Aintzane Armentia

Flexibility Support for Homecare Applications Based on Models and Multi-Agent Technology

In developed countries, public health systems are under pressure due to the increasing percentage of population over 65. In this context, homecare based on ambient intelligence technology seems to be a suitable solution to allow elderly people to continue to enjoy the comforts of home and help optimize medical resources. Thus, current technological developments make it possible to build complex homecare applications that demand, among others, flexibility mechanisms for being able to evolve as context does (adaptability), as well as avoiding service disruptions in the case of node failure (availability). The solution proposed in this paper copes with these flexibility requirements through the whole life-cycle of the target applications: from design phase to runtime. The proposed domain modeling approach allows medical staff to design customized applications, taking into account the adaptability needs. It also guides software developers during system implementation. The application execution is managed by a multi-agent based middleware, making it possible to meet adaptation requirements, assuring at the same time the availability of the system even for stateful applications.

QoS management for dependable sensory environments

Sensory environments for healthcare are commonplace nowadays. A patient monitoring system in such an environment deals with sensor data capture, transmission and processing in order to provide on-the-spot support for monitoring the vulnerable and critical patients. A fault in such a system can be hazardous on the health of the patient. Therefore, such a system must be dependable and ensure reliability, fault-tolerance, safety and other critical aspects, in order to deploy it in real scenario. Also, the management of the infrastructure resources must be efficient and the eventual system reconfiguration must be reliably performed. This paper encounters some of these issues and proposes a component platform with specific support for several QoS aspects, namely fault tolerance, safe inter-component communication and resource management. The platform adopts the Service Component Architecture (SCA) model and defines a Data Distribution Service (DDS) binding, which provides the fault tolerance and the required safety-ensuring techniques and measures, as defined in the IEC 61784-3-3 standard. As a proof of concept, a distributed home care application that improves the medical assistance in case of fire detection is presented.

On applying MDE for generating reconfigurable automation systems

The continuous changes on the market and customer demands have forced modern automation systems to provide more strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements such as load balance or full availability of the control system, among other characteristics. In order to cope with these demanding requirements, modern automation systems have started to incorporate novel design approaches which include reconfiguration mechanisms. Following this trend, this paper presents the use of MDE techniques and technologies, to help in the definition of the control system of reconfigurable automation plants. Directly from the model-based design, a model-based tool is derived that provides support for the generation of the elements that compose the reconfigurable control system.

QoS Aware Middleware Support for Dynamically Reconfigurable Component Based IoT Applications

Sensor web systems, cyber-physical systems, and the so-called Internet of Things are concepts that share a set of common characteristics. The nature of such systems is highly dynamic and very heterogeneous and issues such as interoperability, energy consumption, or resource management must be properly managed to ensure the operation of the applications within the required quality of service level. In this context, base technologies such as component based software engineering or Service Oriented Architecture can play a central role. Model driven development and middleware technologies also aid in the design, development, and operation of such systems. This paper presents a middleware solution that provides runtime support for the complete lifecycle management of a system consisting of several concurrent applications running over a set of distributed infrastructure nodes. The middleware builds up on top of a general purpose component model and is driven by a quality of service aware self-configuration algorithm that provides stateful reconfiguration capabilities in face of both internal (application triggered) and external (application unaware) reconfiguration events. The platform has been deployed over an automated warehouse supervision system that serves as a case study.

Flexible and timely on-line integration of medical services using iLand middleware

Modern medical systems are intensive in the use of distribution technology in medical services. Communication among professionals and patients is enabled to exchange patient information, and for on-line monitoring of health conditions. A miriad of specialized middleware solutions that have appeared in this domain, typically focus on providing more and more patient-data processing services over basic communication backbones (e.g., from pure socket communication to more sophisticated interaction models). Paradigms such as service oriented architectures and decoupled communication middleware support the development of emerging medical systems based on the composition of existing (posibly remote) services into a new application. This adjusts to the phylosophy of systems of systems (SoS) development. In a cyber-physical medical domain, service based applications require support for this composition in a way that a new application is created (or simply modified) in a timely fashion. iLand middleware supports this phylosophy, enabling both off-line and run-time reconfiguration of distributed service based applications. It provides timely operation, controlled communication delays, and a decoupled interaction model for stateless services. iLand has been used in medical applications for remote patient monitoring and in surveillance domains for remote real-time video transmission. This paper presents the systems that iLand has enabled in the medical domain, mainly based on remote patient monitoring. These iLand-based systems have shown to be flexible and capable of undergoing timely service reconfigurations.

A Model-Based Approach for Achieving Available Automation Systems

Abstract Nowadays automation systems are required to be flexible in order to cope with the ever changing requirements of the applications in terms of complexity, extensibility or dynamism. The use of reconfiguration techniques helps to meet these demanding requirements, but at the same time increase the complexity of the systems. This paper presents a supervisor architecture that allows maintaining the availability of a control system in spite of failures such as a node crash, by means of reconfigurations at the control level. To do this, the advantages that Model-Driven Development technology provides have been explored.

Towards an infrastructure model for composing and reconfiguring cyber-physical systems

Cyber Physical Systems involve the use of different computing, communication and control technologies and require satisfying simultaneously several restrictive constraints. One characteristic of CPS is that there is a constant evolution of technologies and tools that help designers to design this kind of systems. Due to its complexity, middleware architectures are frequently used to implement CPS. Most of these middleware architectures tend to use models of the software entities of the system. However, quite often, they do not consider the infrastructure (hardware and network) over which these systems are executed even though this is a key issue for these systems. In addition, frequently, it is necessary to make some composition and reconfiguration decisions at run-time over the current status of the infrastructure. This work proposes a model developed within the iLAND project that represents the static and operational status of the CPS infrastructure.

Model Driven Design Support for Mixed-Criticality Distributed Systems

Abstract Nowadays, it is more and more usual that applications provide critical and non-critical functionalities, the so-called mix-criticality applications. One of the main challenges for developing such applications is to isolate both application types, in such a way that non-critical functionalities do not interfere with the critical ones. The use of virtualization techniques like hypervisors can help to meet this objective. Indeed, a hypervisor is a software layer that provides hardware virtualization allowing different functionalities to be executed in different partitions which are temporally and spatially isolated. In this context, this paper proposes the use of modeling techniques to generate an initial set of constraints to the partition design necessary for a set of critical functionalities that coexist with non-critical ones. Furthermore, the proposed modeling approach supports all the development cycle of the component-based non-critical applications, from the design to the automatic generation of the skeleton code of their components.

Achieving reconfigurable service oriented applications using Model Driven Engineering

Service Oriented architectures are becoming very popular to meet the requirements of complex current applications demanding distribution and heterogeneity in open environments. In this sense, the iLAND-ARTEMIS project is aimed at the development of a service-based middleware framework capable of supporting deterministic dynamic functional composition and reconfiguration of networked embedded service oriented applications. The approach proposed in this paper uses Model Driven Engineering (MDE) in order to guide the development of the iLAND applications from the specification to the execution through code generation, focusing on reconfiguration behavior at run-time, and assuring that non-functional requirements are met by an adequate resource assignment.

A Component-Based Approach for Securing Indoor Home Care Applications

eHealth systems have adopted recent advances on sensing technologies together with advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to provide people-centered services that improve the quality of life of an increasingly elderly population. As these eHealth services are founded on the acquisition and processing of sensitive data (e.g., personal details, diagnosis, treatments and medical history), any security threat would damage the public’s confidence in them. This paper proposes a solution for the design and runtime management of indoor eHealth applications with security requirements. The proposal allows applications definition customized to patient particularities, including the early detection of health deterioration and suitable reaction (events) as well as security needs. At runtime, security support is twofold. A secured component-based platform supervises applications execution and provides events management, whilst the security of the communications among application components is also guaranteed. Additionally, the proposed event management scheme adopts the fog computing paradigm to enable local event related data storage and processing, thus saving communication bandwidth when communicating with the cloud. As a proof of concept, this proposal has been validated through the monitoring of the health status in diabetic patients at a nursing home.