Linlin You

Personal Mobility Service System in Urban Areas: The IRMA Project

We present an ongoing research project, namely Integrated Real-time Mobility Assistant (IRMA). IRMA is a software system that targets the personal mobility in a near future scenario, oriented to green, shared and public transports. IRMA aims to be an extensible, easy-to-implement and sustainable modular platform based on the combined use of multiple information sources (crowd, open, social, and sensor data) and on array of value propositions, each serving a class of stakeholders, which include municipality, users, transport providers. Hence, IRMA supports users in the entire lifecycle of mobility, and municipalities and transport providers in the whole cycle of mobility management. IRMA is deployed on both smartphone and web, and is built on a hierarchy of re-usable web services, that are based on SOA/EDA (Service Oriented Architecture / Event Driven Architecture).

Service Level Management (SLM) in Cloud Computing - Third Party SLM Framework

The key issue in cloud computing in enterprises is the management of the Quality of Service (QoS), by an appropriate SLM (Service Level Management). Cloud Service Provider are offering SLMs to their users. We think that a third party SLM can be a better way to assure a robust and equal SLM. This paper presents the elements of third party SLM, namely Cloud Service Registration Agent, Negotiation Agent, Compensation Agent, Comment Agent, Billing Agent and Service Monitoring Engine. Such framework has been tested in a real life case. Results show that third party SLM is not only equal, but also dependable and reasonably easy to implement.

CITY FEED: A Crowdsourcing System for City Governance

In city governance, participation and engagement of stakeholders are a critical issue. Many researches use crowdsourcing to foster such participation and collaboration. To make sure that such support is complete, an evaluation grid shall be developed. To serve such need, we introduce a framework to assess the maturity of crowd-sourced municipality services. To show a structured example of crowd based city governance, we present CITY FEED, a system consisting of transactional and analytical modules. CITY FEED has been designed, implemented and deployed as a pilot in Pavia, Italy.

A system for green personal integrated mobility: A research in progress

We present an ongoing research on an Integrated Real-time Mobility Assistant (IRMA). IRMA is a software system that targets the personal mobility in a near future scenario, based on green, shared and public transports. IRMA handles end-to-end itineraries that may involve multiple transport systems, and encompasses both commuter mobility and visitor mobility. The objective of IRMA is to make practically feasible a mobility that balances efficiency of time, energy/pollution and cost. Therefore, IRMA supports users in plotting the itinerary and also when en-route. IRMA architecture includes a smartphone application and a set of web services to gather and interpret any relevant source of information, that includes open data, crowd data and big data. The technology is SOA/EDA (Service Oriented Architecture / Event Driven Architecture) and uses GTFS format to access open data. IRMA, after being proved on test cases, shall be tested by the students of University of Pavia. IRMA concept is a step ahead current personal mobility systems that simply suggest and track itineraries.

Mobility Service Systems: Guidelines for a possible paradigm and a case study

This paper discusses a framework for the design of business services, called Service System (SS). SSs are a layer built on the top of Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IOS). SSs integrate two components, Internet of Business (IOB) and Internet of Data (IOD). IOB delivers complex business services that combine services from IOS and IOT. In turn, IOD links semantically the information that is extracted from IOS and IOT and that is processed in IOB; also, it provides a repository for future applications. The association of SS architecture with Open Source drives a twofold roadmap, with a top down design and a bottom implementation. The SS concept is exemplified on a IRMA, namely a project on urban mobility, with pilot cities in Europe and China, where a demo SS is being developed by using Open Source software.

Social data analysis framework in cloud and Mobility Analyzer for Smarter Cities

One emerging and challenging issue in Smarter Cities is Mobility. In order to gather mobility data for relevant analyses, two solutions are widely discussed, namely the conventional standardized infrastructure sensors and the novel social sensing solution. However infrastructure sensors solution is too costly, that is unfeasible for every city. On the contrast, social sensing is a renewal approach, by which people perform “sensory data” collection tasks. In order to widely conduct the second solution and meet various needs of cities, it requires the ability to 1) support various social data sources, 2) be scalable, customizable and configurable, and 3) use cost-efficient IT resources. However current research cannot overcome these challenges. Therefore, this paper presents a social sensing data analysis framework in cloud for smarter cities, especially to support smart mobility. As a case study, Mobility Analyzer, a subsystem of IRMA (Integrated Real-time Mobility Assistant, that is a pilot project of Pavia, Italy), is implemented.

CITY FEED: A Pilot System of Citizen-Sourcing for City Issue Management

Crowdsourcing implies user collaboration and engagement, which fosters a renewal of city governance processes. In this article, we address a subset of crowdsourcing, named citizen-sourcing, where citizens interact with authorities collaboratively and actively. Many systems have experimented citizen-sourcing in city governance processes; however, their maturity levels are mixed. In order to focus on the service maturity, we introduce a city service maturity framework that contains five levels of service support and two levels of information integration. As an example, we introduce CITY FEED, which implements citizen-sourcing in city issue management process. In order to support such process, CITY FEED supports all levels of the maturity framework (publishing, transacting, interacting, collaborating, and evaluating) and integrates related information relationally and heterogeneously. In order to integrate heterogeneous information, it implements a threefold feed deduplication mechanism based on the geographic, text semantic, and image similarities of feeds. Currently, CITY FEED is in a pilot stage.

Cloud Computing: The Issue of Service Quality: An Overview of Cloud Service Level Management Architectures

The paper presents a framework for quality management of Cloud Services, that aims to meet requirements of both providers and enterprises. In providers, a capacity planning phase forecasts the load in order to identify resources, while a quality aware cloud balances in real time SLM and efficiency. In enterprises, a dynamic SLA negotiation system chooses the most convenient provider for commodity services, while a dashboard enables enterprises to analyze the business impact of the cloud Qos. Finally, an independent authority verifies the actual QoS that is delivered by providers to enterprises.

Smart cities, urban sensing, and big data: mining geo-location in social networks

Location-based social networks offer spatiotemporal information which can be accessed through public application programming interfaces and have drawn the interest of researchers with diverse scientific backgrounds. This availability of data enables the potential use of geo-located content as an additional, low-cost and infrastructureless source of information for urban sensing in smart cities. All these aspects along with the need for real-time analytics for urban sensing, take us to Big Data management and its related issues. Real-time urban sensing uses citizens as active and passive sensors and can reveal important insights about human behavior in the city. A systematic literature review outlines related works and gaps in current research. In this chapter, we propose a reference model to exploit Big Data for urban sensing and we validate it using a case study. Finally, we give recommendations for future research about location and mobility mining of social network data.

Service level agreement (SLA) in Public Cloud environments: A Survey on the current enterprises adoption

In recent past, organizations have purchased IT equipment to be installed and directly managed within their own Data Centres. The rise of Cloud Computing generated an important shift of focus from the private boundaries of the companies to a new golden era of IT outsourcing. To analyse the quality of the services available on the market we conducted a survey based upon 58 IT professionals who have migrated critical business applications to the Public Cloud. The survey has been carried on to highlight the security policies, the minimum performance warranted by the Cloud providers and the presence of monitoring tools which allow to the customers a direct control on the deployed services. The study shows that the SLAs offered by Public Cloud Providers are not able to properly address the needs of the customers ensuring a low degree of control and a lack of transparency on the actual performance of the services.