Survey of Autonomic Computing and Experiments on JMX-based Autonomic Features

Autonomic Computing (AC) aims at solving the problem of managing the rapidly-growing complexity of Information Technology systems, by creating self-managing systems. In this thesis, we have surveyed the progress of the AC field, and studied the requirements, models and architectures of AC. The commonly recognized AC requirements are four properties - self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting. The recommended software architecture is the MAPE-K model containing four modules, namely - monitor, analyze, plan and execute, as well as the knowledge repository. In the modern software marketplace, Java Management Extensions (JMX) has facilitated one function of the AC requirements - monitoring. Using JMX, we implemented a package that attempts to assist programming for AC features including socket management, logging, and recovery of distributed computation. In the experiments, we have not only realized the powerful Java capabilities that are unknown to many educators, we also illustrated the feasibility of learning AC in senior computer science courses

Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future Internet including existing and evolving Internet and network developments and could be conceptually defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network

Self-managed Workflows for Cyber-physical Systems

Workflows are a well-established concept for describing business logics and processes in web-based applications and enterprise application integration scenarios on an abstract implementation-agnostic level. Applying Business Process Management (BPM) technologies to increase autonomy and automate sequences of activities in Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) promises various advantages including a higher flexibility and simplified programming, a more efficient resource usage, and an easier integration and orchestration of CPS devices. However, traditional BPM notations and engines have not been designed to be used in the context of CPS, which raises new research questions occurring with the close coupling of the virtual and physical worlds. Among these challenges are the interaction with complex compounds of heterogeneous sensors, actuators, things and humans; the detection and handling of errors in the physical world; and the synchronization of the cyber-physical process execution models. Novel factors related to the interaction with the physical world including real world obstacles, inconsistencies and inaccuracies may jeopardize the successful execution of workflows in CPS and may lead to unanticipated situations. This thesis investigates properties and requirements of CPS relevant for the introduction of BPM technologies into cyber-physical domains. We discuss existing BPM systems and related work regarding the integration of sensors and actuators into workflows, the development of a Workflow Management System (WfMS) for CPS, and the synchronization of the virtual and physical process execution as part of self-* capabilities for WfMSes. Based on the identified research gap, we present concepts and prototypes regarding the development of a CPS WFMS w.r.t. all phases of the BPM lifecycle. First, we introduce a CPS workflow notation that supports the modelling of the interaction of complex sensors, actuators, humans, dynamic services and WfMSes on the business process level. In addition, the effects of the workflow execution can be specified in the form of goals defining success and error criteria for the execution of individual process steps. Along with that, we introduce the notion of Cyber-physical Consistency. Following, we present a system architecture for a corresponding WfMS (PROtEUS) to execute the modelled processes-also in distributed execution settings and with a focus on interactive process management. Subsequently, the integration of a cyber-physical feedback loop to increase resilience of the process execution at runtime is discussed. Within this MAPE-K loop, sensor and context data are related to the effects of the process execution, deviations from expected behaviour are detected, and compensations are planned and executed. The execution of this feedback loop can be scaled depending on the required level of precision and consistency. Our implementation of the MAPE-K loop proves to be a general framework for adding self-* capabilities to WfMSes. The evaluation of our concepts within a smart home case study shows expected behaviour, reasonable execution times, reduced error rates and high coverage of the identified requirements, which makes our CPS~WfMS a suitable system for introducing workflows on top of systems, devices, things and applications of CPS.:1. Introduction 15 1.1. Motivation 15 1.2. Research Issues 17 1.3. Scope & Contributions 19 1.4. Structure of the Thesis 20 2. Workflows and Cyber-physical Systems 21 2.1. Introduction 21 2.2. Two Motivating Examples 21 2.3. Business Process Management and Workflow Technologies 23 2.4. Cyber-physical Systems 31 2.5. Workflows in CPS 38 2.6. Requirements 42 3. Related Work 45 3.1. Introduction 45 3.2. Existing BPM Systems in Industry and Academia 45 3.3. Modelling of CPS Workflows 49 3.4. CPS Workflow Systems 53 3.5. Cyber-physical Synchronization 58 3.6. Self-* for BPM Systems 63 3.7. Retrofitting Frameworks for WfMSes 69 3.8. Conclusion & Deficits 71 4. Modelling of Cyber-physical Workflows with Consistency Style Sheets 75 4.1. Introduction 75 4.2. Workflow Metamodel 76 4.3. Knowledge Base 87 4.4. Dynamic Services 92 4.5. CPS-related Workflow Effects 94 4.6. Cyber-physical Consistency 100 4.7. Consistency Style Sheets 105 4.8. Tools for Modelling of CPS Workflows 106 4.9. Compatibility with Existing Business Process Notations 111 5. Architecture of a WfMS for Distributed CPS Workflows 115 5.1. Introduction 115 5.2. PROtEUS Process Execution System 116 5.3. Internet of Things Middleware 124 5.4. Dynamic Service Selection via Semantic Access Layer 125 5.5. Process Distribution 126 5.6. Ubiquitous Human Interaction 130 5.7. Towards a CPS WfMS Reference Architecture for Other Domains 137 6. Scalable Execution of Self-managed CPS Workflows 141 6.1. Introduction 141 6.2. MAPE-K Control Loops for Autonomous Workflows 141 6.3. Feedback Loop for Cyber-physical Consistency 148 6.4. Feedback Loop for Distributed Workflows 152 6.5. Consistency Levels, Scalability and Scalable Consistency 157 6.6. Self-managed Workflows 158 6.7. Adaptations and Meta-adaptations 159 6.8. Multiple Feedback Loops and Process Instances 160 6.9. Transactions and ACID for CPS Workflows 161 6.10. Runtime View on Cyber-physical Synchronization for Workflows 162 6.11. Applicability of Workflow Feedback Loops to other CPS Domains 164 6.12. A Retrofitting Framework for Self-managed CPS WfMSes 165 7. Evaluation 171 7.1. Introduction 171 7.2. Hardware and Software 171 7.3. PROtEUS Base System 174 7.4. PROtEUS with Feedback Service 182 7.5. Feedback Service with Legacy WfMSes 213 7.6. Qualitative Discussion of Requirements and Additional CPS Aspects 217 7.7. Comparison with Related Work 232 7.8. Conclusion 234 8. Summary and Future Work 237 8.1. Summary and Conclusion 237 8.2. Advances of this Thesis 240 8.3. Contributions to the Research Area 242 8.4. Relevance 243 8.5. Open Questions 245 8.6. Future Work 247 Bibliography 249 Acronyms 277 List of Figures 281 List of Tables 285 List of Listings 287 Appendices 28

Adaptive Mechanisms for Mobile Spatio-Temporal Applications

Mobile spatio-temporal applications play a key role in many mission critical fields, including Business Intelligence, Traffic Management and Disaster Management. They are characterized by high data volume, velocity and large and variable number of mobile users. The design and implementation of these applications should not only consider this variablility, but also support other quality requirements such as performance and cost. In this thesis we propose an architecture for mobile spatio-temporal applications, which enables multiple angles of adaptivity. We also introduce a two-level adaptation mechanism that ensures system performance while facilitating scalability and context-aware adaptivity. We validate the architecture and adaptation mechanisms by implementing a road quality assessment mobile application as a use case and by performing a series of experiments on cloud environment. We show that our proposed architecture can adapt at runtime and maintain service level objectives while offering cost-efficiency and robustness

Intensional Cyberforensics

This work focuses on the application of intensional logic to cyberforensic analysis and its benefits and difficulties are compared with the finite-state-automata approach. This work extends the use of the intensional programming paradigm to the modeling and implementation of a cyberforensics investigation process with backtracing of event reconstruction, in which evidence is modeled by multidimensional hierarchical contexts, and proofs or disproofs of claims are undertaken in an eductive manner of evaluation. This approach is a practical, context-aware improvement over the finite state automata (FSA) approach we have seen in previous work. As a base implementation language model, we use in this approach a new dialect of the Lucid programming language, called Forensic Lucid, and we focus on defining hierarchical contexts based on intensional logic for the distributed evaluation of cyberforensic expressions. We also augment the work with credibility factors surrounding digital evidence and witness accounts, which have not been previously modeled. The Forensic Lucid programming language, used for this intensional cyberforensic analysis, formally presented through its syntax and operational semantics. In large part, the language is based on its predecessor and codecessor Lucid dialects, such as GIPL, Indexical Lucid, Lucx, Objective Lucid, and JOOIP bound by the underlying intensional programming paradigm.Comment: 412 pages, 94 figures, 18 tables, 19 algorithms and listings; PhD thesis; v2 corrects some typos and refs; also available on Spectrum at http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977460

Ami-deu : un cadre sémantique pour des applications adaptables dans des environnements intelligents

Cette thèse vise à étendre l’utilisation de l'Internet des objets (IdO) en facilitant le développement d’applications par des personnes non experts en développement logiciel. La thèse propose une nouvelle approche pour augmenter la sémantique des applications d’IdO et l’implication des experts du domaine dans le développement d’applications sensibles au contexte. Notre approche permet de gérer le contexte changeant de l’environnement et de générer des applications qui s’exécutent dans plusieurs environnements intelligents pour fournir des actions requises dans divers contextes. Notre approche est mise en œuvre dans un cadriciel (AmI-DEU) qui inclut les composants pour le développement d’applications IdO. AmI-DEU intègre les services d’environnement, favorise l’interaction de l’utilisateur et fournit les moyens de représenter le domaine d’application, le profil de l’utilisateur et les intentions de l’utilisateur. Le cadriciel permet la définition d’applications IoT avec une intention d’activité autodécrite qui contient les connaissances requises pour réaliser l’activité. Ensuite, le cadriciel génère Intention as a Context (IaaC), qui comprend une intention d’activité autodécrite avec des connaissances colligées à évaluer pour une meilleure adaptation dans des environnements intelligents. La sémantique de l’AmI-DEU est basée sur celle du ContextAA (Context-Aware Agents) – une plateforme pour fournir une connaissance du contexte dans plusieurs environnements. Le cadriciel effectue une compilation des connaissances par des règles et l'appariement sémantique pour produire des applications IdO autonomes capables de s’exécuter en ContextAA. AmI- DEU inclut également un outil de développement visuel pour le développement et le déploiement rapide d'applications sur ContextAA. L'interface graphique d’AmI-DEU adopte la métaphore du flux avec des aides visuelles pour simplifier le développement d'applications en permettant des définitions de règles étape par étape. Dans le cadre de l’expérimentation, AmI-DEU comprend un banc d’essai pour le développement d’applications IdO. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent une optimisation sémantique potentielle des ressources pour les applications IoT dynamiques dans les maisons intelligentes et les villes intelligentes. Notre approche favorise l'adoption de la technologie pour améliorer le bienêtre et la qualité de vie des personnes. Cette thèse se termine par des orientations de recherche que le cadriciel AmI-DEU dévoile pour réaliser des environnements intelligents omniprésents fournissant des adaptations appropriées pour soutenir les intentions des personnes.Abstract: This thesis aims at expanding the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) by facilitating the development of applications by people who are not experts in software development. The thesis proposes a new approach to augment IoT applications’ semantics and domain expert involvement in context-aware application development. Our approach enables us to manage the changing environment context and generate applications that run in multiple smart environments to provide required actions in diverse settings. Our approach is implemented in a framework (AmI-DEU) that includes the components for IoT application development. AmI- DEU integrates environment services, promotes end-user interaction, and provides the means to represent the application domain, end-user profile, and end-user intentions. The framework enables the definition of IoT applications with a self-described activity intention that contains the required knowledge to achieve the activity. Then, the framework generates Intention as a Context (IaaC), which includes a self-described activity intention with compiled knowledge to be assessed for augmented adaptations in smart environments. AmI-DEU framework semantics adopts ContextAA (Context-Aware Agents) – a platform to provide context-awareness in multiple environments. The framework performs a knowledge compilation by rules and semantic matching to produce autonomic IoT applications to run in ContextAA. AmI-DEU also includes a visual tool for quick application development and deployment to ContextAA. The AmI-DEU GUI adopts the flow metaphor with visual aids to simplify developing applications by allowing step-by-step rule definitions. As part of the experimentation, AmI-DEU includes a testbed for IoT application development. Experimental results show a potential semantic optimization for dynamic IoT applications in smart homes and smart cities. Our approach promotes technology adoption to improve people’s well-being and quality of life. This thesis concludes with research directions that the AmI-DEU framework uncovers to achieve pervasive smart environments providing suitable adaptations to support people’s intentions

Participative Urban Health and Healthy Aging in the Age of AI

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2022, held in Paris, France, in June 2022. The 15 full papers and 10 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. They cover topics such as design, development, deployment, and evaluation of AI for health, smart urban environments, assistive technologies, chronic disease management, and coaching and health telematics systems

A paradigm of an interaction context-aware pervasive multimodal multimedia computing system

Communication is a very important aspect of human life; it is communication that helps human beings to connect with each other as individuals and as independent groups. Communication is the fulcrum that drives all human developments in all fields. In informatics, one of the main purposes of the existence of computer is information dissemination – to be able to send and receive information. Humans are quite successful in conveying ideas to one another, and reacting appropriately. This is due to the fact that we share the richness of the language, have a common understanding of how things work and an implicit understanding of everyday situations. When humans communicate with humans, they comprehend the information that is apparent to the current situation, or context, hence increasing the conversational bandwidth. This ability to convey ideas, however, does not transfer when humans interact with computers. On its own, computers do not understand our language, do not understand how the world works and cannot sense information about the current situation. In a typical computing set-up where we have an impoverished typical mechanism for providing computer with information using mouse, keyboard and screen, the end result is we explicitly provide information to computers, producing an effect that is contrary to the promise of transparency and calm technology in Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing (Weiser 1991; Weiser and Brown 1996). To reverse this trend, it is imperative that we researchers find ways that will enable computers to have access to context. It is through context-awareness that we can increase the richness of communication in human-computer interaction, through which we can reap the most likely benefit of more useful computational services. Context is a subjective idea as demonstrated by the state-of-the art in which each researcher has his own understanding of the term, which continues to evolve nonetheless. The acquisition of contextual information is essential but it is the end user, however, that will have the final say as to whether the envisioned context is correctly captured/acquired or not. Current literature informs us that some contextual information is already predefined by some researchers from the very beginning – this is correct if the application domain is fixed but is incorrect if we infer that a typical user does different computing tasks on different occasions. With the aim of coming up with more conclusive and inclusive design, we conjecture that what contextual information should be left to the judgment of the end user who is the one that has the knowledge determine which information is important to him and which is not. This leads us to the concept of incremental acquisition of context where context parameters are added, modified or deleted one context parameter at a time. In conjunction with our idea of inclusive context, we broaden the notion of context that it has become context of interaction. Interaction context is the term that is used to refer to the collective context of the user (i.e. user context), of his working environment (i.e. environmental context) and of his computing system (i.e. system context). Logically and mathematically, each of these interaction context elements – user context, environment context and system context – is composed of various parameters that describe the state of the user, of his workplace and his computing resources as he undertakes an activity in accomplishing his computing task, and each of these parameters may evolve over time. For example, user location is a user context parameter and its value will evolve as the user moves from one place to another. The same can be said about noise level as an environment context parameter; its value evolves over time. The same can be said with available bandwidth that continuously evolves which we consider as a system context parameter. To realize the incremental definition of incremental context, we have developed a tool called the virtual machine for incremental interaction context. This tool can be used to add, modify and delete a context parameter on one hand and determine the sensor-based context (i.e. context that is based on parameters whose values are obtained from raw data supplied by sensors) on the other. In order to obtain the full benefit of the richness of interaction context with regards to communication in human-machine interaction, the modality of interaction should not be limited to the traditional use of mouse-keyboard-screen alone. Multimodality allows for a much wider range of modes and forms of communication, selected and adapted to suit the given user’s context of interaction, by which the end user can transmit data to the computer and computer can respond or yield results to the user’s queries. In multimodal communication, the weaknesses of one mode of interaction, with regards to its suitability to a given situation, is compensated by replacing it with another mode of communication that is more suitable to the situation. For example, when the environment becomes disturbingly noisy, using voice may not be the ideal mode to input data; instead, the user may opt for transmitting text or visual information. Multimodality also promotes inclusive informatics as those with a permanent or temporary disability are given the opportunity to use and benefit from information technology advancement. For example, the work on presentation of mathematical expressions to visually-impaired users (Awdé 2009) would not have been made possible without multimodality. With mobile computing within our midst coupled with wireless communication that allows access to information and services, pervasive and adaptive multimodality is more than ever apt to enrich communication in human-computer interaction and in providing the most suitable modes for data input and output in relation to the evolving interaction context. A look back at the state of the art informs us that a great amount of effort was expended in finding the definition of context, in the acquisition of context, in the dissemination of context and the exploitation of context within a system that has a fixed domain of application (e.g. healthcare, education, etc.). Also, another close look tells us that much research efforts on ubiquitous computing were devoted to various application domains (e.g. identifying the user whereabouts, identifying services and tools, etc.) but there is rarely, if ever, an effort made to make multimodality pervasive and accessible to various user situations. In this regard, we come up with a research work that will provide for the missing link. Our work – the paradigm of an interaction context-sensitive pervasive multimodal multimedia computing system is an architectural design that exhibits adaptability to a much larger context called interaction context. It is intelligent and pervasive, meaning it is functional even when the end user is stationary or on the go. It is conceived with two purposes in mind. First, given an instance of interaction context, one which evolves over time, our system determines the optimal modalities that suit such interaction context. By optimal, we mean a selection decision on appropriate multimodality based on the given interaction context, available media devices that support the modalities and user preferences. We designed a mechanism (i.e. a paradigm) that will do this task and simulated its functionality with success. This mechanism employs machine learning (Mitchell 1997; Alpaydin 2004; Hina, Tadj et al. 2006) and uses case-based reasoning with supervised learning (Kolodner 1993; Lajmi, Ghedira et al. 2007). An input to this decision-making component is an instance of interaction context and its output is the optimal modality and its associated media devices that are for activation. This mechanism is continuously monitoring the user’s context of interaction and on behalf of the user continuously adapts accordingly. This adaptation is through dynamic reconfiguration of the pervasive multimodal system’s architecture. Second, given an instance of interaction context and the user’s task and preferences, we designed a mechanism that allows the automatic selection of user’s applications, the preferred suppliers to these applications and the preferred quality of service (QoS) dimensions’ configurations of these suppliers. This mechanism does its task in consultation with computing resources, sensing the available suppliers and possible configuration restrictions within the given computing set-up. Apart from the above-mentioned mechanisms, we also formulated scenarios as to how a computing system must provide the user interface given that we have already identified the optimal modalities that suit the user’s context of interaction. We present possible configurations of unimodal and bimodal interfaces based on the given interaction context as well as user preferences. Our work is different from previous work in that while other systems capture, disseminate and consume context to suit the preferred domain of application, ours captures the interaction context and reconfigures its architecture dynamically in generic fashion in order that the user could continue working on his task anytime, anywhere he wishes regardless of the application domain the user wishes to undertake. In effect, the system that we have designed along with all of its mechanisms, being generic in design, can be adapted or integrated with ease or with very little modification into various computing systems of various domains of applications. Simulations and mathematical formulations were provided to support our ideas and concepts related to the design of the paradigm. An actual program in Java was developed to support our concept of a virtual machine for incremental interaction context

A formal architecture-centric and model driven approach for the engineering of science gateways

From n-Tier client/server applications, to more complex academic Grids, or even the most recent and promising industrial Clouds, the last decade has witnessed significant developments in distributed computing. In spite of this conceptual heterogeneity, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) seems to have emerged as the common and underlying abstraction paradigm, even though different standards and technologies are applied across application domains. Suitable access to data and algorithms resident in SOAs via so-called ‘Science Gateways’ has thus become a pressing need in order to realize the benefits of distributed computing infrastructures.In an attempt to inform service-oriented systems design and developments in Grid-based biomedical research infrastructures, the applicant has consolidated work from three complementary experiences in European projects, which have developed and deployed large-scale production quality infrastructures and more recently Science Gateways to support research in breast cancer, pediatric diseases and neurodegenerative pathologies respectively. In analyzing the requirements from these biomedical applications the applicant was able to elaborate on commonly faced issues in Grid development and deployment, while proposing an adapted and extensible engineering framework. Grids implement a number of protocols, applications, standards and attempt to virtualize and harmonize accesses to them. Most Grid implementations therefore are instantiated as superposed software layers, often resulting in a low quality of services and quality of applications, thus making design and development increasingly complex, and rendering classical software engineering approaches unsuitable for Grid developments.The applicant proposes the application of a formal Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to service-oriented developments, making it possible to define Grid-based architectures and Science Gateways that satisfy quality of service requirements, execution platform and distribution criteria at design time. An novel investigation is thus presented on the applicability of the resulting grid MDE (gMDE) to specific examples and conclusions are drawn on the benefits of this approach and its possible application to other areas, in particular that of Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) interoperability, Science Gateways and Cloud architectures developments