Ambient orchestration in assisted environment

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) stands for information and communication technology enabled smart home environment that serves persons, especially the elderly and disabled in their independent living. Among many already developed AAL systems, technologies, resources and services, the main problem about their inherent interconnection still remains. One of the big research issues is to propose reference architecture and develop an open and standardized platform that should serve wider community as an enabler for cooperating concept – collaboration between competitors. This paper presents an experimental ambient orchestration in assisted environment on top of universAAL middleware that is based on the reference architecture under development within universAAL research project. Our contributions are the following: interconnection scenario using industry commercial products, verification of reference architecture and user guides, developed web services for ambient orchestration within case study and its demonstration in real environment

Applying Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Methods in Embedded Systems Design

In several types of embedded systems the applications are deployed both as software and as hardware components. For such systems, the partitioning decision is highly important since the implementation in software or hardware heavily influences the system properties. In the industry, it is rather common practice to take deployment decisions in an early stage of the design phase and based on a limited number of aspects. Often such decisions are taken based on hardware and software designers‟ expertise and do not account the requirements of the entire system and the project and business development constraints. This approach leads to several disadvantages such as redesign, interruption, etc. In this scenario, we see the need of approaching the partitioning process from a multiple decision perspective. As a consequence, we start by presenting an analysis of the most important and popular Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods and tools. We also identify the key requirements on the partitioning process. Subsequently, we evaluate all of the MCDA methods and tools with respect to the key partitioning requirements. By using the key partitioning requirements the methods and tools that the best suits the partitioning are selected. Finally, we propose two MCDA-based partitioning processes and validate their feasibility thorough an industrial case study