Policy Conflicts in Home Care Systems

Technology to support care at home is a promising alternative to traditional approaches. However, home care systems present significant technical challenges. For example, it is difficult to make such systems flexible, adaptable, and controllable by users. The authors have created a prototype system that uses policy-based management of home care services. Conflict detection and resolution for home care policies have been investigated. We identify three types of conflicts in policy-based home care systems: conflicts that result from apparently separate triggers, conflicts among policies of multiple stakeholders, and conflicts resulting from apparently unrelated actions. We systematically analyse the types of policy conflicts, and propose solutions to enhance our existing policy language and policy system to tackle these conflicts. The enhanced solutions are illustrated through examples

Teleo-Reactive policies for managing human-centric pervasive services.

Event-Condition-Action (ECA) policies are often used to manage various aspects of adaptation and execution of pervasive systems. Such policies are well suited for services where: 1) given actions are reliably executed when they are requested, 2) there is no priority ordering amongst multiple available actions, and 3) execution is instantaneous with respect to the validity of conditions under which they were initiated. However, for a pervasive service that integrates human agents and human activities, these assumptions do not generally hold. Humans may misbehave by postponing the execution of certain actions or ignoring them all together. Performing an action may take a long time so that the action is no longer needed or more important actions may need to be executed. Managing such behaviours through ECA policies is complex and difficult to implement. This paper introduces a new management policy type, called a Teleo-Reactive policy, whose semantics are based on continuous monitoring of the environment and prioritising available actions. The semantics result in more flexible and concise formulation of management policies for human-centric pervasive services. We demonstrate how these policies can be applied in a real-world use case scenario set in a nursing home and describe the underlying implementation based on the Androids Java platform. © 2010 IEEE

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

An Event-Based Coordination Model for Context-Aware Applications

International audienceContext-aware applications adapt their behavior depending on changes in their environment context. Programming such applications in a modular way requires to modularize the global context into more specific contexts and attach specific behavior to these contexts. This is reminiscent of aspects and has led to the notion of context-aware aspects. This paper revisits this notion of context-aware aspects in the light of previous work on concurrent event-based aspect-oriented programming (CEAOP). It shows how CEAOP can be extended in a seamless way in order to define a model for the coordination of concurrent adaptation rules with explicit contexts. This makes it possible to reason about the compositions of such rules. The model is concretized into a prototypical modeling language

A hierarchical distributed control model for coordinating intelligent systems

A hierarchical distributed control (HDC) model for coordinating cooperative problem-solving among intelligent systems is described. The model was implemented using SOCIAL, an innovative object-oriented tool for integrating heterogeneous, distributed software systems. SOCIAL embeds applications in 'wrapper' objects called Agents, which supply predefined capabilities for distributed communication, control, data specification, and translation. The HDC model is realized in SOCIAL as a 'Manager'Agent that coordinates interactions among application Agents. The HDC Manager: indexes the capabilities of application Agents; routes request messages to suitable server Agents; and stores results in a commonly accessible 'Bulletin-Board'. This centralized control model is illustrated in a fault diagnosis application for launch operations support of the Space Shuttle fleet at NASA, Kennedy Space Center

OWL-POLAR : semantic policies for agent reasoning

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OWL-POLAR : A Framework for Semantic Policy Representation and Reasoning

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