SensorCloud: Towards the Interdisciplinary Development of a Trustworthy Platform for Globally Interconnected Sensors and Actuators

Although Cloud Computing promises to lower IT costs and increase users' productivity in everyday life, the unattractive aspect of this new technology is that the user no longer owns all the devices which process personal data. To lower scepticism, the project SensorCloud investigates techniques to understand and compensate these adoption barriers in a scenario consisting of cloud applications that utilize sensors and actuators placed in private places. This work provides an interdisciplinary overview of the social and technical core research challenges for the trustworthy integration of sensor and actuator devices with the Cloud Computing paradigm. Most importantly, these challenges include i) ease of development, ii) security and privacy, and iii) social dimensions of a cloud-based system which integrates into private life. When these challenges are tackled in the development of future cloud systems, the attractiveness of new use cases in a sensor-enabled world will considerably be increased for users who currently do not trust the Cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, published as technical report of the Department of Computer Science of RWTH Aachen Universit

Transforming ASN.1 Specifications into CafeOBJ to assist with Property Checking

The adoption of algebraic specification/formal method techniques by the networks' research community is happening slowly but steadily. We work towards a software environment that can translate a protocol's specification, from Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1 - a very popular specification language with many applications), into the powerful algebraic specification language CafeOBJ. The resulting code can be used to check, validate and falsify critical properties of systems, at the pre-coding stage of development. In this paper, we introduce some key elements of ASN.1 and CafeOBJ and sketch some first steps towards the implementation of such a tool including a case study.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figure

Reorganization in Multi-Agent Architectures: An Active Graph Grammar Approach

Background: Organizational architecture is a holistic approach to design of humane organizations and studies an organization from five perspectives: structure, culture, processes, strategy and individuals. In this paper the concept of organizational architecture is firstly formalized using the fractal principle and then applied to multi-agent systems’ (MAS) organizations. Objectives: Providing a holistic framework for modelling all aspects of MASreorganization. Methods/Approach: MAS organizations are formalized using graph theory and a new active graph rewriting formalism inspired by the active database theory is introduced. Results: The newly developed framework is graphical, event-driven and applied in a distributed MAS environment. Conclusions: By defining organizational units, processes, strategies and cultural artefacts in a recursive way, it is shown that labelled graphs and hypergraphs can be used to model various levels of organizational architecture while active graph grammars allow one to model reorganization of each of the architectural perspectives