The OCarePlatform : a context-aware system to support independent living

Background: Currently, healthcare services, such as institutional care facilities, are burdened with an increasing number of elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses and a decreasing number of competent caregivers. Objectives: To relieve the burden on healthcare services, independent living at home could be facilitated, by offering individuals and their (in)formal caregivers support in their daily care and needs. With the rise of pervasive healthcare, new information technology solutions can assist elderly people ("residents") and their caregivers to allow residents to live independently for as long as possible. Methods: To this end, the OCarePlatform system was designed. This semantic, data-driven and cloud based back-end system facilitates independent living by offering information and knowledge-based services to the resident and his/her (in)formal caregivers. Data and context information are gathered to realize context-aware and personalized services and to support residents in meeting their daily needs. This body of data, originating from heterogeneous data and information sources, is sent to personalized services, where is fused, thus creating an overview of the resident's current situation. Results: The architecture of the OCarePlatform is proposed, which is based on a service-oriented approach, together with its different components and their interactions. The implementation details are presented, together with a running example. A scalability and performance study of the OCarePlatform was performed. The results indicate that the OCarePlatform is able to support a realistic working environment and respond to a trigger in less than 5 seconds. The system is highly dependent on the allocated memory. Conclusion: The data-driven character of the OCarePlatform facilitates easy plug-in of new functionality, enabling the design of personalized, context-aware services. The OCarePlatform leads to better support for elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses, who live independently. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

BRICKS: Building’s reasoning for intelligent control knowledge-based system

Building energy management systems have been largely implemented, focusing on specific domains. When installed together, they lack interoperability to make them work correctly and to achieve a centralized user interface. The Building's Reasoning for Intelligent Control Knowledge-based System (BRICKS) overcomes these issues by developing an interoperable building management system able to aggregate different interest domains. It is a context-aware semantic rule-based system for intelligent management of buildings' energy and security. Its output can be a set of alarms, notifications, or control actions to take. BRICKS itself, and its features are the innovative contribution of the present paper. It is very important for buildings' energy management, namely in the scope of demand response programs. In this paper, it is shown how semantics is used to enable the knowledge exchange between different devices, algorithms, and models, without the need for reprogramming the system. A scenario is deployed in a real building for demonstration.This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under project DOMINOES (grant agreement No 771066) and from FEDER Funds through COMPETE program and from National Funds through FCT under the projects UID/EEA/00760/2019, PTDC/EEI-EEE/28954/2017 (MAS-Society), and SFRH/BD/118487/2016.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Managed ecosystems of networked objects

Small embedded devices such as sensors and actuators will become the cornerstone of the Future Internet. To this end, generic, open and secure communication and service platforms are needed in order to be able to exploit the new business opportunities these devices bring. In this paper, we evaluate the current efforts to integrate sensors and actuators into the Internet and identify the limitations at the level of cooperation of these Internet-connected objects and the possible intelligence at the end points. As a solution, we propose the concept of Managed Ecosystem of Networked Objects, which aims to create a smart network architecture for groups of Internet-connected objects by combining network virtualization and clean-slate end-to-end protocol design. The concept maps to many real-life scenarios and should empower application developers to use sensor data in an easy and natural way. At the same time, the concept introduces many new challenging research problems, but their realization could offer a meaningful contribution to the realization of the Internet of Things

Protocols, performance assessment and consolidation on interfaces for standardization – D3.3

The following document presents a detailed description of the protocol for the “ Control Channels for the Cooperation of the Cognitive Management System ” (C4MS) which provides the necessary means to enable proper management of Opportunistic Networks. Additionally, the document defines the methodology that was applied for the purpose of signalling evaluation. The protocol overview presented in section 2 of the main document, provides the C4MS principles. The section includes, among others, the description of the protocol identifiers, procedures, protocol state machines and message format as well as the security asp ects. Section 3 provides a high-level description of the data structures defined within the scope of OneFIT project. The data structures are classified into five categories, i.e.: Profiles, Context, Decisions,Knowledge and Policies. The high level description is complemented by some detailed data structures in the Appendix to D3.3 Section 3[10]. Section 4 provides details on the evaluation methodology applied for the purpose of C4MS performance assessment. The section presents the evaluation plan along with a description of metrics that are to be exploited in the scope of WP3. Section 5 and Section 6 are composed of the signalling evaluation results. Section 5 focuses on the estimation of the signalling load imposed by ON management in different ON phases. Additionally some results for the initialization phase (not explicitly mentioned in the previous phases of the project)and security related aspects are also depicted. Section 6 on the other hand is focused on the evaluation of the signalling traffic generated by different ON related algorithms. Conclusions to the document are drawn in section 7. Detailed description of the C4MS procedures, implementation options based on IEEE 802.21, DIAMTER and 3GPP are depicted in the appendix to the D3.3[10] . Additionally, the appendix incorporates the detailed definition of the information data structures and final set of Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) provided for the OneFIT project.Peer ReviewedPreprin

E2SP. The Business Case of an Environmental Information System for Decision Support in ASP Mode

According to PSR (OECD) and DPSIR (EEA) models, Environmental Agencies are in charge of measuring the State and Pressure and evaluate the Impact in order to define the most suitable Responses; this implies data analysis and reporting activities, as one of their core responsibilities. Environmental Information Systems (EIS) support these activities by combining the advantages of first-rate consolidated technology (such asBusiness Intelligence and Data Warehouses) to specific technical architectures tailored to environmental management tasks. E2SP (Environmental Enterprise Service Provider) is a online reporting and forecasting platform, providing a cost effective, Internet based EIS and Decision Support System in ASP (Application Service Provider) mode. Tasks such as data integration, data analysis through OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing), impact analysis and forecasts through mathematical models, emission inventories, indices/indicators calculation, reporting, are supplied in an integrated environment as on line services to public authorities and private industries. E2SP project, funded by the eTEN program of the European Commission, allowed to deploy two service centres and to develop the business case study, described in this paper, to verify the viability of the ASP approach to EIS in a trans-national context, starting from the air quality theme

Applying Software Product Lines to Build Autonomic Pervasive Systems

In this Master Thesis, we have proposed a model-driven Software Product Line (SPL) for developing autonomic pervasive systems. The work focusses on reusing the Variability knowledge from the SPL design to the SPL products. This Variability knowledge enables SPL products to deal with adaptation scenarios (evolution and involution) in an autonomic way.Cetina Englada, C. (2008). Applying Software Product Lines to Build Autonomic Pervasive Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12447Archivo delegad

A RECONFIGURABLE AND EXTENSIBLE EXPLORATION PLATFORM FOR FUTURE HETEROGENEOUS SYSTEMS

Accelerator-based -or heterogeneous- computing has become increasingly important in a variety of scenarios, ranging from High-Performance Computing (HPC) to embedded systems. While most solutions use sometimes custom-made components, most of today’s systems rely on commodity highend CPUs and/or GPU devices, which deliver adequate performance while ensuring programmability, productivity, and application portability. Unfortunately, pure general-purpose hardware is affected by inherently limited power-efficiency, that is, low GFLOPS-per-Watt, now considered as a primary metric. The many-core model and architectural customization can play here a key role, as they enable unprecedented levels of power-efficiency compared to CPUs/GPUs. However, such paradigms are still immature and deeper exploration is indispensable. This dissertation investigates customizability and proposes novel solutions for heterogeneous architectures, focusing on mechanisms related to coherence and network-on-chip (NoC). First, the work presents a non-coherent scratchpad memory with a configurable bank remapping system to reduce bank conflicts. The experimental results show the benefits of both using a customizable hardware bank remapping function and non-coherent memories for some types of algorithms. Next, we demonstrate how a distributed synchronization master better suits many-cores than standard centralized solutions. This solution, inspired by the directory-based coherence mechanism, supports concurrent synchronizations without relying on memory transactions. The results collected for different NoC sizes provided indications about the area overheads incurred by our solution and demonstrated the benefits of using a dedicated hardware synchronization support. Finally, this dissertation proposes an advanced coherence subsystem, based on the sparse directory approach, with a selective coherence maintenance system which allows coherence to be deactivated for blocks that do not require it. Experimental results show that the use of a hybrid coherent and non-coherent architectural mechanism along with an extended coherence protocol can enhance performance. The above results were all collected by means of a modular and customizable heterogeneous many-core system developed to support the exploration of power-efficient high-performance computing architectures. The system is based on a NoC and a customizable GPU-like accelerator core, as well as a reconfigurable coherence subsystem, ensuring application-specific configuration capabilities. All the explored solutions were evaluated on this real heterogeneous system, which comes along with the above methodological results as part of the contribution in this dissertation. In fact, as a key benefit, the experimental platform enables users to integrate novel hardware/software solutions on a full-system scale, whereas existing platforms do not always support a comprehensive heterogeneous architecture exploration