Esquemas de Representación Ontológica para la Integración de Datos en los Sistemas de Información de Planta

La complejidad de los procesos productivos sumada a la falta de integración y consistencia en los datos hacen que los Sistemas de Información de Planta (SIP) sean sumamente dependientes de los expertos del proceso. Por este contexto, ha surgido un interés en sistemas de integración de datos basados en conocimiento. A diferencia de otros autores, que proponen soluciones de mediación semántica, en este trabajo se búsca explotar las capacidades deductivas del razonador siguiendo un enfoque de integración dirigido por el conocimiento (knowledge-driven approach). Conceptos propios de la ingeniería de procesos han sido implementados con éxito haciendo uso de los estándares y tecnologías propuestas recientemente por World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) en la construcción de SemanticWeb. Con el objeto de demostrar la potencialidad y el alcance de los esquemas de representación propuestos, se realizaron pruebas de razonamiento sobre un ejemplo de aplicación industrial.Fil: Roda, Fernando. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Rosario. Centro Internacional Franco Argentino de Ciencias de la Información y Sistemas; ArgentinaFil: Basualdo, Marta Susana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Rosario. Centro Internacional Franco Argentino de Ciencias de la Información y Sistemas; ArgentinaFil: Musulin, Estanislao. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Rosario. Centro Internacional Franco Argentino de Ciencias de la Información y Sistemas; Argentin

IoT software infrastructure for Energy Management and Simulation in Smart Cities

This paper presents an IoT software infrastructure that enables energy management and simulation of new control policies in a city district. The proposed platform enables the interoperability and the correlation of (near-)real-time building energy profiles with environmental data from sensors as well as building and grid models. In a smart city context, this platform fulfills i) the integration of heterogeneous data sources at building and district level, and ii) the simulation of novel energy policies at district level aimed at the optimization of the energy usage accounting also for its impact on building comfort. The platform has been deployed in a real world district and a novel control policy for the heating distribution network has been developed and tested. Results are presented and discussed in the paper

Esquemas de representación ontológica para la integración de datos en los sistemas de información de planta

La complejidad de los procesos productivos sumada a la falta de integración y consistencia en los datos hacen que los Sistemas de Información de Planta (SIP) sean sumamente dependientes de los expertos del proceso. Por este contexto, ha surgido un interés en sistemas de integración de datos basados en conocimiento. A diferencia de otros autores, que proponen soluciones de mediación semántica, en este trabajo se busca explotar las capacidades deductivas del razonador siguiendo un enfoque de integración dirigido por el conocimiento (knowledge-driven approach). Conceptos propios de la ingeniería de procesos han sido implementados con éxito haciendo uso de los estándares y tecnologías propuestas recientemente por World Wide Web Consortium (W 3C) en la construcción de SemanticWeb. Con el objeto de demostrar la potencialidad y el alcance de los esquemas de representación propuestos, se realizaron pruebas de razonamiento sobre un ejemplo de aplicación industrial.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Virtualization system for life science automation laboratory

The dissertation developed a Virtualization System to simulate experiment workflows in Life Science Automation (LSA) virtually. The system integrates technologies of process control technology, TCP/IP socket, database, Visual C#, Python Script, Visual Component 3DCreate and 3D modeling, etc. It mainly has four modules: Process Control System, Data Transfer System, Control System and Virtualization Module. The system supplies a vivid and flexible 4D virtualization on LSA experiment workflows for customers, and makes demonstrations for LSA laboratories more conveniently

Applying agent technology to constructing flexible monitoring systems in process automation

The dissertation studies the application of agent technology to process automation monitoring and other domain specific functions. Motivation for the research work derives from the development of industrial production and process automation, and thereby the work load of operating personnel in charge of these large-scale processes has become more complex and difficult to handle. At the same time, the information technology infrastructure in process automation domain has developed ready to accept and utilise novel software engineering solutions. Agent technology is a new programming paradigm which has attractive properties like autonomy, flexibility and a possibility to distribute functions. In addition, agent technology offers a systematic methodology for designing goal based operations. This enables parts of the monitoring tasks to be delegated to the system. In this research, new agent system architecture is introduced. The architecture specifies a structure that enables the use of agents in the process monitoring domain. In addition, an introductory internal layered design of an agent aiming to combine Semantic Web and agent technologies is presented. The developed agent architecture is used in conjunction with the systematic agent design methodology to construct and implement four test cases. Each case has industrially motivated interest and illustrates various aspects of monitoring functionalities. These tests provide evidence that by utilising agent technology it is possible to develop new monitoring features for process operators, otherwise infeasible as such within current process automation systems. As a result of the research work, it can be stated that agent technology is a suited methodology to realise monitoring functionalities in process automation. It is also shown, that by applying solutions gained from the agent technology research, it is possible to define an architecture that enables to utilise the properties offered by agents in process automation environment. The proposed agent architecture supports features that are of generic interest in monitoring tasks. The developed architecture and research findings provide ground to import novel software engineering solutions to process automation monitoring

Smart data management with BIM for Architectural Heritage

In the last years smart buildings topic has received much attention as well as Building Information Modelling (BIM) and interoperability as independent fields. Linking these topics is an essential research target to help designers and stakeholders to run processes more efficiently. Working on a smart building requires the use of Innovation and Communication Technology (ICT) to optimize design, construction and management. In these terms, several technologies such as sensors for remote monitoring and control, building equipment, management software, etc. are available in the market. As BIM provides an enormous amount of information in its database and theoretically it is able to work with all kind of data sources using interoperability, it is essential to define standards for both data contents and format exchange. In this way, a possibility to align research activity with Horizon 2020 is the investigation of energy saving using ICT. Unfortunately, comparing the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) Industry with other sectors it is clear how in the building field advanced information technology applications have not been adopted yet. However in the last years, the adoption of new methods for the data management has been investigated by many researchers. So, basing on the above considerations, the main purpose of this thesis is investigate the use of BIM methodology relating to existing buildings concerning on three main topics: • Smart data management for architectural heritage preservation; • District data management for energy reduction; • The maintenance of highrises. For these reasons, data management acquires a very important value relating to the optimization of the building process and it is considered the most important goal for this research. Taking into account different kinds of architectural heritage, the attention is focused on the existing and historical buildings that usually have characterized by several constraints. Starting from data collection, a BIM model was developed and customized in function of its objectives, and providing information for different simulation tests. Finally, data visualization was investigated through the Virtual Reality(VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Certainly, the creation of a 3D parametric model implies that data is organized according to the use of individual users that are involved in the building process. This means that each 3D model can be developed with different Levels of Detail/Development (LODs) basing on the goal of the data source. Along this thesis the importance of LODs is taken into account related to the kind of information filled in a BIM model. In fact, basing on the objectives of each project a BIM model can be developed in a different way to facilitate the querying data for the simulations tests.\ud The three topics were compared considering each step of the building process workflow, highlighting the main differences, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of BIM methodology. In these terms, the importance to set a BIM template before the modelling step was pointed out, because it provides the possibility to manage information in order to be collected and extracted for different purposes and by specific users. Moreover, basing on the results obtained in terms of the 3D parametric model and in terms of process, a proper BIM maturity level was determined for each topic. Finally, the value of interoperability was arisen from these tests considering that it provided the opportunity to develop a framework for collaboration, involving all parties of the building industry

A Semantically Enhanced Approach for Orchestration of Web Services in Factory Automation Systems

The Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm makes it possible to build systems from several independent components. Most typically, web services are chosen as the building blocks of such a system. A web service is essentially a passive software entity, which listens for request messages sent to it over the network, possibly reacts to the requests by performing some operations, and finally sends response messages to the request senders. The traditional application domain of web services belongs to the so-called IT domain. While opening new horizons in software development life-cycles, web services have been adopted in various new application domains, including the domain of factory automation (software development for factory automation). Indeed, recent research projects have experimented with controlling production system equipment through web service interfaces. When migrated from pure software to the physical realm involving industrial equipment, web services set additional demands for the application domains. For example, since the domains involve operations with physical effects, roll-back or application recovery procedures become challenging. This research work targets the orchestration of factory automation systems encapsulated as web services and presents various techniques for overcoming the difficulties. Orchestrating web services to accomplish a complicated production task can be difficult due to the transitoriness of both production equipment states and the set of available web services. Nevertheless, the selection of appropriate web services can be facilitated by augmenting each service with semantic information describing its conditions and effects. Web services augmented with such descriptions are termed semantic web services. While Web Ontology Language, OWL, is ideal for describing application domain concepts and property relationships, the OWL-S ontology, which is based on OWL, has been specifically developed for describing web services. Once the semantic service descriptions have been analyzed to find the appropriate web services, the selected services can be invoked using their syntactic WSDL descriptions. In addition to automated web service selection, semantic descriptions allow the composition of web services to achieve production tasks. Service composition involves first analyzing the descriptions to determine the appropriate service invocation process for achieving the desired goal and then executing the process. This dissertation presents an approach in which the production equipment and their states are represented using an ontology, and the model is dynamically used in decision-making. In particular, the devices in the considered production systems provide web service interfaces through which they can be controlled, while semantic web service descriptions formulated in OWL-S make it possible to determine the conditions and effects of invoking the web services. The approach presented in this research work additionally involves a set of specialized web services that co-operate to achieve production goals using the domain web services. One of the services maintains a semantic model of the current system state, while another uses the model to compose the domain web services so that they jointly achieve the desired goals. The semantic model of the system is automatically updated based on event notifications sent by the domain services. Software agents controlling production devices must maintain an up-to-date view of the physical world state in order to efficiently reason and plan their actions. Especially in a factory automation system, the world state undergoes rapid evolution, and the world view must remain synchronized with the changes. This research discusses two approaches to updating the world view based on event notifications sent by web services representing production devices in a manufacturing system. One of the approaches is based on separately specified update rules, and one automatically uses semantic web service descriptions formulated in OWL-S. While all of the examples presented in this research work specifically focus on the factory automation domain, the presented approaches are applicable to all domains involving semantic web services. Semantic Web Service descriptions facilitate the automated discovery and composition of web services. Particularly in the production system domain, the service condition and effect descriptions are essential in selecting the appropriate service or service composition for a given task. OWL-S is one of the most popular semantic web service description languages, and due to its XML syntax, OWL-S can be effortlessly incorporated into service WSDL descriptions. However, developing OWL-S documents for each service instance is laborious. This dissertation presents an approach to automatically generating executable OWL-S descriptions from semantically annotated service WSDL files. Computing clouds facilitate rapid and effortless resource allocation. Cloud consumers can generally be ignorant of the physical computing resources used or their geographical location, as the resources are abstracted into a commodity that can be dynamically leased from the cloud provider. In particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds allow clients to dynamically lease virtual machines that behave similarly to physical servers. However, executing an application by directly using computing cloud resources is complicated and typically involves similar steps as installing and executing an application on a physical machine. Moreover, starting numerous application instances on a single virtual machine may result in poor performance. Thus, this dissertation considers the development of a web service that facilitates the use of cloud resources by abstracting them. When the web service is used, an application can be effortlessly started in a computing cloud by invoking simple web service operations. Furthermore, when multiple applications are started, the workload can be automatically distributed between several virtual machines, resulting in higher performance. To conclude, the results presented in this research work demonstrate that semantic web service descriptions can indeed facilitate automatic web service composition and invocation. However, the effort of developing semantic web service descriptions can partly undermine the benefits achieved through their application. Therefore, new tools and methods should be developed to minimize the effort of developing such descriptions

Explainable, Security-Aware and Dependency-Aware Framework for Intelligent Software Refactoring

As software systems continue to grow in size and complexity, their maintenance continues to become more challenging and costly. Even for the most technologically sophisticated and competent organizations, building and maintaining high-performing software applications with high-quality-code is an extremely challenging and expensive endeavor. Software Refactoring is widely recognized as the key component for maintaining high-quality software by restructuring existing code and reducing technical debt. However, refactoring is difficult to achieve and often neglected due to several limitations in the existing refactoring techniques that reduce their effectiveness. These limitation include, but not limited to, detecting refactoring opportunities, recommending specific refactoring activities, and explaining the recommended changes. Existing techniques are mainly focused on the use of quality metrics such as coupling, cohesion, and the Quality Metrics for Object Oriented Design (QMOOD). However, there are many other factors identified in this work to assist and facilitate different maintenance activities for developers: 1. To structure the refactoring field and existing research results, this dissertation provides the most scalable and comprehensive systematic literature review analyzing the results of 3183 research papers on refactoring covering the last three decades. Based on this survey, we created a taxonomy to classify the existing research, identified research trends and highlighted gaps in the literature for further research. 2. To draw attention to what should be the current refactoring research focus from the developers’ perspective, we carried out the first large scale refactoring study on the most popular online Q&A forum for developers, Stack Overflow. We collected and analyzed posts to identify what developers ask about refactoring, the challenges that practitioners face when refactoring software systems, and what should be the current refactoring research focus from the developers’ perspective. 3. To improve the detection of refactoring opportunities in terms of quality and security in the context of mobile apps, we designed a framework that recommends the files to be refactored based on user reviews. We also considered the detection of refactoring opportunities in the context of web services. We proposed a machine learning-based approach that helps service providers and subscribers predict the quality of service with the least costs. Furthermore, to help developers make an accurate assessment of the quality of their software systems and decide if the code should be refactored, we propose a clustering-based approach to automatically identify the preferred benchmark to use for the quality assessment of a project. 4. Regarding the refactoring generation process, we proposed different techniques to enhance the change operators and seeding mechanism by using the history of applied refactorings and incorporating refactoring dependencies in order to improve the quality of the refactoring solutions. We also introduced the security aspect when generating refactoring recommendations, by investigating the possible impact of improving different quality attributes on a set of security metrics and finding the best trade-off between them. In another approach, we recommend refactorings to prioritize fixing quality issues in security-critical files, improve quality attributes and remove code smells. All the above contributions were validated at the large scale on thousands of open source and industry projects in collaboration with industry partners and the open source community. The contributions of this dissertation are integrated in a cloud-based refactoring framework which is currently used by practitioners.Ph.D.College of Engineering & Computer ScienceUniversity of Michigan-Dearbornhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/171082/1/Chaima Abid Final Dissertation.pdfDescription of Chaima Abid Final Dissertation.pdf : Dissertatio