VISIONS Vehicular communication Improvement : solution based on IMS Operational Nodes and Services

Digital services and communications in vehicular scenarios provide the essential assets to improve road transport in several ways like reducing accidents, improving traffic efficiency and optimizing the transport of goods and people. Vehicular communications typically rely on VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks). In these networks vehicles communicate with each other without the need of infrastructure. VANET are mainly oriented to disseminate information to the vehicles in certain geographic area for time critical services like safety warnings but present very challenging requirements that have not been successfully fulfilled nowadays. Some of these challenges are; channel saturation due to simultaneous radio access of many vehicles, routing protocols in topologies that vary rapidly, minimum quality of service assurance and security mechanisms to efficiently detect and neutralize malicious attacks. Vehicular services can be classified in four important groups: Safety, Efficiency, Sustainability and Infotainment. The benefits of these services for the transport sector are clear but many technological and business challenges need to be faced before a real mass market deployment. Service delivery platforms are not prepared for fulfilling the needs of this complex environment with restrictive requirements due to the criticism of some services To overcome this situation, we propose a solution called VISIONS “Vehicular communication Improvement: Solution based on IMS Operational Nodes and Services”. VISIONS leverages on IMS subsystem and NGN enablers, and follows the CALM reference Architecture standardized by ISO. It also avoids the use of Road Side Units (RSUs), reducing complexity and high costs in terms of deployment and maintenance. We demonstrate the benefits in the following areas: 1. VANET networks efficiency. VISIONS provide a mechanism for the vehicles to access valuable information from IMS and its capabilities through a cellular channel. This efficiency improvement will occur in two relevant areas: a. Routing mechanisms. These protocols are responsible of carrying information from a vehicle to another (or a group of vehicles) using multihop mechanisms. We do not propose a new algorithm but the use of VANET topology information provided through our solution to enrich the performance of these protocols. b. Security. Many aspects of security (privacy, key, authentication, access control, revocation mechanisms, etc) are not resolved in vehicular communications. Our solution efficiently disseminates revocation information to neutralize malicious nodes in the VANET. 2. Service delivery platform. It is based on extended enablers, reference architectures, standard protocols and open APIs. By following this approach, we reduce costs and resources for service development, deployment and maintenance. To quantify these benefits in VANET networks, we provide an analytical model of the system and simulate our solution in realistic scenarios. The simulations results demonstrate how VISIONS improves the performance of relevant routing protocols and is more efficient neutralizing security attacks than the widely proposed solutions based on RSUs. Finally, we design an innovative Social Network service based in our platform, explaining how VISIONS facilitate the deployment and usage of complex capabilities. RESUMEN Los servicios digitales y comunicaciones en entornos vehiculares proporcionan herramientas esenciales para mejorar el transporte por carretera; reduciendo el número de accidentes, mejorando la eficiencia del tráfico y optimizando el transporte de mercancías y personas. Las comunicaciones vehiculares generalmente están basadas en redes VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks). En dichas redes, los vehículos se comunican entre sí sin necesidad de infraestructura. Las redes VANET están principalmente orientadas a difundir información (por ejemplo advertencias de seguridad) a los vehículos en determinadas zonas geográficas, pero presentan unos requisitos muy exigentes que no se han resuelto con éxito hasta la fecha. Algunos de estos retos son; saturación del canal de acceso de radio debido al acceso simultáneo de múltiples vehículos, la eficiencia de protocolos de encaminamiento en topologías que varían rápidamente, la calidad de servicio (QoS) y los mecanismos de seguridad para detectar y neutralizar los ataques maliciosos de manera eficiente. Los servicios vehiculares pueden clasificarse en cuatro grupos: Seguridad, Eficiencia del tráfico, Sostenibilidad, e Infotainment (información y entretenimiento). Los beneficios de estos servicios para el sector son claros, pero es necesario resolver muchos desafíos tecnológicos y de negocio antes de una implementación real. Las actuales plataformas de despliegue de servicios no están preparadas para satisfacer las necesidades de este complejo entorno con requisitos muy restrictivos debido a la criticidad de algunas aplicaciones. Con el objetivo de mejorar esta situación, proponemos una solución llamada VISIONS “Vehicular communication Improvement: Solution based on IMS Operational Nodes and Services”. VISIONS se basa en el subsistema IMS, las capacidades NGN y es compatible con la arquitectura de referencia CALM estandarizado por ISO para sistemas de transporte. También evita el uso de elementos en las carreteras, conocidos como Road Side Units (RSU), reduciendo la complejidad y los altos costes de despliegue y mantenimiento. A lo largo de la tesis, demostramos los beneficios en las siguientes áreas: 1. Eficiencia en redes VANET. VISIONS proporciona un mecanismo para que los vehículos accedan a información valiosa proporcionada por IMS y sus capacidades a través de un canal de celular. Dicho mecanismo contribuye a la mejora de dos áreas importantes: a. Mecanismos de encaminamiento. Estos protocolos son responsables de llevar información de un vehículo a otro (o a un grupo de vehículos) utilizando múltiples saltos. No proponemos un nuevo algoritmo de encaminamiento, sino el uso de información topológica de la red VANET a través de nuestra solución para enriquecer el funcionamiento de los protocolos más relevantes. b. Seguridad. Muchos aspectos de la seguridad (privacidad, gestión de claves, autenticación, control de acceso, mecanismos de revocación, etc) no están resueltos en las comunicaciones vehiculares. Nuestra solución difunde de manera eficiente la información de revocación para neutralizar los nodos maliciosos en la red. 2. Plataforma de despliegue de servicios. Está basada en capacidades NGN, arquitecturas de referencia, protocolos estándar y APIs abiertos. Siguiendo este enfoque, reducimos costes y optimizamos procesos para el desarrollo, despliegue y mantenimiento de servicios vehiculares. Para cuantificar estos beneficios en las redes VANET, ofrecemos un modelo de analítico del sistema y simulamos nuestra solución en escenarios realistas. Los resultados de las simulaciones muestran cómo VISIONS mejora el rendimiento de los protocolos de encaminamiento relevantes y neutraliza los ataques a la seguridad de forma más eficientes que las soluciones basadas en RSU. Por último, diseñamos un innovador servicio de red social basado en nuestra plataforma, explicando cómo VISIONS facilita el despliegue y el uso de las capacidades NGN.

MAIA: an event-based modular architecture for intelligent agents

Online services are no longer isolated. The release of public APIs and technologies such as web hooks are allowing users and developers to access their information easily. Intelligent agents could use this information to provide a better user experience across services, connecting services with smart automatic. behaviours or actions. However, agent platforms are not prepared to easily add external sources such as web services, which hinders the usage of agents in the so-called Evented or Live Web. As a solution, this paper introduces an event-based architecture for agent systems, in accordance with the new tendencies in web programming. In particular, it is focused on personal agents that interact with several web services. With this architecture, called MAIA, connecting to new web services does not involve any modification in the platform.

SOA-Based Model for Value-Added ITS Services Delivery

Integration is currently a key factor in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), especially because of the ever increasing service demands originating from the ITS industry and ITS users. The current ITS landscape is made up of multiple technologies that are tightly coupled, and its interoperability is extremely low, which limits ITS services generation. Given this fact, novel information technologies (IT) based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm have begun to introduce new ways to address this problem. The SOA paradigm allows the construction of loosely coupled distributed systems that can help to integrate the heterogeneous systems that are part of ITS. In this paper, we focus on developing an SOA-based model for integrating information technologies (IT) into ITS to achieve ITS service delivery. To develop our model, the ITS technologies and services involved were identified, catalogued, and decoupled. In doing so, we applied our SOA-based model to integrate all of the ITS technologies and services, ranging from the lowest-level technical components, such as roadside unit as a service (RS S), to the most abstract ITS services that will be offered to ITS users (value-added services). To validate our model, a functionality case study that included all of the components of our model was designed.

Web services based state of the environment reporting

The Environmental Sciences Division within Queensland Environmental Protection Agency works to monitor, assess and model the condition of the environment. The Division has as a legislative responsibility to produce a whole-of-government report every four years dealing environmental conditions and trends in a ”State of the Environment report” (SoE)[1][2][3]. State of Environment Web Service Reporting System is a supplementary web service based SoE reporting tool, which aims to deliver accurate, timely and accessible information on the condition of the environment through web services via Internet [4][5]. This prototype provides a scientific assessment of environmental conditions for a set of environmental indicators. It contains text descriptions and tables, charts and maps with spatiotemporal dimensions to show the impact of certain environmental indicators on our environment. This prototype is a template based indicator system, to which the administrator may add new sql queries for new indicator services without changing the architecture and codes of this template. The benefits are brought through a service-oriented architecture which provides an online query service with seamless integration. In addition, since it uses web service architecture, each individual component within the application can be implemented by using different programming languages and in different operating systems. Although the services showed in this demo are built upon two datasets of regional ecosystem and protection area of Queensland, it will be possible to report on the condition of water, air, land, coastal zones, energy resources, biodiversity, human settlements and natural culture heritage on the fly as well. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the prototype. In the next section, I will discuss the research tasks in the prototype.

Adaptive SOA Infrastructure Based on Variability Management

In order to exploit the adaptability of a SOA infrastructure, it becomes necessary to provide platform mechanisms that support a mapping of the variability in the applications to the variability provided by the infrastructure. The approach focuses on the configuration of the needed infrastructure mechanisms including support for the derivation of the infrastructure variability model.

SLA-Based Guidelines for Database Transitioning

Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) became popular ways to develop software over the last years. During the life-cycle of a software system, several components and services can be developed, evolved and replaced. In production environments, the replacement of core components, such as databases, is often a risky and delicate operation, where several factors and stakeholders should be considered. Service Level Agreement (SLA), according to ITILv3’s official glossary, is “an agreement between an IT service provider and a customer. The agreement consists on a set of measurable constraints that a service provider must guarantee to its customers.”. In practical terms, SLA is a document that a service provider delivers to its consumers with minimum quality of service (QoS) metrics.This work is intended to assesses and improve the use of SLAs to guide the transitioning process of databases on production environments. In particular, in this work we propose SLA-Based Guidelines/Process to support migrations from a relational database management system (RDBMS) to a NoSQL one. Our study is validated by case studies.

An Innovation Model for Collaborative Networks of SOA-Based Software Providers

Part 5: Service Orientation in Collaborative Networks

A reference business process for ecological niche modelling

Ecological niche modelling combines species occurrence points with environmental raster layers in order to obtain models for describing the probabilistic distribution of species. The process to generate an ecological niche model is complex. It requires dealing with a large amount of data, use of different software packages for data conversion, for model generation and for different types of processing and analyses, among other functionalities. A software platform that integrates all requirements under a single and seamless interface would be very helpful for users. Furthermore, since biodiversity modelling is constantly evolving, new requirements are constantly being added in terms of functions, algorithms and data formats. This evolution must be accompanied by any software intended to be used in this area. In this scenario, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an appropriate choice for designing such systems. According to SOA best practices and methodologies, the design of a reference business process must be performed prior to the architecture definition. The purpose is to understand the complexities of the process (business process in this context refers to the ecological niche modelling problem) and to design an architecture able to offer a comprehensive solution, called a reference architecture, that can be further detailed when implementing specific systems. This paper presents a reference business process for ecological niche modelling, as part of a major work focused on the definition of a reference architecture based on SOA concepts that will be used to evolve the openModeller software package for species modelling. The basic steps that are performed while developing a model are described, highlighting important aspects, based on the knowledge of modelling experts. In order to illustrate the steps defined for the process, an experiment was developed, modelling the distribution of Ouratea spectabilis (Mart.) Engl. (Ochnaceae) using openModeller. As a consequence of the knowledge gained with this work, many desirable improvements on the modelling software packages have been identified and are presented. Also, a discussion on the potential for large-scale experimentation in ecological niche modelling is provided, highlighting opportunities for research. The results obtained are very important for those involved in the development of modelling tools and systems, for requirement analysis and to provide insight on new features and trends for this category of systems. They can also be very helpful for beginners in modelling research, who can use the process and the experiment example as a guide to this complex activity. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

SIAT:sistema de informações e alertas de trânsito

A evolução tecnológica e das sociedades permitiu que, hoje em dia, uma boa parte da população tenha acesso a dispositivos móveis com funcionalidades avançadas. Com este tipo de dispositivos, temos acesso a inúmeras fontes de informação em tempo-real, mas esta característica ainda não é, hoje em dia, aproveitada na sua totalidade. Este projecto tenta tirar partido desta realidade para, utilizando os diversos dispositivos móveis, criar uma rede de troca de informações de trânsito. O utilizador apenas necessita de servir-se do seu dispositivo móvel para, automaticamente, obter as mais recentes informações de trânsito enquanto, paralelamente, partilha com os outros utilizadores a sua informação. Apesar de existirem outras alternativas no mercado, com soluções que permitem usufruir do mesmo tipo de funcionalidades, nenhuma utiliza este tipo de dispositivos (GPS’s convencionais, por exemplo). Um dos requisitos necessário na implementação deste projecto é uma solução de geocoding. Após terem sido testadas várias soluções, nenhuma cumpria, na totalidade, os requisitos deste projecto, o que originou o desenvolvimento de uma nova solução que cumpre esses requisitos. A solução é, toda ela, muito modular, formada por vários componentes, cada um com responsabilidades bem identificadas. A arquitectura desta solução baseia-se nos padrões de desenvolvimento de uma Service Oriented Architecture. Todos os componentes disponibilizam as suas operações através de web services, e a sua descoberta recorre ao protocolo WS-Discovery. Estes vários componentes podem ser divididos em duas categorias: os do núcleo, responsáveis por criar e oferecer as funcionalidades requisitadas neste projecto e os módulos externos, nos quais se incluem as aplicações que apresentam as funcionalidades ao utilizador. Foram criadas duas formas de consumir a informação oferecida pelo serviço SIAT: a aplicação móvel e um website. No âmbito dos dispositivos móveis, foi desenvolvida uma aplicação para o sistema operativo Windows Phone 7.

MDAI: Model based Design in Automobile Industry

It is proposed a new approach based on a methodology, assisted by a tool, to create new products in the automobile industry based on previous defined processes and experiences inspired on a set of best practices or principles: it is based on high-level models or specifications; it is component-based architecture centric; it is based on generative programming techniques. This approach follows in essence the MDA (Model Driven Architecture) philosophy with some specific characteristics. We propose a repository that keeps related information, such as models, applications, design information, generated artifacts and even information concerning the development process itself (e.g., generation steps, tests and integration milestones). Generically, this methodology receives the users' requirements to a new product (e.g., functional, non-functional, product specification) as its main inputs and produces a set of artifacts (e.g., design parts, process validation output) as its main output, that will be integrated in the engineer design tool (e.g. CAD system) facilitating the work.

Cooperation mechanism for team-work based multi-agent system in dynamic scheduling through meta-heuristics

This paper describes a Multi-agent Scheduling System that assumes the existence of several Machines Agents (which are decision-making entities) distributed inside the Manufacturing System that interact and cooperate with other agents in order to obtain optimal or near-optimal global performances. Agents have to manage their internal behaviors and their relationships with other agents via cooperative negotiation in accordance with business policies defined by the user manager. Some Multi Agent Systems (MAS) organizational aspects are considered. An original Cooperation Mechanism for a Team-work based Architecture is proposed to address dynamic scheduling using Meta-Heuristics.

Ambient intelligence in emotion based ubiquitous decision making

As the time goes on, it is a question of common sense to involve in the process of decision making people scattered around the globe. Groups are created in a formal or informal way, exchange ideas or engage in a process of argumentation and counterargumentation, negotiate, cooperate, collaborate or even discuss techniques and/or methodologies for problem solving. In this work it is proposed an agent-based architecture to support a ubiquitous group decision support system, i.e. based on the concept of agent, which is able to exhibit intelligent, and emotional-aware behaviour, and support argumentation, through interaction with individual persons or groups. It is enforced the paradigm of Mixed Initiative Systems, so the initiative is to be pushed by human users and/or intelligent agents.

Enabling inter-domain transactions in bridge-based hybrid wired/wireless PROFIBUS networks

The marriage of emerging information technologies with control technologies is a major driving force that, in the context of the factory-floor, is creating an enormous eagerness for extending the capabilities of currently available fieldbus networks to cover functionalities not considered up to a recent past. Providing wireless capabilities to such type of communication networks is a big share of that effort. The RFieldbus European project is just one example, where PROFIBUS was provided with suitable extensions for implementing hybrid wired/wireless communication systems. In RFieldbus, interoperability between wired and wireless components is achieved by the use specific intermediate networking systems operating as repeaters, thus creating a single logical ring (SLR) network. The main advantage of the SLR approach is that the effort for protocol extensions is not significant. However, a multiple logical ring (MLR) approach provides traffic and error isolation between different network segments. This concept was introduced in, where an approach for a bridge-based architecture was briefly outlined. This paper will focus on the details of the inter-Domain Protocol (IDP), which is responsible for handling transactions between different network domains (wired or wireless) running the PROFIBUS protocol.

PETCHA: a Programming Exercises Teaching Assistant

This paper presents a tool called Petcha that acts as an automated Teaching Assistant in computer programming courses. The ultimate objective of Petcha is to increase the number of programming exercises effectively solved by students. Petcha meets this objective by helping both teachers to author programming exercises and students to solve them. It also coordinates a network of heterogeneous systems, integrating automatic program evaluators, learning management systems, learning object repositories and integrated programming environments. This paper presents the concept and the design of Petcha and sets this tool in a service oriented architecture for managing learning processes based on the automatic evaluation of programming exercises. The paper presents also a case study that validates the use of Petcha and of the proposed architecture.