Francesco Nocera

Context-Aware Design of Reflective Middleware in the Internet of Everything

We daily experience the interaction with physical objects which are becoming smarter and smarter with the ability to communicate with each other as well as with different information systems. While, on the one hand, we are assisting to the rise of a pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) or an Internet of Everything (IoE), on the other hand we face the need of a new generation of objects able to adapt to external inputs coming from the environment they are dipped in.

Fuzzy ontology-driven web-based framework for supporting architectural design: student research abstract

Since 2005 when Anton Jansen and Jan Bosch [3] gave a modern definition of Software Architecture as a composition of a set of explicit design decisions, a new perspective concerning software architectures design decisions, quality and goals evaluations have been dominating the scientific literature in this field. Designing the software architecture of non-trivial systems belonging to several application domains, namely industrial automation, defense telecommunication, financial services, and so on, is not an easy task, and requires highly skilled and experienced people. Beyond these, new challenges in the design and in architectural models are derived from self-managing and self-adaptive capabilities that are typical of many modern and emerging software systems, including the industrial Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, cloud computing, and mobile computing. The satisfaction of quality requirements and the appropriate options for future changes are among the major goals of software architectures. In defining and modeling software architecture through patterns, a challenging issue is also concerned with the number of different available decisions depending on the fact that patterns can cooperate, are composable, are complementary or exclusive with respect to a given problem.

A fuzzy ontology-based approach for tool-supported decision making in architectural design

In software development, non-functional requirements (NFRs) play a crucial role in decision-making procedures for architectural solutions. A strong relation exists between NFRs and design patterns, a powerful method to support the architectural design of software systems, but due to their complexity and abstraction, NFRs are rarely taken into account in software design. In fact, the knowledge on NFRs is usually owned by designers and not formalized in a structured way. We propose to structure the knowledge associated with NFRs via a Fuzzy Ontology, which we show is able to model their mutual relations and interactions. The declarative approach makes possible to represent and maintain the above-mentioned knowledge by keeping the flexibility and fuzziness of modeling thanks to the use of fuzzy concepts such as high, low, fair. We present a decision support system based on (i) a fuzzy OWL 2 ontology that encodes 109 design patterns, 28 pattern families and 37 NFRs and their mutual relations, (ii) a novel reasoning service to retrieve a ranked list of pattern sets able to satisfy the non-functional requirements within a system specification.

Formal model for user-centred adaptive mobile devices

The authors present an approach to complex adaptive mobile applications modelling and implementation, able to dynamically change according to changed behavioural properties, state and/or context variables and users preference. To this aim, they design a metamodel made up of an action repository (AR) to store triples composed by logical propositions to define criteria for selecting actions to be executed. An algorithm has been devised to retrieve a set of possible actions – apps, services or components – to be executed from the AR. The selection of a single action to be executed depends on a users model. The metamodel validation is carried out through an instantiation in two real scenarios: a proximity environment and a smartphone.

Architecting the Web of Things for the fog computing era

Fog computing paradigm is emerging after a decades dominance of cloud-based system design and architecture. Now, instead of centralising the computation and coordination to remote services, these are deployed and distributed to all over physical surroundings and network nodes, including cloud services, smart gateways, and network edge devices. At the moment, the majority of the Internet of things (IoT) systems and software has built on top of open Web-based technologies. The authors assume that with the ever-growing number and heterogeneity of connected devices, it becomes ever-more crucial to have open standards that support interoperability and enable interactions. They review the current technological space for architecting Web technology-based IoT software in the coming era of fog computing. They focus on fundamental research challenges and discuss the emerging issues.

A Complex Event Processing based smart aid system for fire and danger management

When hazardous events occurs in buildings or in large environments with different access points and with a large number of users, rescue workers (firefighters, first aid workers, civil protection teams, etc.) need to intervene in a timely manner, where there is a certainty that there are users to help. Topically such events require avoiding waste of resources in environments where there are no people at the time of the disaster or where the damage is of low magnitude. To guide rescuers at the points of the building where there are users to help, we modeled and built an Internet of Things-based framework that monitors data and environmental parameters of interest and, if certain thresholds are exceeded, alerts the rescuers through a telephone call to emergency numbers. The hardware infrastructure is driven by a complex, flexible and adaptive software layer that behaves depending on a Complex Event Processing engine and a reflective middleware according to the rule based engine that manages data from the sensors and reasoning mechanisms of a knowledge base that models the given domain.

PrOnto: an Ontology Driven Business Process Mining Tool

Abstract The main aim of data mining techniques and tools is that of identify and extract, from a set of (big) data, implicit patterns which can describe static or dynamic phenomena. Among these latter business processes are gaining more and more attention due to their crucial role in modern organizations and enterprises. Being able to identify and model processes inside organizations is for sure a key asset to discover their weak and strong points thus helping them in the improvement of their competitiveness. In this paper we describe a prototype system able to discover business processes from an event log and classify them with a suitable level of abstraction with reference to a related business ontology. The identified process, and its corresponding level of abstraction, depends on the knowledge encoded in the reference ontology which is dynamically exploited at runtime. The tool has been validated by considering examples and case studies from the literature on process mining.

Reflective Internet of Things Middleware-Enabled a Predictive Real-Time Waste Monitoring System

Nowadays, Urban Waste Collection process has become crucial to ensure cities’ wealth and viability. The growth of urban centers and the rapid expansion of industry led to a revision of plans and waste collection routes to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. Traditional approaches for the Vehicle Routing Problem and the Waste Collection Problem are not taking into account some factors such as the huge amount of available information produced by the Internet of Things devices.

MoSAIC: a middleware-induced software archIteCture design decision support system

Software Architecture design is a relevant issue in the software development. It is used for communication among the systems stakeholders, and facilitates their understanding about design decisions and design rationale. In this field, architectural knowledge comprises more than design decisions and capture their relationships with requirements and architecture design. In this work, we present MoSAIC, a decision support system based on a knowledge-based approach for managing and reasoning on design decisions of Middleware-induced Software Systems Architecture. The approach is based on a fuzzy ontology to model relationships among Architectural, Functional and Non-Functional Requirements, design decisions and architecture design.

An Adaptive Formal Metamodel for Semantic Complex Event Processing-Driven Social Internet of Things Network.

Information, objects and people are the core innovation actors of human society progress. Their inner relations can be rebounded by the Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT) and social network, respectively. The integration of social networking concepts into the IoT solutions has led to the so called Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm, according to the vision of a future world populated by intelligent objects that permeate the everyday life of human beings.