Quantify resilience enhancement of UTS through exploiting connect community and internet of everything emerging technologies

This work aims at investigating and quantifying the Urban Transport System (UTS) resilience enhancement enabled by the adoption of emerging technology such as Internet of Everything (IoE) and the new trend of the Connected Community (CC). A conceptual extension of Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and its formalization have been proposed and used to model UTS complexity. The scope is to identify the system functions and their interdependencies with a particular focus on those that have a relation and impact on people and communities. Network analysis techniques have been applied to the FRAM model to identify and estimate the most critical community-related functions. The notion of Variability Rate (VR) has been defined as the amount of output variability generated by an upstream function that can be tolerated/absorbed by a downstream function, without significantly increasing of its subsequent output variability. A fuzzy based quantification of the VR on expert judgment has been developed when quantitative data are not available. Our approach has been applied to a critical scenario (water bomb/flash flooding) considering two cases: when UTS has CC and IoE implemented or not. The results show a remarkable VR enhancement if CC and IoE are deploye

Km4City Ontology Building vs Data Harvesting and Cleaning for Smart-city Services

Presently, a very large number of public and private data sets are available from local governments. In most cases, they are not semantically interoperable and a huge human effort would be needed to create integrated ontologies and knowledge base for smart city. Smart City ontology is not yet standardized, and a lot of research work is needed to identify models that can easily support the data reconciliation, the management of the complexity, to allow the data reasoning. In this paper, a system for data ingestion and reconciliation of smart cities related aspects as road graph, services available on the roads, traffic sensors etc., is proposed. The system allows managing a big data volume of data coming from a variety of sources considering both static and dynamic data. These data are mapped to a smart-city ontology, called KM4City (Knowledge Model for City), and stored into an RDF-Store where they are available for applications via SPARQL queries to provide new services to the users via specific applications of public administration and enterprises. The paper presents the process adopted to produce the ontology and the big data architecture for the knowledge base feeding on the basis of open and private data, and the mechanisms adopted for the data verification, reconciliation and validation. Some examples about the possible usage of the coherent big data knowledge base produced are also offered and are accessible from the RDF-Store and related services. The article also presented the work performed about reconciliation algorithms and their comparative assessment and selection

Battery choice and management for New Generation Electric Vehicles

Different types of electric vehicles (EVs) have been recently designed with the aim of solving pollution problems caused by the emission of gasoline-powered engines. Environmental problems promote the adoption of new-generation electric vehicles for urban transportation. As it is well known, one of the weakest points of electric vehicles is the battery system. Vehicle autonomy and, therefore, accurate detection of battery state of charge (SoC) together with battery expected life, i.e., battery state of health, are among the major drawbacks that prevent the introduction of electric vehicles in the consumer market. The electric scooter may provide the most feasible opportunity among EVs. They may be a replacement product for the primary-use vehicle, especially in Europe and Asia, provided that drive performance, safety, and cost issues are similar to actual engine scooters. The battery system choice is a crucial item, and thanks to an increasing emphasis on vehicle range and performance, the Li-ion battery could become a viable candidate. This paper deals with the design of a battery pack based on Li-ion technology for a prototype electric scooter with high performance and autonomy. The adopted battery system is composed of a suitable number of cells series connected, featuring a high voltage level. Therefore, cell equalization and monitoring need to be provided. Due to manufacturing asymmetries, charge and discharge cycles lead to cell unbalancing, reducing battery capacity and, depending on cell type, causing safety troubles or strongly limiting the storage capacity of the full pack. No solution is available on the market at a cheap price, because of the required voltage level and performance, therefore, a dedicated battery management system was designed, that also includes a battery SoC monitoring. The proposed solution features a high capability of energy storing in braking conditions, charge equalization, overvoltage and undervoltage protection and, obviously, SoC information in order to optimize autonomy instead of performance or vice-versa

Performance assessment of RDF graph databases for smart city services

Abstract Smart cities are providing advanced services aggregating and exploiting data from different sources. Cities collect static data such as road graphs, service description, as well as dynamic/real time data like weather forecast, traffic sensors, bus positions, city sensors, events, emergency data, flows, etc. RDF stores may be used to set up knowledge bases integrating heterogeneous information for web and mobile applications to use the data for new advanced services to citizens and city administrators, thus exploiting inferential capabilities, temporal and spatial reasoning, and text indexing. In this paper, the needs and constraints for RDF stores to be used for smart cities services, together with the currently available RDF stores are evaluated. The assessment model allows a full understanding of whether an RDF store is suitable to be used as a basis for Smart City modeling and applications. The RDF assessment model is also supported by a benchmark which extends available RDF store benchmarks at the state the art. The comparison of the RDF stores has been applied on a number of well-known RDF stores as Virtuoso, GraphDB (former OWLIM), Oracle, StarDog, and many others. The paper also reports the adoption of the proposed Smart City RDF Benchmark on the basis of Florence Smart City model, data sets and tools accessible as Km4City Http://www.Km4City.org , and adopted in the European Commission international smart city projects named RESOLUTE H2020, REPLICATE H2020, and in Sii-Mobility National Smart City project in Italy

Automatic formatting of music sheets through MILLA rule-based language and engine

Automated music formatting helps composers and copyists to speed up the process of music score editing by facilitating complex evaluations needed to write correct music sheets in terms of symbol positioning, justification, etc. Delegating this activity to the computer allows the composer to increase the efficiency by letting him/her concentrate on more creative aspects. Music formatting is one of the most relevant problems of programs for music notation editing. Several written and non-written rules are typically applied by music engravers and composers. In this paper, an approach for formalizing formatting rules and the related tools are presented. The approach is based on insertion, positioning and priority rules and on the associated conditions for their activation. Conditions and rules formalized in the proposed approach are automatically executed by a formatting engine called MILLA (Music Intelligence Formatting Language). The Open Source and free distributed WEDELMUSIC editor (www.wedelmusic.org) is based on MILLA. The approach is presente

Smart Cloud Engine and Solution Based on Knowledge Base

AbstractComplexity of cloud infrastructures needs models and tools for process management, configuration, scaling, elastic computing and healthiness control. This paper presents a Smart Cloud solution based on a Knowledge Base, KB, with the aim of modeling cloud resources, Service Level Agreements and their evolution, and enabling the reasoning on structures by implementing strategies of efficient smart cloud management and intelligence. The solution proposed provides formal verification tools and intelligence for cloud control. It can be easily integrated with any cloud configuration manager, cloud orchestrator, and monitoring tool, since the connections with these tools are performed by using REST calls and XML files. It has been validated in the large ICARO Cloud project with a national cloud service provider

IoT-Enabled Smart Cities: A Review of Concepts, Frameworks and Key Technologies

In recent years, smart cities have been significantly developed and have greatly expanded their potential. In fact, novel advancements to the Internet of things (IoT) have paved the way for new possibilities, representing a set of key enabling technologies for smart cities and allowing the production and automation of innovative services and advanced applications for the different city stakeholders. This paper presents a review of the research literature on IoT-enabled smart cities, with the aim of highlighting the main trends and open challenges of adopting IoT technologies for the development of sustainable and efficient smart cities. This work first provides a survey on the key technologies proposed in the literature for the implementation of IoT frameworks, and then a review of the main smart city approaches and frameworks, based on classification into eight domains, which extends the traditional six domain classification that is typically adopted in most of the related works