Interoperability middleware for IIoT gateways based on international standard ontologies and standardized digital representation

Recent advances in the areas of microelectronics, information technology, and communication protocols have made the development of smaller devices with greater processing capacity and lower energy consumption. This context contributed to the growing number of physical devices in industrial environments which are interconnected and communicate via the internet, enabling concepts such as Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These nodes have different sensors and actuators that monitor and control environment data. Several companies develop these devices, including diverse communication protocols, data structures, and IoT platforms, which leads to interoperability issues. In IoT scenarios, interoperability is the ability of two systems to communicate and share services. Therefore, communication problems can make it unfeasible to use heterogeneous devices, increasing the project’s financial cost and development time. In an industry, interoperability is related to different aspects, such as physical communication, divergent device communication protocols, and syntactical problems, referring to the distinct data structure. Developing a new standard for solving these matters may bring interoperability-related drawbacks rather than effectively solving these issues. Therefore, to mitigate interoperability problems in industrial applications, this work proposes the development of an interoperability middleware for Edge-enabled IIoT gateways based on international standards. The middleware is responsible for translating communication protocols, updating data from simulations or physical nodes to the assets’ digital representations, and storing data locally or remotely. The middleware adopts the IEEE industrial standard ontologies combined with assets’ standardized digital models. As a case study, a simulation replicates the production of a nutrient solution for agriculture, controlled by IIoT nodes. The use case consists of three devices, each equipped with at least five sensors or actuators, communicating in different communication protocols and exchanging data using diverse structures. The performance of the proposed middleware and its proposed translations algorithms were evaluated, obtaining satisfactory results for mitigating interoperable in industrial applications.Devido a recentes avanços nas áreas de microeletrônica, tecnologia da informação, e protocolos de comunicação tornaram possível o desenvolvimento de dispositivos cada vez menores com maior capacidade de processamento e menor consumo energético. Esse contexto contribuiu para o crescente nú- mero desses dispositivos na industria que estão interligados via internet, viabilizando conceitos como Indústria 4.0 e Internet das Coisas Industrial (IIoT). Esses nós possuem diferentes sensores e atuadores que monitoram e controlam os dados do ambiente. Esses equipamentos são desenvolvidos por diferentes empresas, incluindo protocolos de comunicação, estruturas de dados e plataformas de IoT distintos, acarretando em problemas de interoperabilidade. Em cenários de IoT, interoperabilidade, é a capacidade de sistemas se comunicarem e compartilharem serviços. Portanto, esses problemas podem inviabilizar o uso de dispositivos heterogêneos, aumentando o custo financeiro do projeto e seu tempo de desenvolvimento. Na indústria, interoperabilidade se divide em diferentes aspectos, como comunicação e problemas sintáticos, referentes à estrutura de dados distinta. O desenvolvimento de um padrão industrial pode trazer mais desvantagens relacionadas à interoperabilidade, em vez de resolver esses problemas. Portanto, para mitigar problemas relacionados a intoperabilidade industrial, este trabalho propõe o desenvolvimento de um middleware de interoperável para gateways IIoT baseado em padrões internacionais e ontologias. O middleware é responsável por traduzir diferentes protocolos de comunicação, atualizar os dados dos ativos industriais por meio de suas representações digitais, esses armazenados localmente ou remotamente. O middleware adota os padrões ontológicos industriais da IEEE combinadas com modelos digitais padronizados de ativos industriais. Como estudo de caso, são realizadas simulações para a produção de uma solução nutritiva para agricultura, controlada por nós IIoT. O processo utiliza três dispositivos, cada um equipado com pelo menos cinco sensores ou atuadores, por meio de diferentes protocolos de comunicação e estruturas de dados. O desempenho do middleware proposto e seus algoritmos de tradução foram avaliados e apresentados no final do trabalho, os quais resultados foram satisfatórios para mitigar a interoperabilidade em aplicações industriais

Doing things with words across time. Snapshots of communicative practices in and from the past

Knowing our contextualized (hi)story means being able to understand ourselves and how the world works. This kind of knowledge is key to self-awareness and self-empowerment, which also have a close connection with how we use language to communicate, to develop social interactions, to build relationships, and to project our identity. The diachronic evolution of languages is therefore a crucial part of a social being’s historical situatedness. The account of this evolution, i.e. historical linguistics, has traditionally focused on formal aspects of language as a grammatical system, investigating changes affecting or reflected in orthography, phonetics-phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. More recently, however, scholarly attention has broadened its scope to include functional aspects of language use, such as strategies and conventions of communicative affordances over time, thus giving rise to historical pragmatics. In this special issue, the contributions encompass three main areas within historical pragmatics: language use in earlier periods (pragmaphilology), the development of language use (diachronic pragmatics) and causes of language change (discourse-oriented historical linguistics). In particular, the papers offer complementary insights into communicative practices, examining interactional strategies in classical languages, politeness phenomena in grammar and discourse, the evolution of discursive practices, the pragmatic use of lexemes and the teaching of sociopragmatics. Significantly, the issue presents a cross-linguistic approach, since it considers pragmatic phenomena in English, Korean, Italian, Slavonic languages, Ancient Greek and Latin, thus helping us understand how current discursive forms are in fact both unique and comparable in several languages and cultures

Rigorous, transparent, and eye-catching: Exploring the universalistic parameters of impactful theory building in management

In the management discipline, scholarly impact is most commonly measured using a researcher perspective, by counting the number of times a particular article is mentioned in the references section of other articles (Aguinis, Shapiro, Antonacopoulou, and Cummings, 2014). This approach conceptualizes scholarly impact using a measurable indicator, the citation count an article receives. Several studies have been conducted to examine what drives scholarly impact in the field of management. The originality of the idea, rigor of the study, and clarity of writing have been identified as the most significant universalistic parameters of scholarly impact (Judge, Colbert, Cable, and Rynes, 2007). This dissertation sets out to do a detailed examination of these parameters. The six articles included in the thesis do so in two ways: either by offering recommendations for improving these universalistic parameters of scholarly impact or by further exploring the relationship between the universalistic parameters and scholarly impact. Our first empirical article, here relayed in Chapter II, focuses on case studies, and analyzes the methodological rigor of all case studies published during the period 1996-2006. We point out different types of replication logic, and illustrate how their individual research actions have differential effects on the internal and external validity (in that order of priority) of the emerging theory. Chapter III follows up on the previous chapter, extending the investigation to quantitative as well as qualitative research, and offers replication logic as a tool for analyzing deviant cases identified during the course of a qualitative or quantitative study. We call this technique the \u2018Deviant Case Method\u2019 (\u2018DCM\u2019). Through this study, we explain the theoretical consequentiality (Aguinis et al., 2013; Cortina, 2002) of analyzing three different kinds of outliers (construct, model fit, and prediction outliers/ deviant cases) and offer DCM for analyzing prediction outliers/deviant cases. In Chapter IV, we extend this method to have a look at medium-N studies. Here we focus on inconsistent or deviant cases which turn up during a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). We offer a method called \u2018Comparative Outlier Analysis\u2019 (\u2018COA\u2019) which combines DCM and Mill\u2019s canons (1875) to examine these multitude of inconsistent cases. We explicate this using exemplars from fields like politics, marketing, and education. Unlike in other disciplines or methods, it is far from clear what the label \u2018transparent research procedures\u2019 constitutes in management field studies, with adverse effects during write-up, revision, and even after publication. To rectify this, in Chapter V, we review field studies across seven major management journals (1997- 2006) in order to develop a transparency index, and link it to article impact. Chapter VI is a sequel to the previous chapter. We propose a new method for assessing the methodological rigor of grounded theory procedures ex-post using an audit trail perspective. While existing research on the methodological sophistication of grounded theory was typically done from the perspective of the author or producer of the research, our perspective is customer-centric, both in terms of the end-customer (i.e. the reader or other author), as well as the intermediate customer (i.e. reviewers and editors). The last empirical article in the thesis, Chapter VII, focuses on yet another parameter influencing impact: the style of academic writing. Specifically, we focus on the attributes of article titles and their subsequent influence on the citation count. At this early stage of theory development on article titles, we do this in the specific application context of management science. We conclude with Chapter VIII where we sum up the findings and implications of all preceding studies and put forth suggestions for future research

Fusion of Thresholding Rules During Wavelet-Based Noisy Image Compression

The new method for combining semisoft thresholding rules during wavelet-based data compression of images with multiplicative noise is suggested. The method chooses the best thresholding rule and the threshold value using the proposed criteria which provide the best nonlinear approximations and take into consideration errors of quantization. The results of computer modeling have shown that the suggested method provides relatively good image quality after restoration in the sense of some criteria such as PSNR, SSIM, etc

Using Semantic Web Technologies to Query and Manage Information within Federated Cyber-Infrastructures

A standardized descriptive ontology supports efficient querying and manipulation of data from heterogeneous sources across boundaries of distributed infrastructures, particularly in federated environments. In this article, we present the Open-Multinet (OMN) set of ontologies, which were designed specifically for this purpose as well as to support management of life-cycles of infrastructure resources. We present their initial application in Future Internet testbeds, their use for representing and requesting available resources, and our experimental performance evaluation of the ontologies in terms of querying and translation times. Our results highlight the value and applicability of Semantic Web technologies in managing resources of federated cyber-infrastructures.EC/FP7/318389/EU/Federation for FIRE/Fed4FIREEC/FP7/732638/EU/Federation for FIRE Plus/Fed4FIREplu

A Programming Environment Evaluation Methodology for Object-Oriented Systems

The object-oriented design strategy as both a problem decomposition and system development paradigm has made impressive inroads into the various areas of the computing sciences. Substantial development productivity improvements have been demonstrated in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to user interface design. However, there has been very little progress in the formal characterization of these productivity improvements and in the identification of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The development and validation of models and metrics of this sort require large amounts of systematically-gathered structural and productivity data. There has, however, been a notable lack of systematically-gathered information on these development environments. A large part of this problem is attributable to the lack of a systematic programming environment evaluation methodology that is appropriate to the evaluation of object-oriented systems