Alfredo D'Elia

Semantic Interoperability Architecture for Pervasive Computing and Internet of Things

Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potential for new business. To fully realize this potential, there is a need for a common way to abstract the heterogeneity of devices so that their functionality can be represented as a virtual computing platform. To this end, we present novel semantic level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and IoTs. There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with semantic web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a semantic information broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a resolution infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios. In addition, to validate that the proposed architecture conforms to the common IoT-A architecture reference model (ARM), we map the central components of the architecture to the IoT-ARM.

RedSib: A smart-M3 semantic information broker implementation

Smart-M3 is an open source middleware solution originally released by Nokia as a prototype reference infrastructure to support context-aware ontology-driven smart applications. This paper proposes a renewedSmart-M3 Semantic Information Broker implementation with increased performance and usability levels. In the proposed solution many features have been added or modified, preserving compatibility with the previous release. The major changes are related to the subscription mechanism, the RDF store and the supported encodings for information representation and query. SPARQL query language replaces Wilbur. This paper enlightens the analysis carried out on the original implementation and discusses the choices made to increase its maturity level. The work done is a step forward towards a stable and efficient open interoperability platform for the emerging market of smart space based services.

Access control at triple level: specification and enforcement of a simple RDF model to support concurrent applications in smart environments

Smart environments support service innovation and in emerging approaches the information space involved is shared and accessible through simple primitives. Semantic web technologies play a crucial role in smart environments information representation, as they provide definitions allowing for interoperability at information level. The consistent interplay of multiple agents that concurrently access the knowledge base of an interoperable smart environment requires synchronization means like in traditional concurrent programming. This paper is focused on access control to synchronize concurrent access to shared resources of an RDF store in a multi-agent system. An RDF data model to semantically describe access rights at triple level is defined, an implementation to enforce this semantics on the RDF store is described and its performance are evaluated. Additional access control primitives can be implemented to support more complex behaviors.

A smart space application to dynamically relate medical and environmental information

In this paper we present a cross-domain application for ambient and health monitoring. The system architecture is intended to be openly extensible in order to fulfil unanticipated needs. Our implementation addresses diverse groups, from those requiring heart related monitoring, which could be dependent on the environmental conditions, to those who need to maximize environmental comfort under specified energy consumption constraints. In this application the ambient information is used to enrich the biomedical data and provide a more complete picture to the information consumers, such as doctors and building superintendents. The cross-domain nature of the scenario requires data interoperability, which is ensured by a shared Smart Space. The Smart Space represents the information in Resource Description Framework and its semantics are ontology driven. A simple ontology for the addressed information domain is also presented. The Smart Space platform is provided by the JTI Artemis SOFIA project.

An interoperable architecture for mobile smart services over the internet of energy

The Internet of Energy (IoE) for Electric Mobility is an European research project that aims at deploying a communication infrastructure to facilitate and support the operations of Electric Vehicles (EVs). In this paper, we present three research contributions of IoE. First, we describe a software architecture to support the deployment of mobile and smart services over an Electric Mobility (EM) scenario. The proposed architecture relies on an ontology-based data representation, on a shared repository of information (Service Information Broker), and on software modules (called Knowledge Processors -KPs) for standardized data access/management. As a result, information sharing among the different stakeholders of the EM scenario (i.e. EVs, EVSEs, City Services, etc) is enabled, and the interoperability of smart services offered by heterogeneous providers is guaranteed by the common ontology. Second, we rely on the proposed architecture to develop a remote charging reservation system, that runs on top of mobile smarthphones, and allows drivers to monitor the current state-of-charge of their EV, and to reserve a charging slot at a specific EVSE. Finally, we validate our architecture through a benchmark framework, that supports the embedding of mobile EV applications and of real KPs into a simulated vehicular scenario, including realistic traffic, wireless communication and battery models. Evaluation results confirm the scalability of our architecture, and the ability to support EVs charging operations on a large-scale scenario (i.e. the downtown of Bologna).

A Semantic Publish-Subscribe Architecture for the Internet of Things

This paper presents a publish-subscribe architecture designed to support information level interoperability in smart space applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). The architecture is built on top of a generic SPARQL endpoint where publishers and subscribers use standard SPARQL Updates and Queries. Notifications about events [i.e., changes in the resource description framework (RDF) knowledge base] are expressed in terms of added and removed SPARQL binding results since the previous notification, limiting the network overhead and facilitating notification processing at subscriber side. A novel event detection algorithm, tailored on the IoT specificities (i.e., heterogeneous events need to be detected and continuous updates of few RDF triples dominate with respect to more complex updates), is presented along with the envisioned application design pattern and performance evaluation model. Eventually, a reference implementation is evaluated against a benchmark inspired by a smart city lighting case. The performance evaluation results show the capability to process up to 68k subscriptions/s triggered by simple single-lamp updates and up to 3.8k subscriptions/s triggered by more complex updates (i.e., 10 to 100 lamps).

Smart applications for the maintenance of large buildings: How to achieve ontology-based interoperability at the information level

Industrial applications for smart environments call for techniques and methodologies to improve interoperability, reusability, and easy integration with existing applications, thus reducing development costs and time-to-market. This paper presents a novel and practical approach to smart context-aware applications for the maintenance of large buildings, where ontology-based interoperability is exploited to enable the easy integration of multivendor multiplatform devices/sensors with existing applications. The proposed solution has been designed and implemented on top of the smart environment architecture developed within the SOFIA project. In particular, the paper shows how it is possible to realize a set of context-aware smart maintenance applications capable of monitoring environmental variables, automatically detecting building-related faults, and promptly calling for specific interventions in a multi-modal way, always by carefully considering cross-industry interoperability.

An Integrated Simulation Framework to Model Electric Vehicle Operations and Services

At present, battery-charging operations constitute one of the most critical obstacles toward a large-scale uptake of electric mobility (EM), due to performance issues and implementation complexities. Although several solutions based on the utilization of information and communication technologies and on mobile applications have been investigated to assist electric vehicle (EV) drivers and to coordinate charging operations, there is still the problem of how to evaluate and validate such solutions on realistic scenarios, due to the lack of accurate simulators integrating vehicular mobility, wireless communication, and battery charging/discharging models. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by proposing a novel EV simulation platform that can assist in the predeployment of charging infrastructures and services on realistic large-scale EM scenarios. The simulation platform, which is realized within the ARTEMIS EU project “Internet of Energy for Electric Mobility,” supports two utilization modes, i.e., evaluation of EM scenarios and immersive emulation of EM-related mobile applications, due to a semantic architecture through which virtual and real components can be integrated in a seamless way. We provide three major contributions with respect to the state of the art. First, we extend the existing cosimulation platform composed of SUMO (a vehicular traffic simulator) and OMNET++ (a network simulator) with realistic models of EVs, electric vehicle supply equipment, and ontology-based communication protocols that enable the deployment of city-wide mobile services (e.g., charging reservation). Second, we validate the battery model against the consumptions data of target EVs, and we evaluate the operations of EVs on a large-scale scenario (the city of Bologna, Italy), by analyzing the effectiveness of the charging reservation process and the resulting impact to the smart grid. Finally, we introduce the Mobile Application Zoo, which is a sandbox through which EM-related mobile applications can be seamlessly integrated within the simulation platform to be validated on virtual environments before their deployment on real scenarios, and we describe the implementation of an Android application for battery monitoring and charging reservation.

Impact of Interdisciplinary Research on Planning, Running, and Managing Electromobility as a Smart Grid Extension

The smart grid is concerned with energy efficiency and with the environment, being a countermeasure against the territory devastations that may originate by the fossil fuel mining industry feeding the conventional power grids. This paper deals with the integration between the electromobility and the urban power distribution network in a smart grid framework, i.e., a multi-stakeholder and multi-Internet ecosystem (Internet of Information, Internet of Energy, and Internet of Things) with edge computing capabilities supported by cloud-level services and with clean mapping between the logical and physical entities involved and their stakeholders. In particular, this paper presents some of the results obtained by us in several European projects that refer to the development of a traffic and power network co-simulation tool for electro mobility planning, platforms for recharging services, and communication and service management architectures supporting interoperability and other qualities required for the implementation of the smart grid framework. For each contribution, this paper describes the inter-disciplinary characteristics of the proposed approaches.

Reconfigurable natural interaction in smart environments: approach and prototype implementation

The vision of sensor-driven applications that adapt to the environment hold great promise, but it is difficult to turn these applications into reality because device and space heterogeneity is an obstacle to interoperability and mutual understanding of the smart devices and spaces involved. Smart Spaces provide shared knowledge about physical domains and they inherently enable cooperative and adaptable applications by keeping track of the semantic relations between objects in the environment. In this paper, the interplay between sensor-driven objects and Smart Spaces is investigated and a device with a tangible interface demonstrates the potential of the