Ontology development for run-time safety management methodology in Smart Work Environments using ambient knowledge

This paper presents the development of a decision support system for run-time safety management in Smart Work Environments (SWEs). Our approach consists of four main phases: (i) definition of the basic steps of a methodology for run-time safety management; (ii) development of an ontological knowledge-base of safety in work environments; (iii) definition of constraints on the ontology based on organizations’ safety protocols; (iv) communication of relevant information to each actor in the safety management team. We propose a generic ontological model of safety expertise, based on Occupational Safety and Health Regulations (OSHA), that is employed as Knowledge required in our safety management methodology based on the MAPE-K (Monitor–Analyze–Plan–Execute and Knowledge) loop. We present the RAMIRES (Risk-Adaptive Management in Resilient Environments with Security) tool, implementing this methodology. RAMIRES is developed as a dashboard, supporting the safety management team in understanding the risk and its consequences, and to support decision making in risk treatment. RAMIRES interacts with the SWE and the safety management team (actors) in order to: (i) communicate the risks and preventive strategies to actors; (ii) obtain more data about the observed areas to understand the risk and its consequences; and (iii) execute the automatic preventive strategies and support actors in the execution of human-operated preventive strategies. In this paper, we show the details on concepts designed in the safety ontology and illustrate how these concepts can be extended to provide an abstract model of a specific use case. Furthermore, we propose the definition of constraints on the ontology using logic-based rules. Finally, we discuss the advantages and limitations of the proposed methodology regarding the resilience of the environment

Risks in Smart Environments and Adaptive Access Controls

In monitored environments, where risks can be prevented via sensors and spatial data technologies, security rules, in particular access control rules, should be made adaptive to the situation at hand at run time. The paper presents adaptive access controls suitable for “smart environments”, based on the Attribute-based Access Control paradigm. Risks are notified by monitoring devices and managed by a Risk Management System, which is illustrated. To adapt the access control decisions to risk mitigation needs, security policies are defined to dynamically activate or deactivate access rules according to the operations required to manage the risks

Context-based risk-adaptive security model and conflict management

In dynamic and risk-prone environments, security rules should be flexible enough to permit the treatment of risks, and to manage privileges on resources based on the situation at hand. For this purpose, we define safety-centric contexts based on risk description that is provided by the safety management system. This paper presents a riskadaptive access control model that adopts hierarchies of contexts and security domains to make adaptations to risks at different levels of criticality. Since various risks may arise simultaneously, two or more security domains might be applicable at the same time incorporating various security rules which might lead to conflicts. Therefore, an approach to analyze conflicts is essential. In this work, we propose a conflict analysis algorithm based on set theory and we illustrate its usage with the proposed risk-adaptive access control model

Dynamic security modeling in risk management using environmental knowledge

This paper presents the design principles for dynamic security modeling in risk-prone environments, where elements of the environment to be protected are classified in Contexts and are monitored and geo-referenced. Based on a motivating scenario, the security model elements are introduced building on the ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control) paradigm. Dynamicity is integrated into the model to make it self-adaptable to dynamic changes in the environment conditions, including the occurrence of risks and emergencies. The model aims at dynamically authorizing subjects to access diverse data and physical objects (resources) based on adaptive activation/deactivation of security rules and changes in subject or object attributes, while still preserving the need-to-know principle

HANDY: A Configurable Gesture Recognition System

Abstract—With the growing usage of computer systems in daily life, a natural and intuitive Human Computer Interaction (HCI) method to support the embedding of computer systems in our environment seems necessary. Gestures are of utmost importance for the design of natural user interfaces. Hand gesture recog-nition to extract meaningful expressions from the human hand movements and postures is being used for different applications. However, the recognition of hand gestures that contain different hand poses can be challenging. In this paper, we propose a system (called HANDY) for hand gesture recognition that is flexible to be trained to recognize a variety of user-defined gestures defined as sequences of static hand postures. The system has been designed to be used in uncontrolled environments, to handle dynamic and cluttered backgrounds, and without the need of using any wearable sensor or any specific clothing. Evaluation results show a good average accuracy in gesture recognition. Keywords-interactive systems; gesture-based interface; natural HCI; personalizable system I

An ontological approach for run-time safety management in smart work environments

This paper proposes a methodology for run-time safety management in Smart Work Environments (SWE), based on a semantic assessment of the risks, based on defined indicators. To assess SWE safety, we define a novel ontological model for representing its characteristics and introduce a metric for run-time evaluation of the SWE safety level. A description logic reasoner is used to automatically check the consistency of the proposed ontology. The novelty of the approach lies in treating safety at run-time