An Application of Industrial Agents to Concrete Bridge Monitoring

Abstract: Bridges are key elements of transportation infrastructure. Being expensive vital infrastructure, continuous monitoring and preventive maintenance are of the essence. Wireless sensor networks, the technology of the 21 st century offers promising features for a wide range of applications including civil infrastructure monitoring. We present an application of sensor networks backed by agent technology and ubiquitous computing all merged in a holarchy for bridge monitoring. The overall system architecture, context ontology, sensors required, decision support system and agent architecture are presented. 1

CLAMP: Cross LAyer Management Plane for low power wireless sensor networks

Traditional layered architectures used for wireless networks pose drawbacks in terms of performance and efficiency. The constrained resources of wireless sensor nodes such as memory, computational power, and energy motivate to modify traditional layered architectures. In this paper we present a cross layer management plane for low power wireless sensor networks which enables sensor nodes to exploit cross layer information for efficient resource utilization. A set of well known parameters to be used to benefit from the synergy across layers is presented. The feasibility of the proposed scheme and the advantages drawn from using cross layer information is shown by simulation

Synthesis Of System Dynamics Tools For Holistic Conceptualization Of Water Resources Problems

Out-of-context analysis of water resources systems can result in unsustainable management strategies. To address this problem, systems thinking seeks to understand interactions among the subsystems driving a system\u27s overall behavior. System dynamics, a method for operationalizing systems thinking, facilitates holistic understanding of water resources systems, and strategic decision making. The approach also facilitates participatory modeling, and analysis of the system\u27s behavioral trends, essential to sustainable management. The field of water resources has not utilized the full capacity of system dynamics in the thinking phase of integrated water resources studies. We advocate that the thinking phase of modeling applications is critically important, and that system dynamics offers unique qualitative tools that improve understanding of complex problems. Thus, this paper describes the utility of system dynamics for holistic water resources planning and management by illustrating the fundamentals of the approach. Using tangible examples, we provide an overview of Causal Loop and Stock and Flow Diagrams, reference modes of dynamic behavior, and system archetypes to demonstrate the use of these qualitative tools for holistic conceptualization of water resources problems. Finally, we present a summary of the potential benefits as well as caveats of qualitative system dynamics for water resources decision making. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

Towards Energy Efficient Cloud: A Green and Intelligent Migration of Traditional Energy Sources

Geographically distributed cloud data centers (DCs) consume enormous amounts of energy to meet the ever-increasing processing and storage demands of users. The brown energy generated using fossil fuels is expensive and significantly contributes to global warming. Considering the environmental impact caused by the high carbon emissions and relatively high energy cost of brown energy, we propose the integration of renewable energy sources (RES), especially solar and wind energy, with brown energy to power cloud data centers. In our earlier study, we addressed the intermittency of renewable energy sources, where we replaced the random initialization of artificial neural network (ANN) edge weights with the harmony search algorithm (HSA)-optimized assignment of weights. This study incorporated reliably forecast solar and wind energy into the input parameters of our proposed green energy manager (GEM), for cost minimization, carbon emission minimization, and better energy management of cloud DCs, to make our current study more reliable and trustworthy. Four power sources, on-site solar energy and wind energy, off-site solar energy and wind energy, energy stored in energy storage devices, and brown energy, were considered in this study and simulations were carried out for three different cases. The simulation results showed that case 1 (all brown) was 58% more expensive and caused 71% higher carbon emissions than case 2.1 (cost minimization). Case 1 (all brown) was 39% more expensive and had 80% higher carbon emissions than case 2.2 (carbon emission minimization). The simulation results justify the necessity and importance of the GEM, and finally the results proved that our proposed GEM is less expensive and more environmentally friendly

Synthesis of System Dynamics Tools for Holistic Conceptualization of Water Resources Problems

Out-of-context analysis of water resources systems can result in unsustainable management strategies. To address this problem, systems thinking seeks to understand interactions among the subsystems driving a system’s overall behavior. System dynamics, a method for operationalizing systems thinking, facilitates holistic understanding of water resources systems, and strategic decision making. The approach also facilitates participatory modeling, and analysis of the system’s behavioral trends, essential to sustainable management. The field of water resources has not utilized the full capacity of system dynamics in the thinking phase of integrated water resources studies. We advocate that the thinking phase of modeling applications is critically important, and that system dynamics offers unique qualitative tools that improve understanding of complex problems. Thus, this paper describes the utility of system dynamics for holistic water resources planning and management by illustrating the fundamentals of the approach. Using tangible examples, we provide an overview of Causal Loop and Stock and Flow Diagrams, reference modes of dynamic behavior, and system archetypes to demonstrate the use of these qualitative tools for holistic conceptualization of water resources problems. Finally, we present a summary of the potential benefits as well as caveats of qualitative system dynamics for water resources decision making

Enhancement and Assessment of a Code-Analysis-Based Energy Estimation Framework

Energy estimation of applications helps developers greening the smartphone- and Internet-of-Things-based devices. Traditional energy estimation schemes consider smartphone component's power measurement or code analysis methods for energy estimation of applications. The existing code analysis method considers the energy cost of software operations to minimize the energy estimation overhead of dynamic estimation methods. However, it overlooked cache storage analysis and overheads associated with it due to concurrent program execution at runtime. As a result, the performance of estimation tools is affected. To handle these issues, this study put forward an enhanced static-code-analysis-based lightweight energy estimation (SA-LEE) framework that has considered overheads associated with the application runtime execution environment, cache storage analysis, and the application inactivity period for energy estimation of applications. The experiments revealed that the SA-LEE model has minimized the estimation time and the energy overhead by 98% and 97%, respectively. Also, the accuracy is observed to be 82-88%. © 2018 IEE