Ingeniería basada en modelos aplicada a sistemas distribuidos sensibles al contexto.

239 p.En esta Tesis Doctoral se plantea una metodología, soportada por mecanismos y herramientas, que da soporte al ciclo de desarrollo de aplicaciones distribuidas sensibles al contexto, aquéllas que supervisan su entorno físico con objeto de detectar cambios en él y reaccionar rápida y adecuadamente. Son aplicaciones presentes en diferentes campos de aplicación que demandan requisitos tales como ejecución en entornos distribuidos y heterogéneos, personalización de la supervisión, adaptación a cambios relevantes en su contexto, gestión de la calidad específica de cada aplicación, disponibilidad y recuperación ante situaciones de fallo. En concreto, se propone una aproximación de modelado genérica que permite la especificación y diseño de estas aplicaciones, independientemente de la plataforma de gestión responsable de su ejecución y atendiendo a los diferentes expertos que participan: expertos de dominio y desarrolladores de software. Se hace uso de la ingeniería dirigida por modelos para lograr la separación de dominios necesaria. Así, el experto de dominio realiza el diseño arquitectónico en el que se especifican todos sus requisitos, mientras que el desarrollador de software se centra en el diseño e implementación de la solución software correspondiente. Por tanto, la aproximación de modelado recoge los requisitos de las aplicaciones que una plataforma de gestión debe cumplir en tiempo de ejecución, al mismo tiempo que captura la información necesaria para la generación de su código. También se plantea un entorno de desarrollo integrado, basado en dicha aproximación, que da soporte al ciclo de desarrollo, cuyo prototipo se ha validado en un demostrador en el campo de la asistencia domiciliaria

A Component-Based Approach for Securing Indoor Home Care Applications

eHealth systems have adopted recent advances on sensing technologies together with advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to provide people-centered services that improve the quality of life of an increasingly elderly population. As these eHealth services are founded on the acquisition and processing of sensitive data (e.g., personal details, diagnosis, treatments and medical history), any security threat would damage the public's confidence in them. This paper proposes a solution for the design and runtime management of indoor eHealth applications with security requirements. The proposal allows applications definition customized to patient particularities, including the early detection of health deterioration and suitable reaction (events) as well as security needs. At runtime, security support is twofold. A secured component-based platform supervises applications execution and provides events management, whilst the security of the communications among application components is also guaranteed. Additionally, the proposed event management scheme adopts the fog computing paradigm to enable local event related data storage and processing, thus saving communication bandwidth when communicating with the cloud. As a proof of concept, this proposal has been validated through the monitoring of the health status in diabetic patients at a nursing home.This work was financed under project DPI2015-68602-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE), UPV/EHU under project PPG17/56 and GV/EJ under recognized research group IT914-16

Flexibility Support for Homecare Applications Based on Models and Multi-Agent Technology

In developed countries, public health systems are under pressure due to the increasing percentage of population over 65. In this context, homecare based on ambient intelligence technology seems to be a suitable solution to allow elderly people to continue to enjoy the comforts of home and help optimize medical resources. Thus, current technological developments make it possible to build complex homecare applications that demand, among others, flexibility mechanisms for being able to evolve as context does (adaptability), as well as avoiding service disruptions in the case of node failure (availability). The solution proposed in this paper copes with these flexibility requirements through the whole life-cycle of the target applications: from design phase to runtime. The proposed domain modeling approach allows medical staff to design customized applications, taking into account the adaptability needs. It also guides software developers during system implementation. The application execution is managed by a multi-agent based middleware, making it possible to meet adaptation requirements, assuring at the same time the availability of the system even for stateful applications.This work was financed in part by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) under project UFI 11/28, by the Regional Government of the Basque Country under Project IT719-13, and by the MCYT&FEDER under project DPI 2012-37806-C02-01

Model-Driven Design and Development of Flexible Automated Production Control Configurations for Industry 4.0

The continuous changes of the market and customer demands have forced modern automation systems to provide stricter Quality of service (QoS) requirements. This work is centered in automation production system flexibility, understood as the ability to shift from one controller configuration to a different one, in the most quick and cost-effective way, without disrupting its normal operation. In the manufacturing field, this allows to deal with non-functional requirements such as assuring control system availability or workload balancing, even in the case of failure of a machine, components, network or controllers. Concretely, this work focuses on flexible applications at production level, using Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) as primary controllers. The reconfiguration of the control system is not always possible as it depends on the process state. Thus, an analysis of the system state is necessary to make a decision. In this sense, architectures based on industrial Multi Agent Systems (MAS) have been used to provide this support at runtime. Additionally, the introduction of these mechanisms makes the design and the implementation of the control system more complex. This work aims at supporting the design and development of such flexible automation production systems, through the proposed model-based framework. The framework consists of a set of tools that, based on models, automate the generation of control code extensions that add flexibility to the automation production system, according to industry 4.0 paradigm.This work was financed by MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE (grant number RTI2018-096116-B-I00) and by GV/EJ (grant number IT1324-19)

OpenFog-Compliant Application-Aware Platform: A Kubernetes Extension

Distributed computing paradigms have evolved towards low latency and highly virtualized environments. Fog Computing, as its latest iteration, enables the usage of Cloud-like services closer to the generators and consumers of data. The processing in this layer is performed by Fog Applications, which are decomposed into smaller components following the microservice paradigm and encapsulated into containers. Current state-of-the-art container orchestrators can manage hundreds of simultaneous containers. However, Kubernetes, being the de facto standard, does not consider the application itself as a top-level entity, which limits its orchestration capabilities. This raises the need to rearchitect Kubernetes to benefit from application-awareness, which refers to an orchestration method optimized for managing the applications and the set of components that comprise them. Thus, this paper proposes an application-aware and OpenFog-compliant architecture that manages applications as first-level entities during their lifecycle. Furthermore, the proposed architecture allows the definition of organizational structures to group subordinated applications based on user-defined hierarchies. This logical structuring makes it possible to outline how orchestration should be shaped to reflect the operating model of a system or an organization. The proposed architecture is implemented as a Kubernetes extension and provided as an operator.This research was funded by the project PES18/48 funded by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and by the PhD fellowship granted under the frame of the PIF 2022 call funded by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), grant number PIF22/188

A Customizable Architecture for Application-Centric Management of Context-Aware Applications

[EN] Context-aware applications present common requirements (e.g., heterogeneity, scalability, adaptability, availability) in a variety of domains (e.g., healthcare, natural disaster prevention, smart factories). Besides, they do also present domain specific requirements, among which the application concept itself is included. Therefore, a platform in charge of managing their execution must be generic enough to cover common requirements, but it must also be adaptable enough to consider the domain aspects to meet the demands at application-level. Several approaches in the literature tackle some of these demands, but not all of them, and without considering the applications concept and the customization demands in different domains. This work proposes a generic and customizable management architecture that covers both types of requirements based on multi-agent technology and model-driven development. Multi-agent technology is used to enable the distributed intelligence needed to address many common requirements, whereas model-driven development allows to address domain specific particularities. On top of that, a customization methodology to develop specific platforms from this generic architecture is also presented. This methodology is assessed by means of a case study in the domain of eHealthCare. Finally, the performance of MAS-RECON is compared with the most popular tool for the orchestration of containerized applications.This work was supported in part by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (MCIU)/Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI)/Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), Union Europea (UE), under Grant RTI2018-096116-B-I00; and in part by the Gobierno Vasco (GV)/Eusko Jaurlaritza (EJ) under Grant IT1324-19

Ingeniería basada en modelos aplicada a sistemas distribuidos sensibles al contexto.

239 p.En esta Tesis Doctoral se plantea una metodología, soportada por mecanismos y herramientas, que da soporte al ciclo de desarrollo de aplicaciones distribuidas sensibles al contexto, aquéllas que supervisan su entorno físico con objeto de detectar cambios en él y reaccionar rápida y adecuadamente. Son aplicaciones presentes en diferentes campos de aplicación que demandan requisitos tales como ejecución en entornos distribuidos y heterogéneos, personalización de la supervisión, adaptación a cambios relevantes en su contexto, gestión de la calidad específica de cada aplicación, disponibilidad y recuperación ante situaciones de fallo. En concreto, se propone una aproximación de modelado genérica que permite la especificación y diseño de estas aplicaciones, independientemente de la plataforma de gestión responsable de su ejecución y atendiendo a los diferentes expertos que participan: expertos de dominio y desarrolladores de software. Se hace uso de la ingeniería dirigida por modelos para lograr la separación de dominios necesaria. Así, el experto de dominio realiza el diseño arquitectónico en el que se especifican todos sus requisitos, mientras que el desarrollador de software se centra en el diseño e implementación de la solución software correspondiente. Por tanto, la aproximación de modelado recoge los requisitos de las aplicaciones que una plataforma de gestión debe cumplir en tiempo de ejecución, al mismo tiempo que captura la información necesaria para la generación de su código. También se plantea un entorno de desarrollo integrado, basado en dicha aproximación, que da soporte al ciclo de desarrollo, cuyo prototipo se ha validado en un demostrador en el campo de la asistencia domiciliaria