Using Feature Models for Distributed Deployment in Extended Smart Home Architecture

Nowadays, smart home is extended beyond the house itself to encompass connected platforms on the Cloud as well as mobile personal devices. This Smart Home Extended Architecture (SHEA) helps customers to remain in touch with their home everywhere and any time. The endless increase of connected devices in the home and outside within the SHEA multiplies the deployment possibilities for any application. Therefore, SHEA should be taken from now as the actual target platform for smart home application deployment. Every home is different and applications offer different services according to customer preferences. To manage this variability, we extend the feature modeling from software product line domain with deployment constraints and we present an example of a model that could address this deployment challenge

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed