Augusto Morales

Enhancing Evacuation Plans with a Situation Awareness System Based on End-User Knowledge Provision.

Recent disasters have shown that having clearly defined preventive procedures and decisions is a critical component that minimizes evacuation hazards and ensures a rapid and successful evolution of evacuation plans. In this context, we present our Situation-Aware System for enhancing Evacuation Plans (SASEP) system, which allows creating end-user business rules that technically support the specific events, conditions and actions related to evacuation plans. An experimental validation was carried out where 32 people faced a simulated emergency situation, 16 of them using SASEP and the other 16 using a legacy system based on static signs. From the results obtained, we compare both techniques and discuss in which situations SASEP offers a better evacuation route option, confirming that it is highly valuable when there is a threat in the evacuation route. In addition, a study about user satisfaction using both systems is presented showing in which cases the systems are assessed as satisfactory, relevant and not frustrating.

Enabling Flexible and Continuous Capability Invocation in Mobile Prosumer Environments

Mobile prosumer environments require the communication with heterogeneous devices during the execution of mobile services. These environments integrate sensors, actuators and smart devices, whose availability continuously changes. The aim of this paper is to design a reference architecture for implementing a model for continuous service execution and access to capabilities, i.e., the functionalities provided by these devices. The defined architecture follows a set of software engineering patterns and includes some communication paradigms to cope with the heterogeneity of sensors, actuators, controllers and other devices in the environment. In addition, we stress the importance of the flexibility in capability invocation by allowing the communication middleware to select the access technology and change the communication paradigm when dealing with smart devices, and by describing and evaluating two algorithms for resource access management.

An Internet of Things-Based Model for Smart Water Management

Water is a vital resource for life, and for the economy. Nowadays, one of the most serious challenges to solve is to manage the water scarcity. Current water management ICT systems are supported by specific vendor equipment, without considering any interoperability standards. The lack of standardization among producers water ICT equipment hinders proper monitoring and control systems, resulting in low efficiency in water distribution and consumption, systems maintenance and improvement, and failure identification. In this paper we propose a smart water management model integrating Internet of Things technologies for decoupling decision support systems and monitoring from business processes coordination and subsystem implementation. The proposed smart water management model makes specific vendor equipment interoperable and manageable in a water management domain in a homogeneous way.

Experiences and challenges in deploying openflow over a real wireless mesh network

Wireless Mesh Networks propose a decentralized architecture for establishing multi-hop wireless communications. The decentralized architecture brings benefits such as ease of deployment and maintenance., scalability and reliability. However., wireless mesh networks lack high level services such as handoff and mobility management or admission control. OpenFlow is an interface for remotely controlling the flow table of switches., routers and access points. The OpenFlow protocol separates the control plane and the data plane of network devices, proposing a centralized architecture for controlling the forwarding of data packets. Furthermore., it offers a framework for developing high level services over the network. Combining this solution with the characteristics of wireless mesh networks allows better performance., by the use of high level services. However., it introduces challenges regarding the opposition between the centralized control of OpenFlow and the distributed architecture of wireless mesh networks. In this paper we expose our experiences deploying an OpenFlow controller over a wireless mesh network based on the 802.11s standard. First., we describe the scenarios used in our testbed. Then., we discuss the considerations for each scenario. Finally we propose some applications using OpenFlow over a Wireless Mesh Network.

Resolving coordination challenges in distributed mobile service executions

The internet of things enables environments where objects are fully interconnected, allowing the execution of smart services and the consumption of functionalities provided by surrounding objects. This loose-coupled object interconnection demands improvements in the control and data planes for an optimum coordination between distributed services in mobile devices. There are several coordination challenges in these environments related to the interaction between services through communication channels, the support of node and link disconnections and the transmission of events at runtime. This paper defines a coordination model and proposes solutions to these challenges by developing a cooperative service execution model for mobile environments, integrating the publish/subscribe paradigm for communicating event messages and improving its performance by using a gossip-based solution. Subsequently, we evaluate this model and analyse the improvements of the designed optimisation mechanisms over the message queue telemetry transport protocol and the ns-3 network simulator.

Experiences and Challenges in Deploying OpenFlow over Real Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless Mesh Networks propose a distributed architecture for establishing quickly, scalable, reliable and ease of maintenance multi-hop wireless communications. However, many wireless mesh network technologies lack of high level services such as handoff and mobility management. Meanwhile, the OpenFlow protocol offers a framework for developing high level services over data networks. OpenFlow is an interface for remotely controlling the flow table of switches, routers and access points. It separates the control and data planes of network devices, while supports a centralized architecture for controlling the forwarding of packets. Extending wireless mesh networks with OpenFlow offers many benefits, as the use of high level services like mobility. Nevertheless, this combination introduces challenges regarding the opposition between the centralized control of OpenFlow and the distributed architecture of wireless mesh networks. In this paper we expose our experiences deploying an OpenFlow controller over a wireless mesh network based on the 802.11s standard. First, we describe the scenarios employed in our testbed. Then, we discuss the considerations for each scenario. Finally, we expose our conclusions regarding the OpenFlows implementation and its capabilities of supporting throughput-dependant services.

A Systematic Approach for Service Prosumerization in IoT Scenarios

Mobile prosumer environments describe situations in which non-expert users have the possibility to create and provide their own services to others in a prosumer framework. This paper describes a systematic approach for leveraging current IoT scenarios, where two types of roles (developers and prosumers) interact in order to develop a framework that would allow users to create and publish useful services in IoT scenarios. This paper also discusses the responsibilities of both roles, activities to be carried out, the challenges to be faced, and a proposal of best practices for this kind of development. Our proposed method is tested by the development of a service personalization environment based on Web technologies in the field of drug management in hospital pharmacy.

Supporting variability dependencies for rule-based service compositions in prosumer environments

Prosumer service provision is characterised by the creation, composition and sharing of services by non-expert users. Among the various creation strategies, rule-based service composition offers many advantages for prosumers. Variability in service composition and its implications regarding creation flexibility and domain adaptation can be associated to service templates in the form of rules, and shared by prosumers in a cooperative way. In this work we define a variability model, integrable in composable and customisable service templates, which supports adaptability in the form of variations and their dependencies. We consider this model in the development of a rule-based service composition environment integrating a creation wizard, guiding the prosumer through the customisation process, and some solutions for dependency problems, detecting and correcting prosumer undesired behaviour in a fault-tolerant approach. Finally, we implement the variability model by using web service technologies and evaluate how these technologies improve the dynamic provision of these variations, enriching the service composition process in prosumer environments.

On the Support of Scientific Workflows over Pub/Sub Brokers

The execution of scientific workflows is gaining importance as more computing resources are available in the form of grid environments. The Publish/Subscribe paradigm offers well-proven solutions for sustaining distributed scenarios while maintaining the high level of task decoupling required by scientific workflows. In this paper, we propose a new model for supporting scientific workflows that improves the dissemination of control events. The proposed solution is based on the mapping of workflow tasks to the underlying Pub/Sub event layer, and the definition of interfaces and procedures for execution on brokers. In this paper we also analyze the strengths and weaknesses of current solutions that are based on existing message exchange models for scientific workflows. Finally, we explain how our model improves the information dissemination, event filtering, task decoupling and the monitoring of scientific workflows.

A Variability Model for Template Personalization in Mobile Prosumer Environments

Mobile prosumer environments describe situations in which non-expert users have the possibility to create and provide their own services to others in mobility. In this paper we study the degree of variability that enables a service personalization for prosumer users and its implications regarding creation flexibility and domain adaptation. Our main contribution is the definition of a variability model by the consideration of variability points and the dependencies among them, which enrich the service personalization process, occurred during the service creation and provision phases in prosumer environments. As validation of our approach, we implement this model in a use case of mobile service creation for hospital pharmacy.