UBIDEV: a homogeneous service framework for pervasive computing environments

This dissertation studies the heterogeneity problem of pervasive computing system from the viewpoint of an infrastructure aiming to provide a service-oriented application model. From Distributed System passing through mobile computing, pervasive computing is presented as a step forward in ubiquitous availability of services and proliferation of interacting autonomous entities. To better understand the problems related to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of pervasive computing environments, we need to analyze the structure of a pervasive computing system from its physical and service dimension. The physical dimension describes the physical environment together wit the technology infrastructure that characterizes the interactions and the relations within the environment; the service dimension represents the services (being them software or not) the environment is able to provide [Nor99]. To better separate the constrains and the functionalities of a pervasive computing system, this dissertation classifies it in terms of resources, context, classification, services, coordination and application. UBIDEV, as the key result of this dissertation, introduces a unified model helping the design and the implementation of applications for heterogeneous and dynamic environments. This model is composed of the following concepts: • Resource: all elements of the environment that are manipulated by the application, they are the atomic abstraction unit of the model. • Context: all information coming from the environment that is used by the application to adapts its behavior. Context contains resources and services and defines their role in the application. • Classification: the environment is classified according to the application ontology in order to ground the generic conceptual model of the application to the specific environment. It defines the basic semantic level of interoperability. • Service: the functionalities supported by the system; each service manipulates one or more resources. Applications are defined as a coordination and adaptation of services. • Coordination: all aspects related to service composition and execution as well as the use of the contextual information are captured by the coordination concept. • Application Ontology: represents the viewpoint of the application on the specific context; it defines the high level semantic of resources, services and context. Applying the design paradigm proposed by UBIDEV, allows to describe applications according to a Service Oriented Architecture[Bie02], and to focus on application functionalities rather than their relations with the physical devices. Keywords: pervasive computing, homogenous environment, service-oriented, heterogeneity problem, coordination model, context model, resource management, service management, application interfaces, ontology, semantic services, interaction logic, description logic.Questa dissertazione studia il problema della eterogeneit`a nei sistemi pervasivi proponendo una infrastruttura basata su un modello orientato ai servizi. I sistemi pervasivi sono presentati come un’evoluzione naturale dei sistemi distribuiti, passando attraverso mobile computing, grazie ad una disponibilit`a ubiqua di servizi (sempre, ovunque ed in qualunque modo) e ad loro e con l’ambiente stesso. Al fine di meglio comprendere i problemi legati allintrinseca eterogeneit`a dei sistemi pervasivi, dobbiamo prima descrivere la struttura fondamentale di questi sistemi classificandoli attraverso la loro dimensione fisica e quella dei loro servizi. La dimensione fisica descrive l’ambiente fisico e tutti i dispositivi che fanno parte del contesto della applicazione. La dimensione dei servizi descrive le funzionalit`a (siano esse software o no) che l’ambiente `e in grado di fornire [Nor99]. I sistemi pervasivi vengono cos`ı classificati attraverso una metrica pi `u formale del tipo risorse, contesto, servizi, coordinazione ed applicazione. UBIDEV, come risultato di questa dissertazione, introduce un modello uniforme per la descrizione e lo sviluppo di applicazioni in ambienti dinamici ed eterogenei. Il modello `e composto dai seguenti concetti di base: • Risorse: gli elementi dell’ambiente fisico che fanno parte del modello dellapplicazione. Questi rappresentano l’unit`a di astrazione atomica di tutto il modello UBIDEV. • Contesto: le informazioni sullo stato dell’ambiente che il sistema utilizza per adattare il comportamento dell’applicazione. Il contesto include informazioni legate alle risorse, ai servizi ed alle relazioni che li legano. • Classificazione: l’ambiente viene classificato sulla base di una ontologia che rappresenta il punto di accordo a cui tutti i moduli di sistema fanno riferimento. Questa classificazione rappresenta il modello concettuale dell’applicazione che si riflette sull’intero ambiente. Si definisce cos`ı la semantica di base per tutto il sistema. • Servizi: le funzionalit`a che il sistema `e in grado di fornire; ogni servizio `e descritto in termini di trasformazione di una o pi `u risorse. Le applicazioni sono cos`ı definite in termini di cooperazione tra servizi autonomi. • Coordinazione: tutti gli aspetti legati alla composizione ed alla esecuzione di servizi cos`ı come l’elaborazione dell’informazione contestuale. • Ontologia dell’Applicazione: rappresenta il punto di vista dell’applicazione; definisce la semantica delle risorse, dei servizi e dell’informazione contestuale. Applicando il paradigma proposto da UBIDEV, si possono descrivere applicazioni in accordo con un modello Service-oriented [Bie02] ed, al tempo stesso, ridurre l’applicazione stessa alle sue funzionalit`a di alto livello senza intervenire troppo su come queste funzionalit` a devono essere realizzate dalle singole componenti fisiche

Off the Shelf Cloud Robotics for the Smart Home: Empowering a Wireless Robot through Cloud Computing

In this paper, we explore the possibilities offered by the integration of home automation systems and service robots. In particular, we examine how advanced computationally expensive services can be provided by using a cloud computing approach to overcome the limitations of the hardware available at the user’s home. To this end, we integrate two wireless low-cost, off-the-shelf systems in this work, namely, the service robot Rovio and the home automation system Z-wave. Cloud computing is used to enhance the capabilities of these systems so that advanced sensing and interaction services based on image processing and voice recognition can be offered.Ministerio de Economía TEC2016-80242-PJunta de Andalucía P11-TEP-812

Bridging ROS for Heterogeneous Integration in Mobile Robot Systems

We investigate the difficulty of integrating disparate, heterogeneous systems which have not been designed to work together. Such difficulties may arise from differences in communication protocols or data formats, making an in- tegration effort largely manual and labor intensive. The investigation is done in the context of integrating two different robot systems, one mobile platform running ROS (Robot Operating System) and one stationary two-armed ABB robot. The thesis consists of two parts. First, existing solutions to this problem (or parts of it) are examined and evaluated for their applicability. After no suitable solution is found, a tool is then created which solves the problem of integrating non-ROS compatible devices with a ROS system. The presented tool is a program that generates modular bridging nodes between ROS and other systems. Finally, the tool proves its value in the integration of two different robots, where one system also receives some additional changes for practical reasons

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL

Development of a Proactive Fault Diagnosis for Critical System

Large-scale network environments, such as the Internet, are characterized by the presence of various devices connected at various remote locations. There is a scenario of main office connected to different branch offices in another town and cities, with the presence of central administrative system at the main office. Any problem at branches is reported to the main office, due to availability of enough resources there. However, few support tools have been developed to allow the administrators at the central office to remotely control and monitor the computers at the branches. Even, in local area network environment, diagnosing the computers on the network is always a big problem for the administrator, as he/she moves from one computer to another, running the diagnostic program and collecting report for each machine tested. This is strenuous and time consuming. To help address these problems, I have employed the concept of mobile agent to design an architecture that can remotely perform various checks and tests on computers on network, and report its findings to the server administrator as central location. This architecture was implemented with Java, using Jini lookup service to establish communication between the computers. The agent tasks were implemented in C programming language. The result of this research work shows that the use of mobile agent for remote maintenance of computers on network was found to provide an improved, efficient, and dynamic diagnostic management system. All the same, it has proven to be a substantive contributor to efficient network management

A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factors—network bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed

Net.Sense

Net.sense will server as a proof-of-concept of a new type of network management system, using biological models and statistical principles to address scalability, predictability, and reliability issues associated with managing the highly complex computer systems that we as a society have come to depend on

Industrial Robot Programming and UPnP Services Orchestration for the Automation of Factories

The integration of equipment and other devices built into industrial robot cells with modern Ethernet interface technologies and low‐cost mass produced devices (such as vision systems, laser scanners, force torque‐sensors, PLCs and PDAs etc.) enables integrators to offer more powerful and smarter solutions. Nevertheless, the programming of all these devices efficiently requires very specific knowledge about them, such as their hardware architectures and specific programming languages as well as details about the system¿s low level communication protocols. To address these issues, this paper describes and analyses the Plug‐and‐Play architecture. This is one of the most interesting service‐oriented architectures (SOAs) available, which exhibits characteristics that are well adapted to industrial robotics cells. To validate their programming features and applicability, a test bed was specially designed. This provides a new graphical service orchestration which was implemented using Workflow Foundation 4 of .NET. The obtained results allowed us to verify that the use of integration schemes based on SOAs reduces the system integration time and is better adapted to industrial robotic cell system integrators.The authors wish to express their gratitude to the Plan Nacional de I+D (FEDER-CICYT, Spanish Government) and to the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain) for the financing of this work, which was made under the research projects DPI2010-20814-C02-02, DPI2011-28507-C02-01 and PAID/2011/039. In addition, they also want to acknowledge the assistance of Elena Ruiz Gomez for her help in the translation of the article.Valera Fernández, Á.; Gómez Moreno, J.; Sánchez Salmerón, AJ.; Ricolfe Viala, C.; Zotovic Stanisic, R.; Vallés Miquel, M. (2012). Industrial Robot Programming and UPnP Services Orchestration for the Automation of Factories. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems. 9:1-11. doi:10.5772/51373S1119Ahn, S., Lee, J., Lim, K., Ko, H., Kwon, Y., & Kim, H. (2006). UPnP SDK for Robot Development. 2006 SICE-ICASE International Joint Conference. doi:10.1109/sice.2006.315791Ahn, S., Lee, J., Lim, K., Ko, H., Kwon, Y., & Kim, H. (2006). Requirements to UPnP for Robot Middleware. 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. doi:10.1109/iros.2006.282262Kelleher, C., & Pausch, R. (2005). Lowering the barriers to programming. ACM Computing Surveys, 37(2), 83-137. doi:10.1145/1089733.1089734Candido, G., Colombo, A. W., Barata, J., & Jammes, F. (2011). Service-Oriented Infrastructure to Support the Deployment of Evolvable Production Systems. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 7(4), 759-767. doi:10.1109/tii.2011.2166779Crnkovic, I., Stafford, J., & Szyperski, C. (2011). Software Components beyond Programming: From Routines to Services. IEEE Software, 28(3), 22-26. doi:10.1109/ms.2011.62Cucinotta, T., Mancina, A., Anastasi, G. F., Lipari, G., Mangeruca, L., Checcozzo, R., & Rusina, F. (2009). A Real-Time Service-Oriented Architecture for Industrial Automation. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 5(3), 267-277. doi:10.1109/tii.2009.2027013Delamer, I. M., & Lastra, J. L. M. (2006). Service-Oriented Architecture for Distributed Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Electronics Production. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2(4), 281-294. doi:10.1109/tii.2006.885188Estevez-Ayres, I., Basanta-Val, P., Garcia-Valls, M., Fisteus, J. A., & Almeida, L. (2009). QoS-Aware Real-Time Composition Algorithms for Service-Based Applications. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 5(3), 278-288. doi:10.1109/tii.2009.2026422Foster, H., Uchitel, S., Magee, J., & Kramer, J. (2010). An Integrated Workbench for Model-Based Engineering of Service Compositions. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 3(2), 131-144. doi:10.1109/tsc.2010.19Chen, H.-M., Kazman, R., & Perry, O. (2010). From Software Architecture Analysis to Service Engineering: An Empirical Study of Methodology Development for Enterprise SOA Implementation. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 3(2), 145-160. doi:10.1109/tsc.2010.21Jaejoon Lee, & Kotonya, G. (2010). Combining Service-Orientation with Product Line Engineering. IEEE Software, 27(3), 35-41. doi:10.1109/ms.2010.30Jammes, F., & Smit, H. (2005). Service-Oriented Paradigms in Industrial Automation. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 1(1), 62-70. doi:10.1109/tii.2005.844419Juric, M. B., Kezmah, B., Hericko, M., Rozman, I., & Vezocnik, I. (2004). Java RMI, RMI tunneling and Web services comparison and performance analysis. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 39(5), 58. doi:10.1145/997140.997146Lewis, G., Morris, E., Simanta, S., & Smith, D. (2011). Service Orientation and Systems of Systems. IEEE Software, 28(1), 58-63. doi:10.1109/ms.2011.15Martin M., Grounds N.G., Antonio J.K., Crawford K. and Madden J. (2010). “Banker's Deadlock Avoidance Algorithm for Distributed Service-Oriented Architectures”, PDPTACSREA Press, pp. 43–50.Menasce, D., Gomaa, H., Malek, S., & Sousa, J. (2011). SASSY: A Framework for Self-Architecting Service-Oriented Systems. IEEE Software, 28(6), 78-85. doi:10.1109/ms.2011.22Remy, S. L., & Blake, M. B. (2011). Distributed Service-Oriented Robotics. IEEE Internet Computing, 15(2), 70-74. doi:10.1109/mic.2011.38Sasa, A., Juric, M. B., & Krisper, M. (2008). Service-Oriented Framework for Human Task Support and Automation. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 4(4), 292-302. doi:10.1109/tii.2008.2008641Unver, H. O. (2011). System Architectures Enabling Reconfigurable Laboratory-Automation Systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews), 41(6), 909-922. doi:10.1109/tsmcc.2011.2107552Veiga, G., Pires, J. N., & Nilsson, K. (2009). Experiments with service-oriented architectures for industrial robotic cells programming. Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 25(4-5), 746-755. doi:10.1016/j.rcim.2008.09.001Veiga, G., Pires, J. N., & Nilsson, K. (2007). ON THE USE OF SERVICE ORIENTED SOFTWARE PLATFORMS FOR INDUSTRIAL ROBOTIC CELLS. IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 40(3), 109-115. doi:10.3182/20070523-3-es-4908.00019WHITLEY, K. N. (1997). Visual Programming Languages and the Empirical Evidence For and Against. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 8(1), 109-142. doi:10.1006/jvlc.1996.0030Xu, L. D. (2011). Enterprise Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 7(4), 630-640. doi:10.1109/tii.2011.216715

USING EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY IN END-USER PROGRAMMING OF SMART SPACES WITH MOBILE DEVICES

A recent shift in computing paradigm from stand-alone microcomputers and mainframes towards entirely pervasivecomputing where billions of miniature, ubiquitous inter-connected computing elements weave themselves into thefabric of everyday life. Embedded systems run the computing devices hidden inside every object and appliance suchas cell phones, toys, handheld PDAs, cameras, microwave ovens, cars, airplanes, etc. These numerous, easilyaccessible devices connected to each other and to network infrastructure exhibit context-awareness of anenvironment in order to optimize their operation in that environment. In this paper, we examined embedded systemsin end-user programming of smart spaces with mobile devices. We designed and implemented a microcontrollerbasedsystem capable of monitoring and controlling the electronic appliances in a home from any location. Weadopted a task-driven computing approach of the composition of the semantic web. The end user uses thefunctionality of the networked devices in the home as semantic web services to arbitrarily form his request whichinvolves the typing of SMS through the user-friendly interface of a Java enabled mobile phone. An Arduinomicrocontroller for generating the timing and control signals programmed using Wiring language was used. TheGSM wireless technology was used for transmission and reception of the data. Our work addresses the problem ofenergy wastage and domestic accidents by enabling end-users to easily use their mobile devices to monitor andinstruct their home devices from any location over a wireless network.Keywords: Embedded Technology, Smart Spaces, End-User Programming, Mobile Devices, Pervasive Networkin