François Pacull

LINC: A Compact Yet Powerful Coordination Environment

This paper presents LINC, a coordination programming environment. It is an evolution of earlier middlewares the Coordination Language Facility CLF and Stitch. The aim is to provide a more flexible and expressive language correcting several of their limitations and an improved run-time environment. LINC provides a compact yet powerful coordination language and an optimised run-time which executes rules. This paper describes the intrinsic properties brought by the LINC environment and how it helps the coordination aspects in a distributed system. This paper also emphasises on the reflexivity of LINC and its usage at system level. Finally, it illustrates through several case studies, how LINC can manage a wide range of application domains.

Resource-based middleware in the context of heterogeneous building automation systems

Building Automation Systems (BAS) aim at providing control of indoor environment while for instance decreasing energy consumption. Most of these BAS exist and work in stand-alone configuration but the global objective for the whole building could be properly reached if the various BAS were able to cooperate. Thus, an abstraction layer is required to overcome this heterogeneity drawback. The objective of this paper is to describe a resource-based middleware that provides coordination capabilities and ensure the main properties required by the Building Automation (BA) domain. Then a dedicated framework is presented together with its exemplification scenario.

Self-organisation for Building Automation Systems: Middleware LINC as an Integration Tool

Building Automation usually involves a large number of systems that should cooperate in order to improve e.g. the user comfort, security, but also decrease the overall energy consumption. One aim of the EU funded SCUBA project is to improve the coordination among devices and systems installed in a building. This paper deals with the extension of a framework dedicated to Building Automation and built on top of the LINC resource-based middleware. Two particular tools developed in SCUBA and that make use of the middleware are also presented together with the encapsulation of the ontology-based Building Automation System model named BASOnt.

Energy optimisation using analytics and coordination, the example of lifts

This paper focuses on energy optimisation in the context of lifts. Modern lifts embed batteries that are so far used only in emergency. We propose a multi-level optimisation strategy to reduce the electricity bill by combining harvesting, the grid and energy stored in batteries. The strategy combines several analytic components (forecaster, optimisers), modelled/measured variables, and is used by the control system. A coordination middleware enables the cooperation between the components embedded in the lift or located in the cloud, thus requiring communication through firewalls of different companies. Early results are presented. They illustrate new features for improving energy efficiency and they demonstrate our capacity to build such an optimisation architecture in a real environment. Part of the results are simulated to extrapolate the reachable energy gain.

Rapid prototyping of complete systems, the case study of a smart parking

This paper details how LINC a coordination middleware, can fasten the development of prototypes that integrate several equipment. A case study of rapid prototyping is presented. It illustrates how a smart parking prototype has been built from several independent and autonomous equipment, coming from different vendors. This has been achieved by parallel development thanks to the resource based approach offered by LINC. This paper also describes how LINC helps building rich user interfaces quickly and easily.

Architecture for self-organizing, co-operative and robust Building Automation Systems

This paper provides an overview of the architecture for self-organizing, co-operative and robust Building Automation Systems (BAS) proposed by the EC funded FP7 SCUBA1 project. We describe the current situation in monitoring and control systems and outline the typical stakeholders involved in the case of building automation systems. We derive seven typical use cases which will be demonstrated and evaluated on pilot sites. From these use cases the project designed an architecture relying on six main modules that realize the design, commissioning and operation of self-organizing, co-operative, robust BAS.

A systematic engineering tool chain approach for self-organizing building automation systems

There is a strong push towards smart buildings that aim to achieve comfort, safety and energy efficiency, through building automation systems (BAS) that incorporate multiple subsystems such as heating and air-conditioning, lighting, access control etc. The design, commissioning and operation of BAS is already challenging when handling an individual subsystem; however when introducing co-operation between systems the complexity increases dramatically. Balancing the contradictory requirements of comfort, safety and energy efficiency and coping with the dynamics of constantly changing environmental conditions, usage patterns, user needs etc. is a demanding task. This paper outlines an approach to the systematic engineering of cooperating, adaptive building automation systems, which aims to formalize the engineering approach in the form of an integrated tool chain that supports the building stakeholders to produce site-specific robust and reliable building automation.

Wireless Sensor Networks for Building Monitoring Deployment Challenges, Tools and Experience

As more large scale deployments of wireless solutions come on stream there is a real need for deployment support for system integrators to ensure a reliable infrastructure can be achieved. This chapter presents the experiences gained from a real deployment and discusses the process used by a designer in order to investigate what value the use of current support tools can offer a designer.

Poster Abstract: distributed coordination of sub-systems power-modes and software-modes

Summary form given. Energy management is essential for cyber-physical systems. Such systems typically consist of several, often distributed, sub-systems that may communicate. State-of-the-art hardware blocks employed in these sub-systems have several power-modes that can be controlled to consume less energy. To-date, the decision of power-modes is most of the times taken within each of the sub-systems. However, it does not consider neither the external, general context of the system, nor the software-modes which involves on the Quality of Service (QoS) of the system. This may lead to large energy waste. To address this problem, we propose a loosely coupled and distributed framework that selects the appropriate sub-system power-mode. The selection takes into account both external context (e.g. GPS location, ambient temperature, information from external applications) that cannot be directly accessed on a sub-system, and software-modes. The flexibility of the framework allows to control, at the same time, the power-modes of sub-systems and the QoS of the system using the same primitives. The framework is based on the LINC coordination middleware [1] which has several interesting properties. LINC handles synchronization between subsystems by grouping a set of operations into transactions that provide an all-or-nothing property. This ensures, for instance, that the external information which triggers a power-mode switch, is still valid when the power-mode is actually updated. Furthermore, LINC hides the heterogeneity of the controlled devices or communication protocols by using an abstraction layer based on associative memory. LINC also offers a high level programming model that allows to describe a sequence of operations as goal-driven rules. The proposed framework is evaluated in a vehicle system that includes among other a GPS, speed sensors, and the STHORM platform [3] which is a state-of-the-art many-core system-on-chip. A perception application, based on the principle of the Bayesian Occupancy Filter (BOF) [2], runs on the platform and detects obstacles in the environment around the vehicle. The BOF discretizes the environment into a grid whose resolution represents the QoS of the system. The resolution is selected according to the speed and location of the vehicle (e.g. in a city or on highway). Each value of the resolution has different processing requirements which allow to scale the power-mode depending on the vehicle location and speed. For instance, on highway, the vehicle runs at a high speed, and in a less diversified environment than in city. Then, a lower resolution can fit the application. This requires less computation power, and consequently, a lower power-mode can be selected. The results have shown that we can realize a significant power-saving by considering external context and software-modes when selecting sub-systems powermode. The loosely coupled approach of LINC eases the integration of any cyber-physical systems into the framework. In addition, the goal driven production rules simplify the coordination of the whole system.

Compilation Tool Chains and Intermediate Representations

In SMECY, we believe that an efficient tool chain could only be defined when the type of parallelism required by an application domain and the hardware architecture is fixed. Furthermore, we believe that once a set of tools is available, it is possible with reasonable effort to change hardware architectures or change the type of parallelism exploited.