Understanding and predicting trends in urban freight transport

Among different components of urban mobility, urban freight transport is usually considered as the least sustainable. Limited traffic infrastructures and increasing demands in dense urban regions lead to frequent delivery runs with smaller freight vehicles. This increases the traffic in urban areas and has negative impacts upon the quality of life in urban populations. Data driven optimizations are essential to better utilize existing urban transport infrastructures and to reduce the negative effects of freight deliveries for the cities. However, there is limited work and data driven research on urban delivery areas and freight transportation networks. In this paper, we collect and analyse data on urban freight deliveries and parking areas towards an optimized urban freight transportation system. Using a new check-in based mobile parking system for freight vehicles, we aim to understand and optimize freight distribution processes. We explore the relationship between areas' availability patterns and underlying traffic behaviour in order to understand the trends in urban freight transport. By applying the detected patterns we predict the availabilities of loading/unloading areas, and thus open up new possibilities for delivery route planning and better managing of freight transport infrastructures. © 2017 IEEE

Designing Security Requirements Models through Planning

The quest for designing secure and trusted software has led to refined Software Engineering methodologies that rely on tools to support the design process. Automated reasoning mechanisms for requirements and software verification are by now a well-accepted part of the design process, and model driven architectures support the automation of the refinement process. We claim that we can further push the envelope towards the automatic exploration and selection among design alternatives and show that this is concretely possible for Secure Tropos, a requirements engineering methodology that addresses security and trust concerns. In Secure Tropos, a design consists of a network of actors (agents, positions or roles) with delegation/permission dependencies among them. Accordingly, the generation of design alternatives can be accomplished by a planner which is given as input a set of actors and goals and generates alternative multiagent plans to fulfill all given goals.We validate our claim with a case study using a state-of-the-art planner

CIGO! Mobility management platform for growing efficient and balanced smart city ecosystem

The massive amount of tourists, citizens and traffic in big cities usually collapse busy areas causing transport inefficiency, unbalanced economic growth, crime, and nuisance among citizens and visitors. Therefore, the Smart City strategies such as Smart Mobility and Smart Governance naturally arise as means to improve mobility in urban areas. In this paper we propose a novel mobility management platform and business model that can attract numerous actors and still be orchestrated by the city government. The proposed platform integrates mobility data from various sources such as Open Data, mobile applications, sensors and government data, allowing for its visualisation and analysis while making it actionable through associated third party mobile applications. We propose to inject the city mobility policies to the third party mobile applications which provide services related to the city resources. In this way we form a value chain which connects different actors (city governments, mobile application providers, POI owners, companies that require logistics in cities, and final users) who both take a part in improving the mobility in urban areas, and benefit from the way mobility policies being executed. In this paper we discuss the business model and logical architecture of the proposed platform which has been already deployed in the city of Barcelona.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

CIGO! Mobility management platform for growing efficient and balanced smart city ecosystem

The massive amount of tourists, citizens and traffic in big cities usually collapse busy areas causing transport inefficiency, unbalanced economic growth, crime, and nuisance among citizens and visitors. Therefore, the Smart City strategies such as Smart Mobility and Smart Governance naturally arise as means to improve mobility in urban areas. In this paper we propose a novel mobility management platform and business model that can attract numerous actors and still be orchestrated by the city government. The proposed platform integrates mobility data from various sources such as Open Data, mobile applications, sensors and government data, allowing for its visualisation and analysis while making it actionable through associated third party mobile applications. We propose to inject the city mobility policies to the third party mobile applications which provide services related to the city resources. In this way we form a value chain which connects different actors (city governments, mobile application providers, POI owners, companies that require logistics in cities, and final users) who both take a part in improving the mobility in urban areas, and benefit from the way mobility policies being executed. In this paper we discuss the business model and logical architecture of the proposed platform which has been already deployed in the city of Barcelona.Peer Reviewe

Symbolic agent negotiation for Semantic Web service exploitation

Abstract. This paper presents an architecture and a methodology for agent-based Web service discovery and composition. We assume that Web services are described with declarative specifications like DAML-S. Based on the declarative information about services, symbolic reasoning can be applied while searching for or composing automatically new services. We propose that symbolic agent negotiation could be used for dynamic Web service discovery and composition. Symbolic negotiation, as we consider it here, is a mixture of distributed planning and information exchange. Therefore, by using symbolic negotiation for automated service composition, we support information collection and integration during service composition. The latter aspect has been largely neglected in automated service composition until now.