Context Aware Adaptable Applications - A global approach

Actual applications (mostly component based) requirements cannot be expressed without a ubiquitous and mobile part for end-users as well as for M2M applications (Machine to Machine). Such an evolution implies context management in order to evaluate the consequences of the mobility and corresponding mechanisms to adapt or to be adapted to the new environment. Applications are then qualified as context aware applications. This first part of this paper presents an overview of context and its management by application adaptation. This part starts by a definition and proposes a model for the context. It also presents various techniques to adapt applications to the context: from self-adaptation to supervised approached. The second part is an overview of architectures for adaptable applications. It focuses on platforms based solutions and shows information flows between application, platform and context. Finally it makes a synthesis proposition with a platform for adaptable context-aware applications called Kalimucho. Then we present implementations tools for software components and a dataflow models in order to implement the Kalimucho platform

Developing A Multi Application Real-Time Platform Using Cloud Serverless Technologies

Magycal Interactive is a software company that has produced a significant impact in the Portuguese television sector. Magycal is Magycal Interactive’s cloud based server-side framework that was developed to standardize common services (chats, polls, authentication) provided by applications such as Viva Ronaldo, Secret Story e SPORT TV Digital Hub. As popularity and success of each application increases, Magycal becomes more technically outdated. Its monolithic architecture, which previously allowed for easy development is becoming a development bottleneck. Scaling the server is increasing in cost as the platform grows, and developing updates and new features is more difficult since services are becoming more tightly coupled with each release. In this work, we propose an architectural shift for Magycal where we decouple services for better scalability, development and deployment. After a study of existing architectural options, we have concluded that the most suitable candidate architecture that meets the demands of Magycal is the microservices architecture. To test our hypothesis and determine the feasibility of the architectural change, we have selected a service of Magycal that was implemented following a microservice-oriented design. Our implementation was validated via API calls to ensure the modifications maintained correct behavior of the framework. The new service had its implementation benchmarked and compared to the corresponded Magycal existing service. We concluded that the changes to Magycal yield a more robust framework with reduced costs of maintaining, development and deployment.A Magycal Interactive é uma empresa de software que produz um impacto significativo no setor televisivo português. Magycal é a plataforma servidor da empresa na cloud desenvolvida para padronizar serviços comuns (canais de conversa, votações, autenticação) fornecidos por aplicações como Viva Ronaldo, Secret Story e SPORT TV Digital Hub. À medida que a popularidade e o sucesso de cada aplicação aumenta, o Magycal tornase tecnicamente mais desatualizado. A sua arquitetura monolítica, que anteriormente permitia desenvolvimento fácil, torna-se um problema. O custo de escalabilidade do servidor está a aumentar à medida que a plataforma cresce, e o desenvolvimento de atualizações e novos recursos é mais difícil, pois os serviços tornam-se mais fortemente acoplados a cada nova versão. Neste trabalho, propomos uma mudança de arquitetura para o Magycal, onde dissociamos os serviços para melhor escalabilidade, desenvolvimento e deployment. Após um estudo das opções arquiteturais existentes, concluímos que a arquitetura candidata mais adequada às necessidades do Magycal é a arquitetura de microserviços. Para testar nossa hipótese e determinar a viabilidade da mudança arquitetural, selecionamos um serviço do Magycal que foi implementados seguindo um design orientado a microsserviços. A nossa implementação foi validada com chamadas API para garantir que as modificações mantiveram o comportamento correto da estrutura. O novo serviço teve a sua implementação medida e comparadas ao serviço existente no Magycal. Foi concluído que as mudanças no Magycal produzem uma estrutura mais robusta, com custos reduzidos de manutenção, desenvolvimento e implementação

A Human-Centric Approach to Group-Based Context-Awareness

The emerging need for qualitative approaches in context-aware information processing calls for proper modeling of context information and efficient handling of its inherent uncertainty resulted from human interpretation and usage. Many of the current approaches to context-awareness either lack a solid theoretical basis for modeling or ignore important requirements such as modularity, high-order uncertainty management and group-based context-awareness. Therefore, their real-world application and extendability remains limited. In this paper, we present f-Context as a service-based context-awareness framework, based on language-action perspective (LAP) theory for modeling. Then we identify some of the complex, informational parts of context which contain high-order uncertainties due to differences between members of the group in defining them. An agent-based perceptual computer architecture is proposed for implementing f-Context that uses computing with words (CWW) for handling uncertainty. The feasibility of f-Context is analyzed using a realistic scenario involving a group of mobile users. We believe that the proposed approach can open the door to future research on context-awareness by offering a theoretical foundation based on human communication, and a service-based layered architecture which exploits CWW for context-aware, group-based and platform-independent access to information systems

A fuzzy logic recommendation system to support the design of cloud-edge data analysis in cyber-physical systems

The ongoing 4th industrial revolution is characterized by the digitization of industrial environments, mainly based on the use of Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Regarding AI, although data analysis has shown to be a key enabler of industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the development of smart machines and products, the traditional Cloud-centric solutions are not suitable to attend the data and time-sensitive requirements. Complementary to Cloud, Edge Computing has been adopted to enable the data processing capabilities at or close to the physical components. However, defining which data analysis tasks should be deployed on Cloud and Edge computational layers is not straightforward. This work proposes a framework to guide engineers during the design phase to determine the best way to distribute the data analysis capabilities among computational layers, contributing for a lesser ad-hoc design of distributed data analysis in industrial CPS. Besides defining the guidelines to identify the data analysis requirements, the core contribution relies on a Fuzzy Logic recommendation system for suggesting the most suitable layer to deploy a given data analysis task. The proposed approach is validated in a smart machine testbed that requires the implementation of different data analysis tasks for its operation.This work was supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UIDB/05757/2020.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Markov modeling of moving target defense games

We introduce a Markov-model-based framework for Moving Target Defense (MTD) analysis. The framework allows modeling of broad range of MTD strategies, provides general theorems about how the probability of a successful adversary defeating an MTD strategy is related to the amount of time/cost spent by the adversary, and shows how a multi-level composition of MTD strategies can be analyzed by a straightforward combination of the analysis for each one of these strategies. Within the proposed framework we define the concept of security capacity which measures the strength or effectiveness of an MTD strategy: the security capacity depends on MTD specific parameters and more general system parameters. We apply our framework to two concrete MTD strategies