164 research outputs found
Data gathering approach in dense sensor networks
Sensor/actuator networks promised to extend automated monitoring and control into industrial processes. Avionic
system is one of the prominent technologies that can highly gain from dense sensor/actuator deployments. An
aircraft with smart sensing skin would fulfill the vision of affordability and environmental friendliness properties by
reducing the fuel consumption. Achieving these properties is possible by providing an approximate representation of
the air flow across the body of the aircraft and suppressing the detected aerodynamic drags. To the best of our
knowledge, getting an accurate representation of the physical entity is one of the most significant challenges that
still exists with dense sensor/actuator network. This paper offers an efficient way to acquire sensor readings from
very large sensor/actuator network that are located in a small area (dense network). It presents LIA algorithm, a
Linear Interpolation Algorithm that provides two important contributions. First, it demonstrates the effectiveness of
employing a transformation matrix to mimic the environmental behavior. Second, it renders a smart solution for
updating the previously defined matrix through a procedure called learning phase. Simulation results reveal that the
average relative error in LIA algorithm can be reduced by as much as 60% by exploiting transformation matrix
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Enabling Resilience in Cyber-Physical-Human Water Infrastructures
Rapid urbanization and growth in urban populations have forced community-scale infrastructures (e.g., water, power and natural gas distribution systems, and transportation networks) to operate at their limits. Aging (and failing) infrastructures around the world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to operational degradation, extreme weather, natural disasters and cyber attacks/failures. These trends have wide-ranging socioeconomic consequences and raise public safety concerns. In this thesis, we introduce the notion of cyber-physical-human infrastructures (CPHIs) - smart community-scale infrastructures that bridge technologies with physical infrastructures and people. CPHIs are highly dynamic stochastic systems characterized by complex physical models that exhibit regionwide variability and uncertainty under disruptions. Failures in these distributed settings tend to be difficult to predict and estimate, and expensive to repair. Real-time fault identification is crucial to ensure continuity of lifeline services to customers at adequate levels of quality. Emerging smart community technologies have the potential to transform our failing infrastructures into robust and resilient future CPHIs.In this thesis, we explore one such CPHI - community water infrastructures. Current urban water infrastructures, that are decades (sometimes over a 100 years) old, encompass diverse geophysical regimes. Water stress concerns include the scarcity of supply and an increase in demand due to urbanization. Deterioration and damage to the infrastructure can disrupt water service; contamination events can result in economic and public health consequences. Unfortunately, little investment has gone into modernizing this key lifeline.To enhance the resilience of water systems, we propose an integrated middleware framework for quick and accurate identification of failures in complex water networks that exhibit uncertain behavior. Our proposed approach integrates IoT-based sensing, domain-specific models and simulations with machine learning methods to identify failures (pipe breaks, contamination events). The composition of techniques results in cost-accuracy-latency tradeoffs in fault identification, inherent in CPHIs due to the constraints imposed by cyber components, physical mechanics and human operators. Three key resilience problems are addressed in this thesis; isolation of multiple faults under a small number of failures, state estimation of the water systems under extreme events such as earthquakes, and contaminant source identification in water networks using human-in-the-loop based sensing. By working with real world water agencies (WSSC, DC and LADWP, LA), we first develop an understanding of operations of water CPHI systems. We design and implement a sensor-simulation-data integration framework AquaSCALE, and apply it to localize multiple concurrent pipe failures. We use a mixture of infrastructure measurements (i.e., historical and live water pressure/flow), environmental data (i.e., weather) and human inputs (i.e., twitter feeds), combined and enhanced with the domain model and supervised learning techniques to locate multiple failures at fine levels of granularity (individual pipeline level) with detection time reduced by orders of magnitude (from hours/days to minutes). We next consider the resilience of water infrastructures under extreme events (i.e., earthquakes) - the challenge here is the lack of apriori knowledge and the increased number and severity of damages to infrastructures. We present a graphical model based approach for efficient online state estimation, where the offline graph factorization partitions a given network into disjoint subgraphs, and the belief propagation based inference is executed on-the-fly in a distributed manner on those subgraphs. Our proposed approach can isolate 80% broken pipes and 99% loss-of-service to end-users during an earthquake.Finally, we address issues of water quality - today this is a human-in-the-loop process where operators need to gather water samples for lab tests. We incorporate the necessary abstractions with event processing methods into a workflow, which iteratively selects and refines the set of potential failure points via human-driven grab sampling. Our approach utilizes Hidden Markov Model based representations for event inference, along with reinforcement learning methods for further refining event locations and reducing the cost of human efforts.The proposed techniques are integrated into a middleware architecture, which enables components to communicate/collaborate with one another. We validate our approaches through a prototype implementation with multiple real-world water networks, supply-demand patterns from water utilities and policies set by the U.S. EPA. While our focus here is on water infrastructures in a community, the developed end-to-end solution is applicable to other infrastructures and community services which operate in disruptive and resource-constrained environments
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An Anthology of Next-Generation WSNs and Transformative IoT Use-Cases
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm brought an ever-increasing dependence on low-power devices to collect sensor data and transmit that information to the cloud, placing greater demand on connectivity and lifespan. In response, rapid worldwide innovation demonstrates the trade-offs in processing, communication, and energy consumption with diverse approaches to low-power components, duty-cycle schemes, cost, and many other critical constraints for complex use-cases, such as track-and-trace (T&T). This work explores the central theme of low-power wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in the IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT). A collection of publications evolves through the theme, from an IoT literature review to enabling densely-scalable WSNs for logistics & asset management (LAM). Next, this research enhances the WSN design by leveraging wake-up radio (WUR) and energy harvesting (EH) to achieve battery-free operation. Lastly, this work presents WSNs to improve visibility and control of airflow/microclimate management in potentially transformative IIoT use-cases, such as data centers and agriculture
Extending Cyber-Physical Systems to Support Stakeholder Decisions Under Resource and User Constraints: Applications to Intelligent Infrastructure and Social Urban Systems
In recent years, rapid urbanization has imposed greater load demands on physical infrastructure while placing stressors (e.g., pollution, congestion, social inequity) on social systems. Despite these challenges, opportunities are emerging from the unprecedented proliferation of information technologies enabling ubiquitous sensing, cloud computing, and full-scale automation. Together, these advancements enable “intelligent” systems that promise to enhance the operation of the built environment. Even with these advancements, the ability of professionals to “sense for decisions” —data-driven decision processes based on sensed data that have quantifiable returns on investment—remains unrealized for an entire class of problems. In response, this dissertation builds a rigorous foundation enabling stakeholders to use sensor data to inform decisions in two applications: infrastructure asset management and community-engaged decision making.
This dissertation aligns sensing strategies with decisions governing infrastructure management by extending the role of reliability methods to quantify system performance. First, the reliability index is used as a scalar measure of the safety (i.e., failure probability) that is extracted from monitoring data to assess structural condition relative to a failure limit state. As an example, long-term data collected from a wireless sensing network (WSN) installed on the Harahan Bridge (Memphis, TN) is used in a reliability framework to track the fatigue life of critical eyebar assemblies. The proposed reliability-based SHM framework is then generalized to formally and more broadly link SHM data with condition ratings (CRs) because inspector-assigned CRs remain the primary starting point for asset management decisions made in practice today. While reliability methods historically quantify safety with respect to a single failure limit state, this work demonstrates that there exist measurable reliability index values associated with “lower” limit states below failure that more richly characterize structural performance and rationally map to CR scales. Consequently, monitoring data can be used to assign CRs based on quantitative information encompassing the measurable damage domain, as opposed to relying on visual inspection. This work reflects the first-ever SHM framework to explicitly map monitoring data to actionable decisions and is validated using a WSN on the Telegraph Road Bridge (TRB) (Monroe, MI).
A primary challenge faced by solar-powered WSNs is their stringent energy constraints. For decision-making processes relying on statistical estimation of performance, the utility of data should be considered to optimize the data collection process given these constraints. This dissertation proposes a novel stochastic data collection and transmission policy for WSNs that minimizes the variance of a measured process’ estimated parameters subject to constraints imposed by energy and data buffer sizes, stochastic models of energy and event arrivals, the value of measured data, and temporal death. Numerical results based on one-year of data collected from the TRB illustrate the gains achieved by implementing the optimal policy to obtain response data used to estimate the reliability index.
Finally, this dissertation extends the work performed in WSN and sense-for-decision frameworks by exploring their role in community-based decision making. This work poses societal engagement as a necessary entry point to urban sensing efforts because members of under-resourced communities are vulnerable to lack of access to data and information. A novel, low-power WSN architecture is presented that functions as a user-friendly sensing solution that communities can rapidly deploy. Applying this platform, transformative work to “democratize” data is proposed in which members of vulnerable communities collect data and generate insights that inform their decision-making strategies.PHDCivil EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162898/1/kaflanig_1.pd
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