Jacques Pasquier

Towards modeling real-world aware business processes

In this paper we aim at bringing together the Web of Things (WoT) domain with the domain of enterprise business process modeling in order to work towards a Future Internet that includes all layers of networked technology stacks. We suggest introducing new notation concepts to the current business process modeling standards to facilitate modeling WoT aware business processes. We obtain and classify known WoT specific properties of real-world business processes. By means of a sensor based case study we analyze existing business process modeling standards such as Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), Extended Event-driven Process Chain (eEPC) and Unified Modeling Language (UML) in order to extract WoT specific process properties. A final evaluation concludes with the current most fitting process notation for modeling real world processes using WoT technology and suggests extending established approaches by including WoT specific aspects.

Using a Residential Environment Domain Ontology for Discovering and Integrating Smart Objects in Complex Scenarios

Abstract Nowadays, in residential environments context, an increasing number of connected devices and objects (that fall broadly into two categories: actuators and sensors) provide useful functionalities and services to improve urban living conditions. These devices and their associated services, however, cannot be easily integrated to create new composite applications, such as controlling different home devices for saving energy or enhancing user comfort. In order to meet this requirement, we propose a domain ontology to discover, search, use and share information and services of residential environment devices. This ontology forms the central part of our proposed application development framework. In this paper, we briefly introduce this ontology and explain, through examples, how it is used during the different steps of an application development process.

Supporting Agile teams with a test analytics platform: a case study

Continuous improvement, feedback mechanisms and automated testing are cornerstones of agile methods. We introduce the concept of test analytics, which brings these three practices together. We illustrate the concept with an industrial case study and describe the experiments run by a team who had set a goal for itself to get better at testing. Beyond technical aspects, we explain how these experiments have changed the mindset and the behaviour of the team members. We then present an open source test analytics platform, later developed to share the positive learnings with the community. We describe the platform features and architecture and explain how it can be easily put to use. Before the conclusions, we explain how test analytics fits in the broader context of software analytics and present our ideas for future work.

The WoT as an Awareness Booster in Agile Development Workspaces

Continuous feedback is one of the most important concepts in agile development. We argue for the need to increase the awareness that the team maintains of various facets of the development activity. We then introduce iFLUX, an event-driven middleware designed for the Web of Things. We explain how it provides a platform that facilitates the creation of augmented workplaces that connect various information sources with physical displays, also known as information radiators.

A secure, privacy-preserving IoT middleware using intel SGX

With Internet of Things (IoT) middleware solutions moving towards cloud computing, the problems of trust in cloud platforms and data privacy need to be solved. The emergence of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) opens new perspectives to increase security in cloud applications. We propose a privacy-preserving IoT middleware, using Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to create a secure system on untrusted platforms. An encrypted index is used as a database and communication with the application is protected using asymmetric encryption. This set of measures allows our system to process events in an orchestration engine without revealing data to the hosting cloud platform.

Beyond dashboards: on the many facets of metrics and feedback in Agile organizations

One of the key principles in agile development is that the team should use continuous feedback cycles to maintain awareness both about the product, the process and the involved people. In healthy agile environments, people see a lot of value in the collection of metrics and in their collaborative analysis to support a continuous improvement process. In pseudo agile environments, metrics are often perceived as a threat and they make people uncomfortable. In theses conditions, they can do more harm than good. In this paper, we argue that the acceptance of a data-driven continuous improvement process is heavily influenced by the nature of the channels through which the metrics are published. We argue for the need to go beyond typical dashboards and propose additional engagement channels. We discuss the notions of awareness and story telling and illustrate them with various experiments conducted with agile teams.

A component based approach for the Web of Things

Model Driven Architectures are the holy grail of software engineering. Instead of writing code, developers draw models from the clients specification, which are then compiled into executable code (skeletons). We have taken this principle and applied it to the WoT. With the help of a meta-model tailored for the WoT we are able to build models to simultaneously take care of the physical and virtual aspects of smart devices. These models can then automatically be turned into code skeletons. The emphasis in the meta-model and its associated tools is reusability. Following the software engineering principle of independent reusable and deployable components, the outcome of the meta-model compiler are WoT compliant components.

A Domain Specific Language for High-level Process Control Programming in Smart Buildings☆

Abstract Web services composition is a recurring idea in the field of smart residential environments (SRE), since it helps to solve complex problems such as energy saving, security control or health care by combining and orchestrating the available basic services. Smart environments are composed of networked devices (sensors and actuators) embedded within web services, which contain well-defined programming interfaces allowing them to share data, capture events and create composed control applications. There is still, however, a lack of domain specific languages (DSL) supporting a high degree of abstraction and transparency and allowing users to define control scenarios in a compact and comprehensible way. To satisfy these needs, the present paper aims to propose a DSL for describing scenarios to control SRE, with considerable gains in transparency, abstraction, expressiveness and simplicity.

IRAP3: An interactive program for reliability analysis

SummaryIRAP3 is a model, method and results base system, written in FORTRAN, whose purpose is to offer to the reliability engineer a whole set of methods to analyse system reliability. Through a simple command language he can define, store and modify interactively reliability models. He can ask IRAP3 to perform computations on them and to store the results.In order to inform IRAP3 about the hierarchical structure of a complex reliability system, it is necessary to define first the basic components and then the subsystems up to the whole system itself. Another possibility is to use Markovian models. For the creation of basic components and their composition into subsystems, IRAP3 offers up to six lifetime distributions and four different composition structures.ZusammenfassungIRAP3 ist ein in FORTRAN geschriebenes Resultat-, Methoden- und Modellbanksystem, dessen Zweck es ist, dem Zuverlässigkeits-Ingenieur einen umfassenden Satz von Methoden zu bieten, um Systemzuverlässigkeiten zu analysieren. Dazu kann er, mittels einer einfachen Kommandosprache, interaktiv Zuverlässigkeits-Modelle definieren, speichern und modifi zieren. An diesen Modellen führt dann IRAP3 Berechnungen durch und speichert die Resultate.Um IRAP3 die nötigen Informationen über die hierarchische Struktur eines komplexen Zuverlässigkeits Systems zu geben, ist es nötig, zuerst die Basis-Komponenten und dann die Subsysteme bis hinauf zum ganzen System selber zu definieren. Eine andere Möglichkeit ist die Benützung von Markoff-Modellen. Für die Kreation der Basis-Komponenten und ihren Aufbau in Subsystemen bietet IRAP3 sechs Lebensdauer-Verteilungen und vier verschiedene Kompositions-Strukturen.

Resilient, crowd-sourced LPWAN infrastructure using blockchain

Low power communication is a major milestone for the Internet of Things (IoT). Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies seek to provide a large coverage area and long battery life at the cost of a reduced bandwidth compared to traditional networks. Commercially-available LPWAN solutions typically involve the usage of a wireless infrastructure from a network provider; with the notable exception of crowd-sourced networks, which use gateways from other users for wireless communication to end-devices. In this paper, we analyse the feasability of a fully decentralized LPWAN infrastructure and build a working prototype based on the LoRaWAN protocol.