John V. Gialelis

Vertical integration of enterprise industrial systems utilizing web services

The need for interoperability is prominent in the industrial enterprise environment. Different applications and systems that cover the overall range of the industrial infrastructure from the field to the enterprise level need to interoperate. This quest is driven by the enterprise need for greater flexibility and for the wider possible integration of the enterprise systems. This paper presents a distributed system architecture that utilizes dominant state-of-the-art standard technologies, such as workflows, ontologies, and web services, in order to address the above quest in an efficient way.

A Modified DPWS Protocol Stack for 6LoWPAN-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a modification of the protocol stack of the device profile for web services (DPWS) is proposed which can be applied in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that comply with the IPv6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) architecture. The modification is based on a new format for the DPWS message exchanges without prohibiting the usage of the web services (WS) and the extensible markup language (XML) set of rules. The modified DPWS was implemented on the SunSPOT wireless sensor mote (WSM) and it was observed that it processes XML documents with a mean computation time less by 53% than the respective computation time of the DPWS while it consumes less EEPROM and RAM by 84% and 85%, respectively. Furthermore, its network performance was assessed by testing it over a real 6LoWPAN-based WSN with its maximum number of WSMs being 12. In order to validate these results and extend them to larger-scale 6LoWPAN-based WSNs, the network simulator 2 (NS-2) was used by enhancing it with a developed 6LoWPAN object. The NS-2 was also utilized for comparing the modified DPWS, the DPWS and a binary-based DPWS in terms of packet delivery ratio and maximum transmission delay. Simulation results have shown that the modified DPWS presents better performance than the DPWS and offers inferior results only when it is compared with the binary-based DPWS which, however, does not retain the WSs interoperability feature as it does not use XML documents.

Vertical integration of enterprise industrial systems utilizing Web services

The need for interoperability is prominent in the industrial enterprise environment. Different applications and systems that cover the overall range of the industrial infrastructure from the field to the enterprise level need to interoperate. This quest is driven by the enterprise need for greater flexibility and for the wider possible integration of the enterprise systems. The current paper presents an architecture that utilizes three predominant state-of-the-art technologies, namely workflows, ontologies and Web services in order to address the above quest in an efficient way.

Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks into Enterprise Information Systems by Using Web Services

This paper proposes an advanced middleware solution to the problem of integrating a Wireless Sensor Network into the information system of an enterprise at a high abstraction level. This is achieved by using the proposed middleware which provides to the wireless sensors a Service Oriented Architecture connection to the Internet. The proposed middleware is based on the Device Profile for Web Services which is a Service Oriented Architecture technology at the device level. Since this technology is based on exchanging eXtensible Markup Language documents, a technique is utilized which compresses and reduces the data volume of such documents at a level that can be handled by the use of the resource constrained environment of the wireless sensors. By utilizing the proposed middleware which implements only the basic functions of the Device Profile for Web Services, we demonstrate how such a Wireless Sensor Network can be connected to the Internet achieving in this way its integration into an enterprise information system in which all its components conform to a Service Oriented Architecture standard.

On the Detection of Myocadial Scar Based on ECG/VCG Analysis

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting the presence of a myocardial scar from the standard electrocardiogram (ECG)/vectorcardiogram (VCG) recordings, giving effort to develop a screening system for the early detection of the scar in the point-of-care. Based on the pathophysiological implications of scarred myocardium, which results in disordered electrical conduction, we have implemented four distinct ECG signal processing methodologies in order to obtain a set of features that can capture the presence of the myocardial scar. Two of these methodologies are: 1) the use of a template ECG heartbeat, from records with scar absence coupled with wavelet coherence analysis and 2) the utilization of the VCG are novel approaches for detecting scar presence. Following, the pool of extracted features is utilized to formulate a support vector machine classification model through supervised learning. Feature selection is also employed to remove redundant features and maximize the classifiers performance. The classification experiments using 260 records from three different databases reveal that the proposed system achieves 89.22% accuracy when applying tenfold cross validation, and 82.07% success rate when testing it on databases with different inherent characteristics with similar levels of sensitivity (76%) and specificity (87.5%).

Security Framework for Pervasive Healthcare Architectures Utilizing MPEG-21 IPMP Components

Nowadays in modern and ubiquitous computing environments, it is imperative more than ever the necessity for deployment of pervasive healthcare architectures into which the patient is the central point surrounded by different types of embedded and small computing devices, which measure sensitive physical indications, interacting with hospitals databases, allowing thus urgent medical response in occurrences of critical situations. Such environments must be developed satisfying the basic security requirements for real-time secure data communication, and protection of sensitive medical data and measurements, data integrity and confidentiality, and protection of the monitored patients privacy. In this work, we argue that the MPEG-21 Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) components can be used in order to achieve protection of transmitted medical information and enhance patients privacy, since there is selective and controlled access to medical data that sent toward the hospitals servers.

Performance evaluation of a WSN system for distributed event detection using fuzzy logic

The research field of event detection in realistic WSN environments has attracted a lot of interest, with health monitoring being one of its most pronounced applications. Although efforts related to the healthcare applications exist in the current literature, there is a significant lack of investigation on the performance of such systems, when applied in error prone and limited resource wireless environments. This paper aimed to address this need by porting a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) to a WSN simulation framework. The considered FIS is implemented on TelosB motes and evaluates the health status of a monitored person, in an energy conserving manner. A distributed implementation of the above FIS is also proposed, comprising an additional contribution of this paper, based on an objective function, attempting to reduce the network congestion and balance the energy consumption between network nodes. This work presents a thorough performance evaluation of the FIS under the distributed and the centralized approach, while varying the communication conditions and highlighting the advantages of the distributed execution of the FIS, leading to packet loss gain and transmission gain up to 67% and 25% respectively. The networking benefits from the distributed approach are reflected to the FIS performance. Respective results and comparative evaluation against Matlab simulations reveal strong dependencies of the applications performance to critical WSN network parameters.

RosettaNet-based implementation for a collaborative continuous replenishment planning model utilizing Web services and ontologies

Collaborative e-commerce provides an increased level of flexibility and dynamicity and generates an entrepreneurial competitive edge. Widely accepted implementation frameworks like RosettaNet may be utilized to provide generic inter-enterprise B2B infrastructure. This paper presents an innovative approach towards utilizing RosettaNet in combination with Web services and ontologies for the enforcement of the continuous replenishment planning model

Workflow - coordinated integration of enterprise/ industrial systems based on a semantic service - oriented architecture

Enterprise integration is significant for the enforcement of novel business models in an enterprise/industry. The great heterogeneity of systems/applications in the enterprise environment requires the introduction of interoperability aspects in order to resolve integration problems in a flexible and dynamic way. Our approach introduces an advanced enterprise semantic model representing both enterprise structure and available services, through the use of ontologies. The model is associated by a specific architecture that uses the above model in combination with state-of-the-art technologies such as Web services and workflows

Wireless wearable body area network supporting person centric health monitoring

This paper describes a wearable health monitoring system integrated into a broad telemedical infrastructure allowing high-risk cardiovascular patients to closely monitor changes in their critical vital signs and get experts feedback to help maintain optimal health status. Consistent with the major challenge to provide good quality and reliable health care services to an increasing number of people utilizing limited financial and human resources, we propose a person-based health care system which consists of wearable Commercial of-the-shelf (COTS) nodes. These nodes, already used in the hospital environment, are capable of sensing and processing Blood-Oxygen, Blood-Pressure, Electrocardiographs (ECGs) and other vital signs and can be seamlessly integrated into Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) for ubiquitous real time patient monitoring.