Scalable software framework for real-time data processing in the railway environment

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City of things : enabling resource provisioning in smart cities

In the last few years, traffic over wireless networks has been increasing exponentially due to the impact of IoT. IoT is transforming a wide range of services in different domains of urban life, such as environmental monitoring, home automation, and public transportation. The so-called smart city applications will introduce a set of stringent requirements, such as low latency and high mobility, since services must be allocated and instantiated on demand, simultaneously, close to multiple devices at different locations. Efficient resource provisioning functionalities are needed to address these demanding constraints introduced by smart city applications while minimizing resource costs and maximizing QoS. In this article, the CoT framework is presented, which provides not only data collection and analysis functionalities but also automated resource provisioning mechanisms for future smart city applications. CoT is deployed as a smart city test-bed in Antwerp, Belgium, which allows researchers and developers to easily set up and validate IoT experiments. A smart city use case of air quality monitoring through the deployment of air quality sensors in moving cars is presented showing the full applicability of the CoT framework for a flexible and scalable resource provisioning in the smart city ecosystem

Towards computerizing intensive care sedation guidelines: design of a rule-based architecture for automated execution of clinical guidelines

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Computerized ICUs rely on software services to convey the medical condition of their patients as well as assisting the staff in taking treatment decisions. Such services are useful for following clinical guidelines quickly and accurately. However, the development of services is often time-consuming and error-prone. Consequently, many care-related activities are still conducted based on manually constructed guidelines. These are often ambiguous, which leads to unnecessary variations in treatments and costs.</p> <p>The goal of this paper is to present a semi-automatic verification and translation framework capable of turning manually constructed diagrams into ready-to-use programs. This framework combines the strengths of the manual and service-oriented approaches while decreasing their disadvantages. The aim is to close the gap in communication between the IT and the medical domain. This leads to a less time-consuming and error-prone development phase and a shorter clinical evaluation phase.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A framework is proposed that semi-automatically translates a clinical guideline, expressed as an XML-based flow chart, into a Drools Rule Flow by employing semantic technologies such as ontologies and SWRL. An overview of the architecture is given and all the technology choices are thoroughly motivated. Finally, it is shown how this framework can be integrated into a service-oriented architecture (SOA).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The applicability of the Drools Rule language to express clinical guidelines is evaluated by translating an example guideline, namely the sedation protocol used for the anaesthetization of patients, to a Drools Rule Flow and executing and deploying this Rule-based application as a part of a SOA. The results show that the performance of Drools is comparable to other technologies such as Web Services and increases with the number of decision nodes present in the Rule Flow. Most delays are introduced by loading the Rule Flows.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The framework is an effective solution for computerizing clinical guidelines as it allows for quick development, evaluation and human-readable visualization of the Rules and has a good performance. By monitoring the parameters of the patient to automatically detect exceptional situations and problems and by notifying the medical staff of tasks that need to be performed, the computerized sedation guideline improves the execution of the guideline.</p