Ferry Pramudianto

The Energy Aware Smart Home

In this paper, we present a novel smart home system integrating energy efficiency features. The smart home application is built on top of Hydra, a middleware framework that facilitates the intelligent communication of heterogeneous embedded devices through an overlay P2P network. We interconnect common devices available in private households and integrate wireless power metering plugs to gain access to energy consumption data. These data are used for monitoring and analyzing consumed energy on device level in near real-time. Further, transparent information about the energy usage can be used to efficiently program and control home appliances depending on various factors, e.g. the electricity price. Making more and more data available to end-users, brings with it further challenges in the area of user interfaces. Hence, we complete the smart home system by intuitive user interfaces presenting energy consumption data in meaningful contexts and allowing end users to interact with their environment. We argue, that the combination of both, a technically sophisticated smart home application and at the same time transparent, intuitive user interfaces showing information regarding the energy usage, e.g. energy price, energy source, standby consumption etc., has the potential to bring the vision of the energy efficient smart home within reach.

Event-Driven User-Centric Middleware for Energy-Efficient Buildings and Public Spaces

In this paper, the design of an event-driven user-centric middleware for monitoring and managing energy consumption in public buildings and spaces is presented. The main purpose is to increase energy efficiency in buildings and public spaces, thus reducing consumption. To achieve this, the proposed service-oriented middleware has been designed to be event based, also exploiting the user behavior patterns of people who live and work in buildings. Furthermore, it allows an easy integration of heterogeneous technologies in order to enable a hardware-independent interoperability between them. Moreover, a heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) control strategy has been developed, and the whole infrastructure has been deployed in a real-world case study consisting of a historical building. Finally, the results will be presented and discussed.

Bringing the Internet of Things along the manufacturing line: A case study in controlling industrial robot and monitoring energy consumption remotely

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept attracts considerable interest from the academia and industry. This paper provides a set of proof-of-concept prototype descriptions, based on such IoT exploitation, which aim at gathering real-time data along the manufacturing processes that enables a responsive production management and maintenance, including energy consumption and water usage monitoring at each stage of a production cycle. The presented work takes advantage of the ebbits platform, which provides a middleware infrastructure for integrating industrial sensors, devices and emerging wireless technology in the physical world, transforming them into web services that enable seamless integration into mainstream business system such as MES and ERP.

Industrial application development exploiting IoT vision and model driven programming

In recent years there has been a huge discussion about the IoT (Internet of Things) concept, and even more about IoT within industrial environment. The real IoT is a network of devices with local intelligence (sensors, lights, gas pumps, HVAC systems), which shares access & control mechanisms to push and pull status and command information from the networked world. However, there are still some issues, limiting the IoT diffusion: the devices involved are heterogeneous, with proprietary system of chips, protocols and interface; furthermore, there is a lack of development toolkits, enabling developers to create and evaluate IoT prototypes in simple and flexible manner. The ebbits [1] platform addressed those issues, taking advantages from the IoT vision and providing a middleware infrastructure for the integration of heterogeneous industrial devices and sensors, transforming them into web services and thus enabling their seamless integration into existing legacy systems. This paper will introduce the platform and its software architecture, describing features like semantic devices interoperability and entity virtualization. Furthermore, the paper will describe an innovative, IoT oriented, model driven development toolkit. This toolkit leverages on the semantic discovery service, allowing to dynamically selecting and locating available resources or devices, and provides a flexible instrument, including a graphical interface, that enables developers to compose mashup applications.

Heterogeneous Applications, Tools, and Methodologies in the Car Manufacturing Industry Through an IoT Approach

Due to the growth of industrial Internet services, todays production environment is on the edge of a new era of innovations and changes. This is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing, and new levels of connectivity enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). These innovations will bring higher efficiency, flexibility, and interoperability among industries, although they belong to different production ecosystems. This paper describes an IoT platform and the related prototypes developed within the project: Enabling Business-Based Internet of Things and Services (ebbits), with a focus on the industrial domain. Heterogeneous applications were deployed and tested, including a wireless sensor and actuator network for industrial machines monitoring and a radio-frequency-identification-based system for operator management, locating, and authorization, which also includes an interactive user interface for portable devices to visualize real-time information from physical-world devices. Moreover, tools for model-driven development are used to simplify the process of building IoT applications. Those developments are based on IoT middleware that is developed and deployed by the project to enable the seamless integration of heterogeneous technologies and processes into mainstream enterprise systems. This paper also presents the prototypal deployment of the developed prototypes in the car manufacturing industry.

An energy-saving support system for office environments

We present a system that helps office workers to save energy at work. The system features two concepts which are differing from current smart metering systems. It takes the special characteristics of office environments into account where saving energy has lower priority than the actual working processes. Firstly, the system uses unobtrusive technology in order not to interrupt the normal working processes of office workers. Secondly, the system minimizes the effort of workers to deal with the topic of saving energy so that it can be done en passant. In an explorative user study, we examine if the system is considered useful by users.

User activity recognition for energy saving in smart home environment

In recent years, the consumption of electricity has increased considerably in the industrial, commercial and residential sectors. This has prompted a branch of research which attempts to overcome this problem by applying different information and communication technologies, turning houses and buildings into smart environments. In this paper, we propose and design an energy saving technique based on the relationship between the users activities and electrical appliances in smart home environments. The proposed method utilizes machine learning techniques to automatically recognize the users activities, and then a ranking algorithm is applied to relate activities and existing home appliances. Finally, the system gives recommendations to the user whenever it detects a waste of energy. Tests on a real database show that the proposed method can to save up to 35% of electricity in a smart home.

IoT Link: An Internet of Things Prototyping Toolkit

The Internet of Things (IoT) application development is a complex task that requires a wide range of expertise. Currently, the IoT community lacks a development toolkit that enables inexperienced developers to develop IoT prototypes rapidly. Filling this gap, we propose a development toolkit based on a model-driven approach, called IoT Link. IoT Link allows inexperienced developers to compose mash up applications through a graphical domain-specific language that can be easily configured and wired together to create an IoT application. Through visual components, IoT Link encapsulates the complexity of communicating with devices and services on the internet and abstracts them as virtual objects that are accessible through different communication technologies. Consequently, it solves interoperability between heterogeneous IoT components. Based on the visual model, IoT Link is able to generate a complete Java project including an extendable Java code. In a controlled experiment, IoT Link was 42% faster than using a Java library and able to outperform the Java librarys user satisfactions.

Food Traceability Chain Supported by the Ebbits IoT Middleware

The paper presents the food traceability prototype, which was implemented as a pilot application of the FP7 EU project ebbits. The platform architecture, built upon the principles of the Internet of Things (IoT), People, and Services, is described in aspects of the supported interoperability and semantic orchestration of services involved in the food production chain. The platform represents physical objects as digital objects that go through different phases in the production chain. The information produced in each phase is stored by involved actors and could be retrieved back by the consumers through orchestrating services provided by the actors in the production chain. These services are resolved by a product service orchestration, which is supported by a semantic backend.

Prototyping the Internet of Things for the future factory using a SOA-based middleware and reliable WSNs

In this paper, we describe a SOA-based middleware to integrate Internet-of-Things technologies in industrial setups. The middleware allows a seamless horizontal integration among heterogeneous technologies and vertical integration with applications and business systems. Using the middleware, we evaluated an approach to improve the reliability of 6LoWPAN-based sensor networks with self-configuration and self-healing capabilities to support an innovative monitoring and control framework in a manufacturing line. The sensor networks were evaluated in a test bed consisting of various physical devices that emulates a welding station.