions that leave no
time to reallocate freed resources (e.g., communication slots), which hence
remain unused. To address this problem, novel predictive and self triggering
protocols are proposed herein. From a unified Bayesian decision framework, two
schemes are developed: self triggers that predict, at the current triggering
instant, the next one; and predictive triggers that check at every time step,
whether communication will be needed at a given prediction horizon. The
suitability of these triggers for feedback control is demonstrated in hardware
experiments on a cart-pole, and scalability is discussed with a multi-vehicle
simulation.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, accepted article to appear in IEEE Internet of
Things Journal. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.0753
Governance of Autonomous Agents on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities
International audienceThe study of autonomous agents has a long tradition in the Multiagent System and the Semantic Web communities, with applications ranging from automating business processes to personal assistants. More recently, the Web of Things (WoT), which is an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT) with metadata expressed in Web standards, and its community provide further motivation for pushing the autonomous agents research agenda forward. Although representing and reasoning about norms, policies and preferences is crucial to ensuring that autonomous agents act in a manner that satisfies stakeholder requirements, normative concepts, policies and preferences have yet to be considered as first-class abstractions in Web-based multiagent systems. Towards this end, this paper motivates the need for alignment and joint research across the Multiagent Systems, Semantic Web, and WoT communities, introduces a conceptual framework for governance of autonomous agents on the Web, and identifies several research challenges and opportunities
The “WiFi4EU” in light of the European Competition regime
The “WiFi4EU” initiative is a proposal for regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council, which amends Regulations (EU) No 1316/2013 and (EU) No 283/2014, each of them on the promotion of Internet connectivity in local communities. This initiative aims to ensure that all Member States of the European Union create high-quality wireless internet access points throughout their territory to combat digital illiteracy and ensure access to healthcare, administrative services, and online commerce. With the following resolution, hospitals, libraries, monuments, museums, and parks will have a public signal available. Therefore, the proposal has a very strong social dimension, since it aims to broaden the internet signal to citizens who live near municipal areas and whose economic statuses are lacking. With a three-year implementation period, the initiative falls within the scope of the Single Digital Market, which is a major political objective and a way for the European Union to attract investments from large economic agents through the “Internet of Things”. It is therefore relevant to give some context and analyze the initiative through the eyes of the Union’s principles and of the notions of competition and regulation, which areessential to the European Union
Cooperative Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multiple-Group NB-IoT Networks Optimization
NarrowBand-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is an emerging cellular-based
technology that offers a range of flexible configurations for massive IoT radio
access from groups of devices with heterogeneous requirements. A configuration
specifies the amount of radio resources allocated to each group of devices for
random access and for data transmission. Assuming no knowledge of the traffic
statistics, the problem is to determine, in an online fashion at each
Transmission Time Interval (TTI), the configurations that maximizes the
long-term average number of IoT devices that are able to both access and
deliver data. Given the complexity of optimal algorithms, a Cooperative
Multi-Agent Deep Neural Network based Q-learning (CMA-DQN) approach is
developed, whereby each DQN agent independently control a configuration
variable for each group. The DQN agents are cooperatively trained in the same
environment based on feedback regarding transmission outcomes. CMA-DQN is seen
to considerably outperform conventional heuristic approaches based on load
estimation.Comment: Submitted for conference publicatio
A proposal for an Internet of Things-based monitoring system composed by low capability, open source and open hardware devices
The Internet of Things makes use of a huge disparity of technologies at very different levels that help one to the other to accomplish goals that were previously regarded as unthinkable in terms of ubiquity or scalability. If the Internet of Things is expected to interconnect every day devices or appliances and enable communications between them, a broad range of new services, applications and products can be foreseen. For example, monitoring is a process where sensors have widespread use for measuring environmental parameters (temperature, light, chemical agents, etc.) but obtaining readings at the exact physical point they want to be obtained from, or about the exact wanted parameter can be a clumsy, time-consuming task that is not easily adaptable to new requirements. In order to tackle this challenge, a proposal on a system used to monitor any conceivable environment, which additionally is able to monitor the status of its own components and heal some of the most usual issues of a Wireless Sensor Network, is presented here in detail, covering all the layers that give it shape in terms of devices, communications or services
ODIN: Obfuscation-based privacy-preserving consensus algorithm for Decentralized Information fusion in smart device Networks
The large spread of sensors and smart devices in urban infrastructures are motivating research in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) to develop new services and improve citizens’ quality of life. Sensors and smart devices generate large amounts of measurement data from sensing the environment, which is used to enable services such as control of power consumption or traffic density. To deal with such a large amount of information and provide accurate measurements, service providers can adopt information fusion, which given the decentralized nature of urban deployments can be performed by means of consensus algorithms. These algorithms allow distributed agents to (iteratively) compute linear functions on the exchanged data, and take decisions based on the outcome, without the need for the support of a central entity. However, the use of consensus algorithms raises several security concerns, especially when private or security critical information is involved in the computation.
In this article we propose ODIN, a novel algorithm allowing information fusion over encrypted data. ODIN is a privacy-preserving extension of the popular consensus gossip algorithm, which prevents distributed agents from having direct access to the data while they iteratively reach consensus; agents cannot access even the final consensus value but can only retrieve partial information (e.g., a binary decision). ODIN uses efficient additive obfuscation and proxy re-encryption during the update steps and garbled circuits to make final decisions on the obfuscated consensus. We discuss the security of our proposal and show its practicability and efficiency on real-world resource-constrained devices, developing a prototype implementation for Raspberry Pi devices
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