Rapid prototyping of complete systems, the case study of a smart parking

International audienceThis paper details how LINC a coordination middle-ware, can fasten the development of prototypes that integrate several equipment. A case study of rapid prototyping is presented. It illustrates how a smart parking prototype has been built from several independent and autonomous equipment, coming from different vendors. This has been achieved by parallel development thanks to the resource based approach offered by LINC. This paper also describes how LINC helps building rich user interfaces quickly and easily. I. INTRODUCTION Embedded systems have been part of our daily life for decades. Most of the industrial or consumer products embed multiple processors, sensors and actuators. The next step is the opportunity to build new products, systems, and usages, combining together several of these products. In such innovative and quickly evolving context it is necessary to build prototypes to test, validate, and challenge new products usages or solutions. This paper considers prototypes including several equipment, possibly from different vendors. Such prototypes can be used to exhibit demonstrations in a trade fair, to convince investors of the viability of an idea or to verify the adequacy of the solutions for early adopters. To succeed in today's highly competitive market, a prototype should be more than a few items wired together with a command line interface. Targeted prototypes are real-life demonstrations of new products or technologies with a high end-user experience. Moreover, a prototype should be included in its targeted environment (e.g. a house, a building or a parking). The development of prototypes is vital during the validation stage of new products as they may help to

Dynamic Reconfiguration of Building Automation Systems with LINC

This paper details a new approach for dynamic reconfiguration of building automation systems. To achieve dynamic reconfiguration in this context we rely on LINC, a coordination middleware that provides an abstraction layer allowing the encapsulation of hardware and software components. This paper shows two aspects of dynamic reconfiguration: one using the LINC middleware as an intermediation layer and one using LINC to reconfigure autonomous building management systems. A case study is presented. It consists in the reconfiguration of a room that can be split in two or merged in one according to the current needs. The building is equipped with the LON system, a standard in building automation. Such a reconfiguration is normally done manually by a skilled technician. Thanks to the proposed approach, it can now be autonomous and triggered by various external events such as sensor readings, a remote controller or information from an agenda