Coordinating services embedded everywhere via hierarchical planning

The spaces we live in are provided with different devices and technologies, such as sensors for recognising our presence. The aim of such spaces is to improve our comfort, productivity, and even reduce our energy bills. The problem with fulfilling the aim is that devices alone cannot do much to achieve such difficult goals. People would also have problems in manually searching for the best situation accomplishing their needs. A way to deal with this problem is to coordinate devices automatically. For example, our home can autonomously figure out that some lamps can be turned off because the living room has enough natural light and the activity we are currently doing requires a low light level. The benefits are improved comfort and a reasonable amount of energy saved. We therefore explore the possibilities of using a system based on automated planning. This planning produces a set of device services, such as turn off a lamp, that achieves a given goal. We use a method, called hierarchical planning, which enables us to organise the knowledge we have about spaces and devices in hierarchical forms. We show that planning is suitable for this kind of problems by using hierarchical planning to save energy in the Bernoulliborg building at the University of Groningen. The results show energy and money savings, and that people are satisfied with our system. We also improve the system and show that even more money can be saved without sacrificing the well-being of people if we can buy energy from several energy providers

Greening IT : How greener it can form a solid base for a low-carbon society

272 p.Libro ElectrónicoInformation Technology is responsible for approximately 2% of the world's emission of greenhouse gases. The IT sector itself contributes to these greenhouse gas emissions, through its massive consumption of energy - and therefore continuously exacerbates the problem. At the same time, however, the IT industry can provide the technological solutions we need to optimise resource use, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We call this Greening IT. This book looks into the great potential of greening society with IT - i.e. the potential of IT in transforming our societies into Low-Carbon societies. The book is the result of an internationally collaborative effort by a number of opinion leaders in the field of Greening IT. Tomado de http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8791936020The Greening of IT is a symptom of a much larger challenge for humankind - transitioning from economic childhood into maturity. Despite the emergence of large regional alliances such as the EC, humankind remains incredibly fragmented; and yet the need for global climate and energy policies is pressing. IT offers tantalizing technical solutions to our emissions and growth dilemma: it can grow greener and help with the greening of other industries. This book explores this potential.AcknowledgementsDisclosure1 Prologue2 Our Tools Will Not Save Us This Time - by Laurent Liscia3 Climate Change and the Low Carbon Society - by Irene N. Sobotta4 Why Green IT Is Hard - An Economic Perspective - by Rien Dijkstra5 Cloud Computing - by Adrian Sobotta6 Thin Client Computing - by Sean Whetstone7 Smart Grid - by Adrian Sobotta8 How IT Contributes to the Greening of the Grid - by Dr. GeorgeW. Arnold9 The Green IT Industry Ecosystem - by Ariane Rüdiger10 Out of The Box Ways IT Can Help to Preserve Nature and Reduce CO2 - by Flavio Souza11 From KPIs to the Business Case - Return on Investment on Green IT? - by Dominique C. Brack12 Computing Energy Efficiency - An Introduction - by Bianca Wirth13 A Future View: Biomimicry + Technology - by Bianca Wirth14 Greening Supply Chains - The Role of Information Technologies - by Hans Moonen15 EpilogueReferencesInde

The Functioning of Ecosystems

The ecosystems present a great diversity worldwide and use various functionalities according to ecologic regions. In this new context of variability and climatic changes, these ecosystems undergo notable modifications amplified by domestic uses of which it was subjected to. Indeed the ecosystems render diverse services to humanity from their composition and structure but the tolerable levels are unknown. The preservation of these ecosystemic services needs a clear understanding of their complexity. The role of the research is not only to characterise the ecosystems but also to clearly define the tolerable usage levels. Their characterisation proves to be important not only for the local populations that use it but also for the conservation of biodiversity. Hence, the measurement, management and protection of ecosystems need innovative and diverse methods. For all these reasons, the aim of this book is to bring out a general view on the biogeochemical cycles, the ecological imprints, the mathematical models and theories applicable to many situations

A Synthesis of Automated Planning and Model Predictive Control Techniques and its Use in Solving Urban Traffic Control Problem

Most desired applications for planning and scheduling typically have the characteristics of a continuous changing world. Unfortunately, traditional classical planning does not possess this characteristic. This drawback is because most real-world situations involve quantities and numeric values, which cannot be adequately represented in classical planning. Continuous planning in domains that are represented with rich notations is still a great challenge for AI. For instance, changes occurring due to fuel consumption, continuous movement, or environmental conditions may not be adequately modelled through instantaneous or even durative actions; rather these require modelling as continuously changing processes. The development of planning tools that can reason with domains involving continuous and complex numeric fluents would facilitate the integration of automated planning in the design and development of complex application models to solve real world problems. Traditional urban traffic control (UTC) approaches are still not very efficient during unforeseen situations such as road incidents when changes in traffic are requested in a short time interval. For such anomalies, we need systems that can plan and act effectively in order to restore an unexpected road traffic situation into a normal order. In the quest to improve reasoning with continuous process within the UTC domain, we investigate the role of Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach to planning in the presence of mixed discrete and continuous state variables within a UTC problem. We explore this control approach and show how it can be embedded into existing, modern AI Planning technology. This approach preserves the many advantages of the AI Planning approach, to do with domain independence through declarative modelling, and explicit reasoning while leveraging the capability of MPC to deal with continuous processes. We evaluate the possibility of reasoning with the knowledge of UTC structures to optimise traffic flow in situations where a given road within a network of roads becomes unavailable due to unexpected situations such as road accidents. We specify how to augment the standard AI planning engine with the incorporation of MPC techniques into the central reasoning process of a continuous domain. This approach effectively utilises the strengths of search-based and model-simulation-based methods. We create a representation that can be used to capture declaratively, the definitions of processes, actions, events, resources resumption and the structure of the environment in a UTC scenario. This representation is founded on world states modelled by mixed discrete and continuous state variables. We create a planner with a hybrid algorithm, called UTCPLAN that combines both AI planning and MPC approach to reason with traffic network and control traffic signal at junctions within the network. The experimental objective of minimising the number of vehicles in a queue is implemented to validate the applicability and effectiveness of the algorithm. We present an experimental evaluation showing that our approach can provide UTC plans in a reasonable time. The result also shows that the UTCPLAN approach can perform well in dealing with heavy traffic congestion problems, which might result from heavy traffic flow during rush hours

ECSCW 2013 Adjunct Proceedings The 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 21 - 25. September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus

This volume presents the adjunct proceedings of ECSCW 2013.While the proceedings published by Springer Verlag contains the core of the technical program, namely the full papers, the adjunct proceedings includes contributions on work in progress, workshops and master classes, demos and videos, the doctoral colloquium, and keynotes, thus indicating what our field may become in the future

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC