Cornel Klein

A Survey of Context Adaptation in Autonomic Computing

Autonomic computing (AC) is an emerging paradigm aiming at simplifying the administration of complex computer systems. Efforts required to deploy and maintain complex systems are usually high. Autonomic computing may help to reduce these efforts by allowing administrators to define abstract policies and then enable systems to configure, optimize and maintain themselves according to the specified policies. Context adaptation can be regarded as an enabling technology for future applications in the field of autonomic computing. In this paper we present a survey of past and future secrets of this enabling technology in Autonomic computing.

An Automated Electric Vehicle Prototype Showing New Trends in Automotive Architectures

The automotive domain is challenged by the increasing importance of Information Technology (IT) based functions. To show the possibilities of modern IT systems, a demonstrator car was developed in RACE (Robust and Reliant Automotive Computing Environment for Future eCars) based on a completely redesigned E/E architecture, which supports the integration of mixed-criticality components and offers features like Plug&Play. This paper presents the architecture and components of this vehicle prototype, which is equipped with modern systems such as Steer-by-Wire without mechanical fallback. It was designed to support future driver assistance systems, e.g. to carry out autonomous parking maneuvers onto an inductive charging station, a task, which is hard to achieve accurately enough for a human driver. Therefore, a special emphasis lies on the description of the sensor set for automated operation.

Achieving Dependable Component Bindings in Dynamic Adaptive Systems - A Runtime Testing Approach

Component-based software engineering has been continuously improved and successfully applied over the past years. Future systems, like ultra-large scale systems, are a vast array of decentralized, distributed, autonomic, heterogeneous, organically grown and continually evolving subsystems respectively components. Components may join or leave these systems during the life cycle of these systems, even at runtime. Despite this enormous complexity, we depend more and more on these dynamic adaptive systems. Hence we have to care about dependability although the systems are evolving at runtime. To achieve dependable dynamic adaptive systems which support hot plug and binding of components during runtime we claim to integrate specific concepts, like runtime testing, into the component infrastructure. In this paper we will show that existing approaches cannot guarantee the correctness of component bindings in dynamic adaptive systems. Therefore we introduce a technique for runtime testing and show how it can be integrated into a component-based approach.

Simulating the Potential Savings of Implicit Energy Management on a City Scale

According to statistics and future prospects in the next few years world-wide energy consumption will increase significantly. Therefore not only more energy efficient technologies but also more extensive energy saving concepts have to be realized. We have developed an rdquoimplicit interactionrdquo based power saving concept, which automatically schedules and controls energy consumers depending on the recognized activities of users. Moreover, dynamically schedulable power consumption loads are shifted in time, so as to make use of the cheapest energy prices without compromising user comfort. In order to calculate the potential savings of this concept we have implemented a simulation framework executing energy consumption models on a city scale, which allows for more complex scenarios than being restricted to some devices or buildings only. Both the framework architecture as well as large scale energy consumption simulations are presented. Simulation experiments give strong evidence for our implicit energy management concept as a promising source of energy savings.

Variability in Foot-Worn Sensor Placement for Activity Recognition

On-shoe acceleration and orientation sensors have revealed as a potentially powerful means for capturing aspects of human gait. The placement of sensors however has been done intuitively and mostly without quantitative evaluation of sensor positioning. Based on recorded signals of the five placement options sole, heel, toe-cap, instep and ankle we built SVM classifiers using orientation-based features and evaluate their performance on three activity classes level walking, going upstairs and going downstairs. Finally we present an approach to a placement-invariant classification model and discuss the benefit for a bipedal sensing setup.

Web Enabled Telecommunication Service Control Using VoxML

Techniques for enabling voice access to the World Wide Web have been extensively investigated both within the research community and industry. The voice markup language VoxML1 has been proposed as a markup language enabling the HTML-like description of voice services by describing such services as “dialogues”. By means of some sample services, we show that VoxML would highly benefit from additional language features for call control. We propose a set of tags that allow to access call control from within VoxML dialogues, and describe a prototype system that implements these tags.

A multi-agent solution for advanced call centers

In the past few years, call centers have been introduced with great success by many service-oriented enterprises such as banks and insurance companies. It is expected that this growth will continue in the future and that call centers will be improved by adding new functionality and by embedding call centers better into the workflow of a company. In this paper we show how agent technology can help to realize these goals. Agent-based approaches are becoming more and more mature for applications distributed over networks, supporting (dynamic) workflow and integrating systems and services of different vendors. We show by a typical example of a call center, the call center of a car rental agency, what the deficiencies of current call centers are and how agents can help to improve this situation.