Smart Camp: Building Scalable and Highly Available IT-Infrastructures

The Western Australian resources boom has created a demand for a large amount of domestic accommodations, known as mining camps. However, due to the absent infrastructure within the remote regions of Australia, the energy supply of these mining camps is expensive. In order to reduce the electricity consumption of the mining camps, the Smart Camp project was initiated. The system infrastructure consists of a home automation based controller, placed in each mining accommodation unit to reduce energy consumption, and a centralized management unit, coordinating the controllers. Due to the fact that the size and complexity of mining camps may grow over time, the provided infrastructure of the management unit has to be able to evolve. One possible solution is to design a system in the context of high availability and horizontal scalability. This paper proposes a horizontally scalable and high availability infrastructural concept, in the context of the Smart Camp project. This concept also utilizes cost effective open source solutions running on commodity hardware. Within the context of horizontal scalability and reliability, this paper provides an applied research outline of some of the real world considerations, such as open source based high availability, load balancing, and distributed database solutions

Smart Camp: A Sustainable Digital Ecosystems Environment

Seamlessly integrating energy saving with the habits of daily life is an ambitious goal. It becomes even a bigger challenge in a remote area, like the Western-Australian Outback. Harsh environment, high temperatures and hard working conditions demand great exertion from humans and make one’s well-being an integral part of life. To bring both together – environmental sustainability and life quality – is a new interdisciplinary approach in the field of computer science. A “Smart Camp” is a new low rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN)-based solution, which provides accommodations in a remote mining site with a smart automation and information system to contribute toenvironmental sustainability and to provide amenities for its inhabitants. The Smart Camp intends to monitor and control household appliances with the aim to reduce the overall energy consumption. Additionally, multi-media components will be implemented, which aim to make the occupants life more pleasant by adding value to their habitat

SMART CAMP: Environmental Sustainability Through Intelligent Automation Technologies

A "Smart Camp" solution is a new approach to provide a mining community consisting of multiple households in a remote area in Western Australia with a intelligent wireless network and automated information system. This system intends to automate, control and monitor numerous household devices; supplies the tenants with multi-media services and aims to reduce energy consumption as well as improving the workers habitat. This paper theorizes the big picture with considerations on: how to set up, integrate and create a cost-effective "smart" wireless home automation network solution. It attempts to improve employee quality of life while simultaneously reducing energy consumption and the related emissions. Therefore, the latest Wireless Technologies in the field of domotics will be discussed and the importance of environmental sustainability and energy awareness will be outlined

Complex Environment Evolution: Challenges with Semantic Service Infrastructures

Service infrastructures are often key for the efficient operation of complex environments, such as a large Smart Home infrastructure for a mining camp. The evolution of such service infrastructures, in response to an increased workload on the system or a changing resource allocation, is often tedious and expensive, due to weak evolvability support of its service portfolio. This underpins the need for services to be designed with high evolvability characteristics. Semantic Web technologies have been anticipated as a basis for the required Web service evolution. JSON-LD is a prominent Semantic Web technology used in combination with ontologies, developed with the Web Ontology Language (OWL), to face the evolutionary challenges. Our applied research investigates common Web service tasks, automated using above technologies. It is explained, that this enables the creation of evolutionary building blocks. These building blocks are incrementally combined here for the overall service portfolio, culminating in a model of a semantic agent which excels in its capacity to evolve. Our model is then adopted and assessed for the system infrastructure of the Smart Camp project, as a use case for an agile, complex logistic environmen

SMART CAMP: benefits of media and smart service convergence

The Smart Camp project merges several challenges that we face. Raw materials for generating energy and producing goods are not always extracted where they are needed, namely in the sphere of man settlement. It is likely that growing numbers of workers are required to work in these remote areas. Being in such rural conditions is a complex and difficult undertaking for both, the companies and their labour force. High expenses, mainly caused by off-grid energy generation cause economical issues for the camp operators. Finding a work-life balance and dealing with the concomitant everyday problems in a remote area create human issues. Digital technologies that have evolved in recent years will be implemented using a range of convergent techniques in order to deal with both the energy costs and social challenges. This paper reports the status quo of research that has been done in this area and investigates how a combination of smart, cost effective and easy to implement wireless and media technologies can improve the livelihood of the labour while the energy consumption of the camp is reduced