Leveraging Declarations over the Lifecycle of Large-Scale Sensor Applications

International audienceMasses of sensors and actuators are being deployed in our daily environments to provide innovative services for such spaces as parking lots, buildings, and railway networks. Yet, to realize the full potentials of these sensor network infrastructures, services need to be developed. Service development raises a number of challenges due to existing approaches that are often low level and network/hardware-centric. This paper proposes a high-level approach to the development of large-scale orchestrating applications. It revolves around a declaration language that allows to express the sensor-network dimensions of an application (sensor discovery, delivery models, actuation process). These declarations define the behavior of an application with respect to the sensor network infrastructure. We demonstrate the key relevance of these declarations at every stage of an application lifecycle, from design to runtime. In doing so, declarations allow to match the sensor-network behavior of an application to the target infrastructure. Our approach summarizes and puts in perspective our development of industrial case studies and our experience in using a commercially-operated sensor infrastructure

A smart building semantic platform to enable data re-use in energy analytics applications: the Data Clearing House

Systems in the built environment continuously emit time series data about resource usage (e.g., energy and water), embedded electrical generation/storage, status of equipment, patterns of building occupancy, and readings from IoT sensors. This presents opportunities for new analytics and supervisory control applications that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to energy demand, if the barrier of data heterogeneity can be overcome. Semantic models of buildings -- representing structure, integrated equipment, and the many internal connections -- can help achieve interoperable data re-use by describing overall context, in addition to metadata. In this paper, we describe the Data Clearing House (DCH), a semantic building platform that hosts sensor data, building models, and analytics applications. This fulfills the key phases in the lifecycle of semantic building data, which includes: cost-effective ingestion of Building Management System (BMS), IoT, metering and meteorological time series data from a wide range of open and proprietary systems; importing and validating semantic models of sites and buildings using the Brick Schema; interacting with a discovery API via a high-level domain-specific query language; and deploying applications to modelled buildings. Having onboarded multiple buildings belonging to our own organisation and external partners, we are able to comment on the challenges to success of this approach. As an example use-case of the semantic building platform, we describe a measurement and verification (M&V) application implementing the 'whole facility' (Option C) method of the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP) for evaluating electrical metering data. This compares energy consumption between nominated baseline and analysis time periods, to quantify the energy savings achieved after implementing an intervention on a site.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for presentation at Climate Smart Engineering 2023 (CSE23

Multi-Dimensional Model Based Engineering for Performance Critical Computer Systems Using the AADL

International audienceThe Architecture Analysis & Design Language, (AADL), Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), AS5506, was developed to support quantitative analysis of the runtime architecture of the embedded software system in computer systems with multiple critical operational properties, such as responsiveness, safety-criticality, security, and reliability by allowing a model of the system to be annotated with information relevant to each of these quality concerns and AADL to be extended with analysis-specific properties. It supports modelling of the embedded software runtime architecture, the computer system hardware, and the interface to the physical environment of embedded computer systems and system of systems. It was designed to support a full Model Based Engineering lifecycle including system specification, analysis, system tuning, integration, and upgrade by supporting modelling and analysis at multiple levels of fidelity. A system can be automatically integrated from AADL models when fully specified and when source code is provided for the software components

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

A Framework for Test & Evaluation of Autonomous Systems Along the Virtuality-Reality Spectrum

Test & Evaluation of autonomous vehicles presents a challenge as the vehicles may have emergent behavior and it is frequently difficult to ascertain the reason for software decisions. Current Test & Evaluation approaches for autonomous systems place the vehicles in various operating scenarios to observe their behavior. However, this introduces dependencies between design and development lifecycle of the autonomous software and physical vehicle hardware. Simulation-based testing can alleviate the necessity to have physical hardware; however, it can be costly when transitioning the autonomous software to and from a simulation testing environment. The objective of this thesis is to develop a reusable framework for testing autonomous software such that testing can be conducted at various levels of mixed reality provided the framework components are sufficient to support data required by the autonomous software. The paper describes the design of the software framework and explores its application through use cases

On Reducing Underutilization of Security Standards by Deriving Actionable Rules: An Application to IoT

Even though there exist a number of security guidelines and recommendations from various worldwide standardization authorities (e.g., NIST, ISO, ENISA), it is evident from many of the recent attacks that these standards are not strictly followed in the implementation of real-world products. Furthermore, most security applications (e.g., monitoring and auditing) do not consider those standards as the basis of their security check. Therefore, regardless of continuous efforts in publishing security standards, they are still under-utilized in practice. Such under-utilization might be caused by the fact that existing security standards are intended more for high-level recommendations than for being readily adopted to automated security applications on the system-level data. Bridging this gap between high-level recommendations and low-level system implementations becomes extremely difficult, as a fully automated solution might suffer from high inaccuracy, whereas a fully manual approach might require tedious efforts. Therefore, in this thesis, we aim for a more practical solution by proposing a partially automated approach, where it automates the tedious tasks (e.g., summarizing long standard documents, and extracting device specifications) and relies on manual efforts from security experts to avoid mistakes in finalizing security rules. We apply our solution to IoT by implementing it with IoT-specific standards (NISTIR 8228) and smart home networks. We further demonstrate the actionability of our derived rules in three major applications: security auditing, Intrusion Detection systems (IDS), and secure application development

Fungi in Flux | Designing Regenerative Materials and Products with Mycelium

As the world grapples with the escalating crisis of climate threats and environmental degradation, this research delves into the synergistic potential of design and biology, developing safe and sustainable materials for applications in prototyping, furniture and interior design. Harnessing the power of a unique organism - fungi, the study proposes an accessible, efficient, and resilient material resource system. It utilizes local waste streams and mycelium (the vegetative part of fungi) to grow functional structures. An experimental and small-scale protocol is modeled by testing bio-fabrication and bio-printing methods. The composites\u27 performance qualities and characteristics are evaluated through mechanical testing and a survey of experiential attributes. A series of workshops introduced participants to the creative possibilities of integrating myco-materials into their practice, leading to insights and possibilities in new processes and products. To foster a deeper understanding of sustainability, the carbon footprint and ecological impact of these materials are examined. Envisioning a paradigm shift in industrial ecology, the proposed ideas reduce dependence on non-biodegradable, toxic, and harmful materials. With the principles of biology and design, this work hopes to transcend the trajectory of conventional materials - particularly plastics, and move toward a regenerative future