Analyzing and Computing the Sustainability Gains of Building Automation

Smart home implementation in residential buildings promises to optimize energy usage and save significant amount of energy simply due to a better understanding of user's energy usage profile. Apart from the energy optimisation prospects of this technology, it also aims to guarantee occupants significant amount of comfort and remote control over home appliances both at home locations and at remote places. However, smart home investment just like any other kind of investment requires an adequate measurement and justification of the economic gains it could proffer before its realization. These economic gains could differ for different occupants due to their inherent behaviours and tendencies. Thus it is pertinent to investigate the various behaviours and tendencies of occupants in different domain of interests and to measure the value of the energy savings accrued by smart home implementations in these domains of interest in order to justify such economic gains. This thesis investigates two domains of interests (the rented apartment and owned apartment) for primarily two behavioural tendencies (Finland and Germany) obtained from observation and corroborated by conducted interviews to measure the payback time and Return on Investment (ROI) of their smart home implementations. Also, similar measures are obtained for identified Australian use case. The research finding reveals that building automation for the Finnish behavioural tendencies seems to proffers a better ROI and payback time for smart home implementations.

Power Consumption Measurement and Scenario Based Energy Model in Wearable Computing Applications

The power is still today an issue in wearable computing applications. The aim of the present paper is to raise awareness of the power consumption of wearable computing devices in specific scenarios to be able in the future to design energy efficient wireless sensors for context recognition in wearable computing applications. The approach is based on a hardware study. The objective of this paper is to analyze and compare the total power consumption of three representative wearable computing devices in realistic scenarios such as Display, Speaker, Camera and microphone, Transfer by Wi-Fi, Monitoring outdoor physical activity and Pedometer. A scenario based energy model is also developed. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus I9250 smartphone, the Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses and the SimValley Smartwatch AW-420.RX are the three devices representative of their form factors. The power consumption is measured using PowerTutor, an android energy profiler application with logging option and using unknown parameters so it is adjusted with the USB meter. The result shows that the screen size is the main parameter influencing the power consumption. The power consumption for an identical scenario varies depending on the wearable devices meaning that others components, parameters or processes might impact on the power consumption and further study is needed to explain these variations. This paper also shows that different inputs (touchscreen is more efficient than buttons controls) and outputs (speaker sensor is more efficient than display sensor) impact the energy consumption in different way. This paper gives recommendations to reduce the energy consumption in healthcare wearable computing application using the energy model.

Development of Piping Stress Analysis Guideline for Neste Jacobs' Projects

The aim of this research was to develop a piping stress analysis guideline to be widely used in Neste Jacobs Oy’s domestic and foreign projects. The company’s former guideline to performing stress analysis was partial and lacked important features, which were to be fixed through this research. The development of the guideline was based on literature research and gathering of existing knowledge from the experts in piping engineering. Case study method was utilized by performing stress analysis on an existing project with help of the new guideline. Piping components, piping engineering in process industry, and piping stress analysis were studied in the theory section of this research. Also, the existing piping standards were studied and compared with one another. By utilizing the theory found in literature and the vast experience and know-how collected from the company’s employees, a new guideline for stress analysis was developed. The guideline would be widely used in various projects. The purpose of the guideline was to clarify certain issues such as which of the piping would have to be analyzed, how are different material values determined and how will the results be reported. As a result, an extensive and comprehensive guideline for stress analysis was created. The new guideline more clearly defines formerly unclear points and creates clear parameters to performing calculations. The guideline is meant to be used by both new and experienced analysts and with its aid, the calculation process was unified throughout the whole company’s organization. Case study was used to exhibit how the guideline is utilized in practice, and how it benefits the calculation process.

Formal development of resilient distributed systems

Resilience is the property of a system to remain trustworthy despite changes. Changes of a different nature, whether due to failures of system components or varying operational conditions, significantly increase the complexity of system development. Therefore, advanced development technologies are required to build robust and flexible system architectures capable of adapting to such changes. Moreover, powerful quantitative techniques are needed to assess the impact of these changes on various system characteristics. Architectural flexibility is achieved by embedding into the system design the mechanisms for identifying changes and reacting on them. Hence a resilient system should have both advanced monitoring and error detection capabilities to recognise changes as well as sophisticated reconfiguration mechanisms to adapt to them. The aim of such reconfiguration is to ensure that the system stays operational, i.e., remains capable of achieving its goals. Design, verification and assessment of the system reconfiguration mechanisms is a challenging and error prone engineering task. In this thesis, we propose and validate a formal framework for development and assessment of resilient systems. Such a framework provides us with the means to specify and verify complex component interactions, model their cooperative behaviour in achieving system goals, and analyse the chosen reconfiguration strategies. Due to the variety of properties to be analysed, such a framework should have an integrated nature. To ensure the system functional correctness, it should rely on formal modelling and verification, while, to assess the impact of changes on such properties as performance and reliability, it should be combined with quantitative analysis. To ensure scalability of the proposed framework, we choose Event-B as the basis for reasoning about functional correctness. Event-B is a statebased formal approach that promotes the correct-by-construction development paradigm and formal verification by theorem proving. Event-B has a mature industrial-strength tool support { the Rodin platform. Proof-based verification as well as the reliance on abstraction and decomposition adopted in Event-B provides the designers with a powerful support for the development of complex systems. Moreover, the top-down system development by refinement allows the developers to explicitly express and verify critical system-level properties. Besides ensuring functional correctness, to achieve resilience we also need to analyse a number of non-functional characteristics, such as reliability and performance. Therefore, in this thesis we also demonstrate how formal development in Event-B can be combined with quantitative analysis. Namely, we experiment with integration of such techniques as probabilistic model checking in PRISM and discrete-event simulation in SimPy with formal development in Event-B. Such an integration allows us to assess how changes and di erent recon guration strategies a ect the overall system resilience. The approach proposed in this thesis is validated by a number of case studies from such areas as robotics, space, healthcare and cloud domain.

Embedded Service Bus for Internet of Things Interoperability

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are developing rapidly, and therefore there exist several standards of interconnection protocols and platforms. The existence of heterogeneous protocols and platforms has become a critical challenge for IoT system developers. To mitigate this challenge, few alliances and organizations have taken the initiative to build a framework that helps to integrate application silos. Some of these frameworks focus only on a specific domain like home automation. However, the resource constraints in the large proportion of connected devices make it difficult to build an interoperable system using such frameworks. Therefore, a general purpose, lightweight interoperability framework that can be used for a range of devices is required. To tackle the heterogeneous nature, this work introduces an embedded, distributed and lightweight service bus, Lightweight IoT Service bus Architecture (LISA), which fits inside the network stack of a small real-time operating system for constrained nodes. LISA provides a uniform application programming interface for an IoT system on a range of devices with variable resource constraints. It hides platform and protocol variations underneath it, thus facilitating interoperability in IoT implementations. LISA is inspired by the Network on Terminal Architecture, a service centric open architecture by Nokia Research Center. Unlike many other interoperability frameworks, LISA is designed specifically for resource constrained nodes and it provides essential features of a service bus for easy service oriented architecture implementation. The presented architecture utilizes an intermediate computing layer, a Fog layer, between the small nodes and the cloud, thereby facilitating the federation of constrained nodes into subnetworks. As a result of a modular and distributed design, the part of LISA running in the Fog layer handles the heavy lifting to assist the lightweight portion of LISA inside the resource constrained nodes. Furthermore, LISA introduces a new networking paradigm, Node Centric Networking, to route messages across protocol boundaries to facilitate interoperability. This thesis presents a concept implementation of the architecture and creates a foundation for future extension towards a comprehensive interoperability framework for IoT.

Cloud computing contribution to manufacturing industry

Manufacturing industry has been always facing challenge to improve the production efficiency, product quality, innovation ability and struggling to adopt cost-effective manufacturing system. In recent years cloud computing is emerging as one of the major enablers for the manufacturing industry. Combining the emerged cloud computing and other advanced manufacturing technologies such as Internet of Things, service-oriented architecture (SOA), networked manufacturing (NM) and manufacturing grid (MGrid), with existing manufacturing models and enterprise information technologies, a new paradigm called cloud manufacturing is proposed by the recent literature. This study presents concepts and ideas of cloud computing and cloud manufacturing. The concept, architecture, core enabling technologies, and typical characteristics of cloud manufacturing are discussed, as well as the difference and relationship between cloud computing and cloud manufacturing. The research is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, and a case study. The case is a prototype of cloud manufacturing solution, which is software platform cooperated by ATR Soft Oy and SW Company China office. This study tries to understand the practical impacts and challenges that are derived from cloud manufacturing. The main conclusion of this study is that cloud manufacturing is an approach to achieve the transformation from traditional production-oriented manufacturing to next generation service-oriented manufacturing. Many manufacturing enterprises are already using a form of cloud computing in their existing network infrastructure to increase flexibility of its supply chain, reduce resources consumption, the study finds out the shift from cloud computing to cloud manufacturing is feasible. Meanwhile, the study points out the related theory, methodology and application of cloud manufacturing system are far from maturity, it is still an open field where many new technologies need to be studied.

High-Tech Commercialization Research Projects: A Pragmatic View

In the Finnish university society the commercialization research projects has not been a focus of interest until now. The reasons for the growing interest towards commercialization research projects are their possibility to develop our economy simultaneously by providing new technologies and products. This study focuses on the examination of what kind of high-technology oriented research can be commercialized and how. The aim is to generate understanding of how commercialization research projects should proceed and to find concrete ways of improving the of commercialization research projects. As its research method, the study analyzes four different university high-technology research projects which have been commercially oriented and have to some degree been able to commercialize the product or technology developed during the research phase. The data has been gathered mainly by semi-structured interviews of people involved in these particular projects or cases. The findings from the interviews have been reflected to the final reports of the projects, provided by TEKES, and later on the data gained has been compared to each other. Also a literature review has been produced about the subject of commercializing university research with the purpose of providing known theories and framework connected with the subject. The study reveals five main factors related to commercializing high-tech research. These factors are: The Team, Market potential and competitiveness, Product and technology, Funding and Steering Group. Also the uncertainties related to these factors have been addressed. As a conclusion the study provides the main aspects that should be considered when starting a commercialization research project. Also a combining hierarchical framework has been provided related to the five factors presented. In Chapter 5 the study addresses the main tasks or steps to be taken in order to get public funding for a commercially oriented research project and later on the actual steps to be executed in order to successfully commercialize these high-tech research projects.

A Project Portfolio Tool for Forecasting Small Projects Profitability

The case company in this study is a large industrial engineering company whose business is largely based on delivering a wide-range of engineering projects. The aim of this study is to create and develop a fairly simple Excel-based tool for the sales department. The tool’s main function is to estimate and visualize the profitability of various small projects. The study also aims to find out other possible and more long-term solutions for tackling the problem in the future. The study is highly constructive and descriptive as it focuses on the development task and in the creation of a new operating model. The developed tool focuses on estimating the profitability of the small orders of the selected project portfolio currently on the bidding-phase (prospects) and will help the case company in the monthly reporting of sales figures. The tool will analyse the profitability of a certain project by calculating its fixed and variable costs, then further the gross margin and operating profit. The bidding phase of small project is a phase that has not been covered fully by the existing tools within the case company. The project portfolio tool can be taken into use immediately within the case company and it will provide fairly accurate estimate of the profitability figures of the recently sold small projects.