Cloud-assisted body area networks: state-of-the-art and future challenges

Body area networks (BANs) are emerging as enabling technology for many human-centered application domains such as health-care, sport, fitness, wellness, ergonomics, emergency, safety, security, and sociality. A BAN, which basically consists of wireless wearable sensor nodes usually coordinated by a static or mobile device, is mainly exploited to monitor single assisted livings. Data generated by a BAN can be processed in real-time by the BAN coordinator and/or transmitted to a server-side for online/offline processing and long-term storing. A network of BANs worn by a community of people produces large amount of contextual data that require a scalable and efficient approach for elaboration and storage. Cloud computing can provide a flexible storage and processing infrastructure to perform both online and offline analysis of body sensor data streams. In this paper, we motivate the introduction of Cloud-assisted BANs along with the main challenges that need to be addressed for their development and management. The current state-of-the-art is overviewed and framed according to the main requirements for effective Cloud-assisted BAN architectures. Finally, relevant open research issues in terms of efficiency, scalability, security, interoperability, prototyping, dynamic deployment and management, are discussed

Digital twin and its implementations in the civil engineering sector

Digital Twin (DT) concept has recently emerged in civil engineering; however, some problems still need to be addressed. First, DT can be easily confused with Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Second, the constituents of DT applications in this sector are not well-defined. Also, what the DT can bring to the civil engineering industry is still ambiguous. To address these problems, we reviewed 468 articles related to DT, BIM and CPS, proposed a DT definition and its constituents in civil engineering and compared DT with BIM and CPS. Then we reviewed 134 papers related to DT in the civil engineering sector out of 468 papers in detail. We extracted DT research clusters based on the co-occurrence analysis of paper keywords' and the relevant DT constituents. This research helps establish the state-of-the-art of DT in the civil engineering sector and suggests future DT development

The Data Fusion Grid Infrastructure: Project Objectives and Achievements

This paper describes the objectives and achievements of the project "Data Fusion Grid Infrastructure'' jointly supported by INTAS, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the National Space Agency of Ukraine (NSAU). Within the project, a Grid infrastructure has been developed that integrates the resources of several geographically distributed organizations. The use of Grid technologies is motivated by the need to make computations in the near real-time for fast response to natural disasters and to manage large volumes of satellite data. We show the use of developed Grid infrastructure for a number of applications that heavily rely on Earth observation (EO) data. These applications include: numerical weather prediction (NWP), flood monitoring, biodiversity assessment, and crop yield prediction

SeeBridge Next Generation Bridge Inspection: Overview, Information Delivery Manual and Model View Definition

Innovative solutions for rapid and intelligent survey and assessment methods are required in maintenance, repair, retrofit and rebuild of enormous numbers of bridges in service throughout the world. Motivated by this need, a next-generation integrated bridge inspection system, called SeeBridge, has been proposed. An Information Delivery Manual (IDM) was compiled to specify the technical components, activities and information exchanges in the SeeBridge process, and a Model View Definition (MVD) was prepared to specify the data exchange schema to serve the IDM. The MVD was bound to the IFC4 Add2 data schema standard. The IDM and MVD support research and development of the system by rigorously defining the information and data that structure bridge engineers' knowledge. The SeeBridge process is mapped, parts of the data repositories are presented, and the future use of the IDM is discussed. The development underlines the real potential for automated inspection of infrastructure at large, because it demonstrates that the hurdles in the way of automated acquisition of detailed and semantically rich models of existing infrastructure are computational in nature, not instrumental, and are surmountable with existing technologies

From scan-to-BIM to a structural finite elements model of built heritage for dynamic simulation

The progress in information technology allows an innovative transformation of practices commonly involved in the engineering and construction field, especially in relation to the existing architectural heritage’s control and management activities. The proposed methodology takes advantage of an integrated 3D metric survey as a basis for an HBIM (Historic Building Information Modelling) model to be exploited for the definition of a Finite Elements Model (FEM). This paper aims to show the applicability of a digital process, stemmed from the integration in Rhinoceros 3D of a BIM structural model, leading to the dynamic simulation of the analytical FEM through PRO_SAP® (a PROfessional Structural Analysis Program). The described workflow investigates the interoperability issues, along with the difficulties in the Scan-to-HBIM processes, demonstrating how HBIM models can anyhow support operations aimed at maintaining and preserving existing historical assets, also from a structural point of view, even if with still persistent criticalities

Development of Distributed Research Center for analysis of regional climatic and environmental changes

We present an approach and first results of a collaborative project being carried out by a joint team of researchers from the Institute of Monitoring of Climatic and Ecological Systems, Russia and Earth Systems Research Center UNH, USA. Its main objective is development of a hardware and software platform prototype of a Distributed Research Center (DRC) for monitoring and projecting of regional climatic and environmental changes in the Northern extratropical areas. The DRC should provide the specialists working in climate related sciences and decision-makers with accurate and detailed climatic characteristics for the selected area and reliable and affordable tools for their in-depth statistical analysis and studies of the effects of climate change. Within the framework of the project, new approaches to cloud processing and analysis of large geospatial datasets (big geospatial data) inherent to climate change studies are developed and deployed on technical platforms of both institutions. We discuss here the state of the art in this domain, describe web based information-computational systems developed by the partners, justify the methods chosen to reach the project goal, and briefly list the results obtained so far