Services interfaces for interoperability of signaling computer interlocking on borders

Technological developments in the field of railway signaling have allowed more and more flexibility in the management of rail traffic, especially with computer interlocking. However, differences in signaling principles from one country to another as well as differences in the structure of interlocking software and communication protocols depending on suppliers lead to interoperability difficulties at the borders between computer interlocking. Some deployed projects deal with interoperability issues regarding the communication of signaling information between the train and interlocking like the European rail traffic management system (ERTMS) project. Unfortunately, the interoperability between interlocking themselves is still not achieved. Some deployed projects deal with interoperability issues regarding the communication of signaling information between the train and interlocking like the ERTMS project. Unfortunately, the interoperability between interlocking themselves is still not achieved. This article draws up a proposed model for interfacing at the interlocking boundaries based on service-oriented architecture (SOA). In addition, to ensure the coupling of SOA services to the internal functions of the signaling computer interlocking, a distributed architecture of programmable logic controller according to the IEC 61499 standard is suggested

A Novel Method for Adaptive Control of Manufacturing Equipment in Cloud Environments

The ability to adaptively control manufacturing equipment, both in local and distributed environments, is becoming increasingly more important for many manufacturing companies. One important reason for this is that manufacturing companies are facing increasing levels of changes, variations and uncertainty, caused by both internal and external factors, which can negatively impact their performance. Frequently changing consumer requirements and market demands usually lead to variations in manufacturing quantities, product design and shorter product life-cycles. Variations in manufacturing capability and functionality, such as equipment breakdowns, missing/worn/broken tools and delays, also contribute to a high level of uncertainty. The result is unpredictable manufacturing system performance, with an increased number of unforeseen events occurring in these systems. Events which are difficult for traditional planning and control systems to satisfactorily manage. For manufacturing scenarios such as these, the use of real-time manufacturing information and intelligence is necessary to enable manufacturing activities to be performed according to actual manufacturing conditions and requirements, and not according to a pre-determined process plan. Therefore, there is a need for an event-driven control approach to facilitate adaptive decision-making and dynamic control capabilities. Another reason driving the move for adaptive control of manufacturing equipment is the trend of increasing globalization, which forces manufacturing industry to focus on more cost-effective manufacturing systems and collaboration within global supply chains and manufacturing networks. Cloud Manufacturing is evolving as a new manufacturing paradigm to match this trend, enabling the mutually advantageous sharing of resources, knowledge and information between distributed companies and manufacturing units. One of the crucial objectives for Cloud Manufacturing is the coordinated planning, control and execution of discrete manufacturing operations in collaborative and networked environments. Therefore, there is also a need that such an event-driven control approach supports the control of distributed manufacturing equipment. The aim of this research study is to define and verify a novel and comprehensive method for adaptive control of manufacturing equipment in cloud environments. The presented research follows the Design Science Research methodology. From a review of research literature, problems regarding adaptive manufacturing equipment control have been identified. A control approach, building on a structure of event-driven Manufacturing Feature Function Blocks, supported by an Information Framework, has been formulated. The Function Block structure is constructed to generate real-time control instructions, triggered by events from the manufacturing environment. The Information Framework uses the concept of Ontologies and The Semantic Web to enable description and matching of manufacturing resource capabilities and manufacturing task requests in distributed environments, e.g. within Cloud Manufacturing. The suggested control approach has been designed and instantiated, implemented as prototype systems for both local and distributed manufacturing scenarios, in both real and virtual applications. In these systems, event-driven Assembly Feature Function Blocks for adaptive control of robotic assembly tasks have been used to demonstrate the applicability of the control approach. The utility and performance of these prototype systems have been tested, verified and evaluated for different assembly scenarios. The proposed control approach has many promising characteristics for use within both local and distributed environments, such as cloud environments. The biggest advantage compared to traditional control is that the required control is created at run-time according to actual manufacturing conditions. The biggest obstacle for being applicable to its full extent is manufacturing equipment controlled by proprietary control systems, with native control languages. To take the full advantage of the IEC Function Block control approach, controllers which can interface, interpret and execute these Function Blocks directly, are necessary

Metodologías para el diseño de sistemas de control distribuido bajo el estándar IEC 61499 aplicados al control de procesos

167 p.Es evidente que en los próximos años gran parte de las tecnologías recogidas bajo el marco de la denominada Industria 4.0 tendrá un profundo impacto en todas las empresas y, entre ellas, las relacionadas con la explotación y producción de petróleo y gas. Sin embargo, la apresurada adopción de tecnologías de la información sin un conocimiento adecuado de las mismas y su aplicación a los diferentes aspectos de los sistemas de control de planta, sistema de planificación de recursos empresariales (Enterprise Resource Planning ¿ ERP) y sistemas orientados a la ejecución de la fabricación (Manufacturing Execution Systems ¿ MES) puede derivar en que las compañías de petróleo y gas automaticen sus sistemas industriales con un injustificado alto coste, de manera potencialmente peligrosa y propensa a errores. La automatización de bajo coste promueve arquitecturas de referencia rentables y nuevos enfoques de desarrollo para aumentar la flexibilidad y la eficiencia de las opera-ciones de producción en una planta industrial. Esto ha llevado a la adopción por parte este tipo de empresas de estándares de redes industriales para las comunicaciones a todos los niveles. En este sentido, OPC UA, además de permitir adherirse a las empresas a la iniciativa de la Industria 4.0, proporciona acceso local y remoto a la información de planta, facilitando un mecanismo reconocido de integración tanto horizontal como vertical de manera correcta, segura y eficiente. El objetivo principal de esta tesis doctoral es presentar una arquitectura abierta para la integración vertical basada en sistemas ciber-físicos de producción, configurados bajo la norma IEC 61499 y usando OPC UA, apta para su utilización en la fabricación flexible en la industria de petróleo y ga

Systematic Approaches for Telemedicine and Data Coordination for COVID-19 in Baja California, Mexico

Conference proceedings info: ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologies Raleigh, HI, United States, March 24-26, 2023 Pages 529-542We provide a model for systematic implementation of telemedicine within a large evaluation center for COVID-19 in the area of Baja California, Mexico. Our model is based on human-centric design factors and cross disciplinary collaborations for scalable data-driven enablement of smartphone, cellular, and video Teleconsul-tation technologies to link hospitals, clinics, and emergency medical services for point-of-care assessments of COVID testing, and for subsequent treatment and quar-antine decisions. A multidisciplinary team was rapidly created, in cooperation with different institutions, including: the Autonomous University of Baja California, the Ministry of Health, the Command, Communication and Computer Control Center of the Ministry of the State of Baja California (C4), Colleges of Medicine, and the College of Psychologists. Our objective is to provide information to the public and to evaluate COVID-19 in real time and to track, regional, municipal, and state-wide data in real time that informs supply chains and resource allocation with the anticipation of a surge in COVID-19 cases. RESUMEN Proporcionamos un modelo para la implementación sistemática de la telemedicina dentro de un gran centro de evaluación de COVID-19 en el área de Baja California, México. Nuestro modelo se basa en factores de diseño centrados en el ser humano y colaboraciones interdisciplinarias para la habilitación escalable basada en datos de tecnologías de teleconsulta de teléfonos inteligentes, celulares y video para vincular hospitales, clínicas y servicios médicos de emergencia para evaluaciones de COVID en el punto de atención. pruebas, y para el tratamiento posterior y decisiones de cuarentena. Rápidamente se creó un equipo multidisciplinario, en cooperación con diferentes instituciones, entre ellas: la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, la Secretaría de Salud, el Centro de Comando, Comunicaciones y Control Informático. de la Secretaría del Estado de Baja California (C4), Facultades de Medicina y Colegio de Psicólogos. Nuestro objetivo es proporcionar información al público y evaluar COVID-19 en tiempo real y rastrear datos regionales, municipales y estatales en tiempo real que informan las cadenas de suministro y la asignación de recursos con la anticipación de un aumento de COVID-19. 19 casos.ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3236-

Managing healthcare transformation towards P5 medicine (Published in Frontiers in Medicine)

Health and social care systems around the world are facing radical organizational, methodological and technological paradigm changes to meet the requirements for improving quality and safety of care as well as efficiency and efficacy of care processes. In this they’re trying to manage the challenges of ongoing demographic changes towards aging, multi-diseased societies, development of human resources, a health and social services consumerism, medical and biomedical progress, and exploding costs for health-related R&D as well as health services delivery. Furthermore, they intend to achieve sustainability of global health systems by transforming them towards intelligent, adaptive and proactive systems focusing on health and wellness with optimized quality and safety outcomes. The outcome is a transformed health and wellness ecosystem combining the approaches of translational medicine, 5P medicine (personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine) and digital health towards ubiquitous personalized health services realized independent of time and location. It considers individual health status, conditions, genetic and genomic dispositions in personal social, occupational, environmental and behavioural context, thus turning health and social care from reactive to proactive. This requires the advancement communication and cooperation among the business actors from different domains (disciplines) with different methodologies, terminologies/ontologies, education, skills and experiences from data level (data sharing) to concept/knowledge level (knowledge sharing). The challenge here is the understanding and the formal as well as consistent representation of the world of sciences and practices, i.e. of multidisciplinary and dynamic systems in variable context, for enabling mapping between the different disciplines, methodologies, perspectives, intentions, languages, etc. Based on a framework for dynamically, use-case-specifically and context aware representing multi-domain ecosystems including their development process, systems, models and artefacts can be consistently represented, harmonized and integrated. The response to that problem is the formal representation of health and social care ecosystems through an system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based and policy-driven model and framework, addressing all domains and development process views contributing to the system and context in question. Accordingly, this Research Topic would like to address this change towards 5P medicine. Specifically, areas of interest include, but are not limited: • A multidisciplinary approach to the transformation of health and social systems • Success factors for sustainable P5 ecosystems • AI and robotics in transformed health ecosystems • Transformed health ecosystems challenges for security, privacy and trust • Modelling digital health systems • Ethical challenges of personalized digital health • Knowledge representation and management of transformed health ecosystems Table of Contents: 04 Editorial: Managing healthcare transformation towards P5 medicine Bernd Blobel and Dipak Kalra 06 Transformation of Health and Social Care Systems—An Interdisciplinary Approach Toward a Foundational Architecture Bernd Blobel, Frank Oemig, Pekka Ruotsalainen and Diego M. Lopez 26 Transformed Health Ecosystems—Challenges for Security, Privacy, and Trust Pekka Ruotsalainen and Bernd Blobel 36 Success Factors for Scaling Up the Adoption of Digital Therapeutics Towards the Realization of P5 Medicine Alexandra Prodan, Lucas Deimel, Johannes Ahlqvist, Strahil Birov, Rainer Thiel, Meeri Toivanen, Zoi Kolitsi and Dipak Kalra 49 EU-Funded Telemedicine Projects – Assessment of, and Lessons Learned From, in the Light of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic Laura Paleari, Virginia Malini, Gabriella Paoli, Stefano Scillieri, Claudia Bighin, Bernd Blobel and Mauro Giacomini 60 A Review of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Transformed Health Ecosystems Kerstin Denecke and Claude R. Baudoin 73 Modeling digital health systems to foster interoperability Frank Oemig and Bernd Blobel 89 Challenges and solutions for transforming health ecosystems in low- and middle-income countries through artificial intelligence Diego M. López, Carolina Rico-Olarte, Bernd Blobel and Carol Hullin 111 Linguistic and ontological challenges of multiple domains contributing to transformed health ecosystems Markus Kreuzthaler, Mathias Brochhausen, Cilia Zayas, Bernd Blobel and Stefan Schulz 126 The ethical challenges of personalized digital health Els Maeckelberghe, Kinga Zdunek, Sara Marceglia, Bobbie Farsides and Michael Rigb

Exploring mixed reality in distributed collaborative learning environments

Society is moving rapidly towards a world, where technology enables people to exist in a blend of physical and virtual realities. In education, this vision involves technologies ranging from smart classrooms to e-learning, creating greater opportunities for distance learners, bringing the potential to change the fundamental nature of universities. However, to date, most online educational platforms have focused on conveying information rather than supporting collaborative physical activities which are common in university science and engineering laboratories. Moreover, even when online laboratory support is considered, such systems tend to be confined to the use of simulations or pre-recorded videos. The lack of support for online collaborative physical laboratory activities, is a serious shortcoming for distance learners and a significant challenge to educators and researchers. In working towards a solution to this challenge, this thesis presents an innovative mixed-reality framework (computational model, conceptual architecture and proof-of-concept implementation) that enables geographically dispersed learners to perform co-creative teamwork using a computer-based prototype comprising hardware and software components. Contributions from this work include a novel distributed computational model for synchronising physical objects and their 3D virtual representations, expanding the dual-reality paradigm from single linked pairs to complex groupings, addressing the challenge of interconnecting geographically dispersed environments; and the creation of a computational paradigm that blends a model of distributed learning objects with a constructionist pedagogical model, to produce a solution for distributed mixed-reality laboratories. By way of evidence to support the research findings, this thesis reports on evaluations performed with students from eight different universities in six countries, namely China, Malaysia, Mexico, UAE, USA and UK; providing an important insight to the role of social interactions in distance learning, and demonstrating that the inclusion of a physical component made a positive difference to students’ learning experience, supporting the use of cross-reality objects in educational activities

Programming Languages and Systems

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 29th European Symposium on Programming, ESOP 2020, which was planned to take place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2020, as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2020. The actual ETAPS 2020 meeting was postponed due to the Corona pandemic. The papers deal with fundamental issues in the specification, design, analysis, and implementation of programming languages and systems

Safe and Sound: Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Auditory Display

Complete proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2022), June 24-27. Online virtual conference

Automatic generation of software interfaces for supporting decisionmaking processes. An application of domain engineering & machine learning

[EN] Data analysis is a key process to foster knowledge generation in particular domains or fields of study. With a strong informative foundation derived from the analysis of collected data, decision-makers can make strategic choices with the aim of obtaining valuable benefits in their specific areas of action. However, given the steady growth of data volumes, data analysis needs to rely on powerful tools to enable knowledge extraction. Information dashboards offer a software solution to analyze large volumes of data visually to identify patterns and relations and make decisions according to the presented information. But decision-makers may have different goals and, consequently, different necessities regarding their dashboards. Moreover, the variety of data sources, structures, and domains can hamper the design and implementation of these tools. This Ph.D. Thesis tackles the challenge of improving the development process of information dashboards and data visualizations while enhancing their quality and features in terms of personalization, usability, and flexibility, among others. Several research activities have been carried out to support this thesis. First, a systematic literature mapping and review was performed to analyze different methodologies and solutions related to the automatic generation of tailored information dashboards. The outcomes of the review led to the selection of a modeldriven approach in combination with the software product line paradigm to deal with the automatic generation of information dashboards. In this context, a meta-model was developed following a domain engineering approach. This meta-model represents the skeleton of information dashboards and data visualizations through the abstraction of their components and features and has been the backbone of the subsequent generative pipeline of these tools. The meta-model and generative pipeline have been tested through their integration in different scenarios, both theoretical and practical. Regarding the theoretical dimension of the research, the meta-model has been successfully integrated with other meta-model to support knowledge generation in learning ecosystems, and as a framework to conceptualize and instantiate information dashboards in different domains. In terms of the practical applications, the focus has been put on how to transform the meta-model into an instance adapted to a specific context, and how to finally transform this later model into code, i.e., the final, functional product. These practical scenarios involved the automatic generation of dashboards in the context of a Ph.D. Programme, the application of Artificial Intelligence algorithms in the process, and the development of a graphical instantiation platform that combines the meta-model and the generative pipeline into a visual generation system. Finally, different case studies have been conducted in the employment and employability, health, and education domains. The number of applications of the meta-model in theoretical and practical dimensions and domains is also a result itself. Every outcome associated to this thesis is driven by the dashboard meta-model, which also proves its versatility and flexibility when it comes to conceptualize, generate, and capture knowledge related to dashboards and data visualizations