Applications of Virtual Reality

Information Technology is growing rapidly. With the birth of high-resolution graphics, high-speed computing and user interaction devices Virtual Reality has emerged as a major new technology in the mid 90es, last century. Virtual Reality technology is currently used in a broad range of applications. The best known are games, movies, simulations, therapy. From a manufacturing standpoint, there are some attractive applications including training, education, collaborative work and learning. This book provides an up-to-date discussion of the current research in Virtual Reality and its applications. It describes the current Virtual Reality state-of-the-art and points out many areas where there is still work to be done. We have chosen certain areas to cover in this book, which we believe will have potential significant impact on Virtual Reality and its applications. This book provides a definitive resource for wide variety of people including academicians, designers, developers, educators, engineers, practitioners, researchers, and graduate students

Enabling IoT in Manufacturing: from device to the cloud

Industrial automation platforms are experiencing a paradigm shift. With the new technol-ogies and strategies that are being applied to enable a synchronization of the digital and real world, including real-time access to sensorial information and advanced networking capabilities to actively cooperate and form a nervous system within the enterprise, the amount of data that can be collected from real world and processed at digital level is growing at an exponential rate. Indeed, in modern industry, a huge amount of data is coming through sensorial networks em-bedded in the production line, allowing to manage the production in real-time. This dissertation proposes a data collection framework for continuously collecting data from the device to the cloud, enabling resources at manufacturing industries shop floors to be handled seamlessly. The framework envisions to provide a robust solution that besides collecting, transforming and man-aging data through an IoT model, facilitates the detection of patterns using collected historical sensor data. Industrial usage of this framework, accomplished in the frame of the EU C2NET project, supports and automates collaborative business opportunities and real-time monitoring of the production lines

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

Towards an aspect weaving BPEL engine

This position paper proposes the use of dynamic aspects and the visitor design pattern to obtain a highly configurable and extensible BPEL engine. Using these two techniques, the core of this infrastructural software can be customised to meet new requirements and add features such as debugging, execution monitoring, or changing to another Web Service selection policy. Additionally, it can easily be extended to cope with customer-specific BPEL extensions. We propose the use of dynamic aspects not only on the engine itself but also on the workflow in order to tackle the problems of Web Service hot deployment and hot fixes to long running processes. In this way, composing aWeb Service "on-the-fly" means weaving its choreography interface into the workflow

SUPPORTING ENGINEERING DESIGN OF ADDITIVELY MANUFACTURED MEDICAL DEVICES WITH KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT THROUGH ONTOLOGIES

Medical environments pose a substantial challenge for engineering designers. They combine significant knowledge demands with large investment for new product development and severe consequences in the case of design failure. Engineering designers must contend with an often-chaotic environment to which they have limited access and familiarity, a user base that is difficult to engage and highly diverse in many attributes, and a market structure that often pits stakeholders against one another. As medical care in general moves towards personalized models and surgical tools towards less invasive options emerging manufacturing technologies in additive manufacturing offer significant potential for the design of highly innovative medical devices. At the same time however these same technologies also introduce yet more challenges to the design process. This dissertation presents a knowledge-based approach to addressing the existing and emerging challenges of medical device design. The approach aims to address these challenges using knowledge captured in a suite of modular ontologies modeling knowledge domains that must be considered in medical device design. These include ontologies for understanding clinical context, human factors, regulation, enterprise, and manufacturability. Together these ontologies support design ideation, knowledge capture, and design verification. These ontologies are subsequently used to formulate a comprehensive knowledge framework for medical device design, and to enable an innovative design process. Case studies analyzing the design of surgical tools in several medical specialties are used to assess the capabilities of this approach

CHOReOS Middleware Specification (D3.1)

This deliverable specifies the main concepts of the CHOReOS middleware architecture. Starting from the Future Internet (FI) challenges for scalability, heterogeneity, mobility, awareness, and adaptation that have been investigated in prior work done in WP1, we introduce the aforementioned concepts to deal with the requirements derived from the FI challenges. In particular, we propose an extensible and scalable service discovery approach for the organization and discovery of services that relies on multiple service discovery protocols. Moreover, we introduce an extensible and scalable approach, based on the service bus paradigm, for service access that features the integration and adaptation of multiple interaction protocols. Furthermore, we propose solutions that enable the execution of FI service compositions that range from compositions of choreographed services, developed according to the CHOReOS development process, to massive compositions of things. Finally, we detail the Cloud & Grid middleware facilities that support the overall middleware and the choreographies that are built on it, via a unified API that provides access to multiple cloud infrastructures (e.g., Amazon EC2, HP Open Cirrus, private clouds)

ICSEA 2021: the sixteenth international conference on software engineering advances

The Sixteenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2021), held on October 3 - 7, 2021 in Barcelona, Spain, continued a series of events covering a broad spectrum of software-related topics. The conference covered fundamentals on designing, implementing, testing, validating and maintaining various kinds of software. The tracks treated the topics from theory to practice, in terms of methodologies, design, implementation, testing, use cases, tools, and lessons learnt. The conference topics covered classical and advanced methodologies, open source, agile software, as well as software deployment and software economics and education. The conference had the following tracks: Advances in fundamentals for software development Advanced mechanisms for software development Advanced design tools for developing software Software engineering for service computing (SOA and Cloud) Advanced facilities for accessing software Software performance Software security, privacy, safeness Advances in software testing Specialized software advanced applications Web Accessibility Open source software Agile and Lean approaches in software engineering Software deployment and maintenance Software engineering techniques, metrics, and formalisms Software economics, adoption, and education Business technology Improving productivity in research on software engineering Trends and achievements Similar to the previous edition, this event continued to be very competitive in its selection process and very well perceived by the international software engineering community. As such, it is attracting excellent contributions and active participation from all over the world. We were very pleased to receive a large amount of top quality contributions. We take here the opportunity to warmly thank all the members of the ICSEA 2021 technical program committee as well as the numerous reviewers. The creation of such a broad and high quality conference program would not have been possible without their involvement. We also kindly thank all the authors that dedicated much of their time and efforts to contribute to the ICSEA 2021. We truly believe that thanks to all these efforts, the final conference program consists of top quality contributions. This event could also not have been a reality without the support of many individuals, organizations and sponsors. We also gratefully thank the members of the ICSEA 2021 organizing committee for their help in handling the logistics and for their work that is making this professional meeting a success. We hope the ICSEA 2021 was a successful international forum for the exchange of ideas and results between academia and industry and to promote further progress in software engineering research