Ning Gui

Promises and Challenges of Ambient Assisted Living Systems

The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. Ambient Intelligence technologies are widely developed in this domain aiming to construct safe environments around assisted peoples and help them maintain independent living. However, there are still many fundamental issues in AAL that remain open. Most of the current efforts still do not fully express the power of human being, and the importance of social connections and social activities is less noticed. Our conjecture is that such features are fundamental prerequisites towards truly effective AAL services. This paper reviews the current status of researches on AAL, discusses the promises and possible advantages of AAL, and also indicates the challenges we must meet in order to develop practical and efficient AAL systems for elderly people. In this paper, we also propose an approach to construct effective home-care system for the elderly people.

The missing ones: Key ingredients towards effective ambient assisted living systems

The population of elderly people keeps increasing rapidly in the past decades, which becomes a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a new approach which promises to address the needs from elderly people. In this paper, we claim that human participation is a key ingredient towards effective AAL systems, which not only saves social resources, but also has positive influence on the psychological health of the elderly people. Challenges in increasing human participation in ambient assisted living are dis-cussed in this paper and solutions to meet those challenges are also proposed. We use our proposed mutual assistance commu-nity, which is built with service oriented architecture, as an example to demonstrate how to integrate human tasks in AAL sys-tems. Our preliminary simulation results are presented, which support the effectiveness of human participation.

Toward architecture-based context-aware deployment and adaptation

Software systems are increasingly expected to dynamically self-adapt to the changing environments. One of the main adaptation mechanisms is dynamic recomposition of application components. This paper addresses the key issues that arise when context knowledge is used to steer the run-time (re)composition process so as to match the new environmental conditions. In order to integrate such knowledge into this process, A Continuous Context-Aware Deployment and Adaptation (ACCADA) framework is proposed. To support run-time component composition, the essential runtime abstractions of the underlying component model are studied. By using a layered modeling approach, our framework gradually incorporates design-time as well as run-time knowledge into the component composition process. Service orientation is employed to facilitate the changes of adaptation policy. Results show that our framework has significant advantages over traditional approaches in light of flexibility, resource usage and lines of code. Although our experience was based on the OSGi middleware, we believe our findings to be general to architecture-based management systems using reflective component models.

A hybrid real-time component model for reconfigurable embedded systems

Increasing capabilities of modern microcontrollers greatly increase their applicability to more and more unstable and complex environments. Dynamic reconfiguration provides a powerful mechanism to adapt in such environments. However, the implementation of dynamic reconfiguration is still challenging for embedded real-time control software systems. In this paper, we present our real-time component framework which simultaneously supports hard real-time control and non-real-time adaption management while keeping the implementation as lean as possible. Our contribution is the hybrid component model in which one part is designed to support the real-time task while its non-real-time counterpart deals with component adaptation and management functions. A detailed analysis of the intra-component management interface was provided. XML was employed to describe and configure real-time task. We also designed an interface between real-time objects to achieve an inter-real-time task communication scheme based on global shared memory. In the non real-time domain, by mapping much of the management functions to the OSGi system service, we realized the components management service. Our framework can achieve complex component management while providing hard real-time assurance.

ACCADA: A Framework for Continuous Context-Aware Deployment and Adaptation

Software systems are increasingly expected to dynamically self-adapt to the changing environments. One of the principle adaptation mechanisms is dynamic recomposition of application components. This paper addresses the key issues that arise when external context knowledge is used to steer the run-time (re)composition process. In order to integrate such knowledge into this process, A Continuous Context-Aware Deployment and Adaptation (ACCADA) framework is proposed. To support run-time component composition, the essential runtime abstractions of the underlying component model are studied. By using a layered modeling approach, our framework gradually incorporates design-time as well as run-time knowledge into the component composition process. Service orientation is employed to facilitate the changes of adaptation policy. Results show that our framework has significant advantages over traditional approaches in light of flexibility, resource usage and lines of code. Although our experience was done based on the OSGi middleware, we believe our findings to be general to other architecture-based management systems.

Delegate MAS for Large Scale and Dynamic PDP: A Case Study

Pickup and Delivery Problems (PDPs) have received significant research interest in the past decades. Their industrial relevance has stimulated the study of various types of solutions. Both centralized solutions, using discrete optimization techniques, as well as distributed, multi-agent system (MAS) solutions, have proven their merits. However, real PDP problems today are more and more characterized by (1) dynamism - in terms of tasks, service time, vehicle availability, infrastructure availability, and (2) their large scale - in terms of the geographical field of operation, the number of pickup and delivery tasks and vehicles. A combination of both characteristics brings unsolved challenges.

Service Matching in Online Community for Mutual Assisted Living

Elder people are becoming a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. Our previous study suggests that mutual assisted living community, where dwellers make contributions to the community. Thus community resources could be fully utilized and requested services would be provided in a prompt way. We used service oriented architecture (SOA) to orchestrate the available resources inside the community; and we organize the services into different forms such as formal ones (carried out by professionals, etc), informal ones (assisted by relatives, volunteers, .etc) and even as group activities. We expect such a community could help not only efficiently utilizing the social resources in maintaining the independent living of the elderly people, but also helping these people maintain their connections to the society and bring them entertainment, so that the quality of their living standard may be improved at the same time. This paper continues the track of the previous studies on building mutual assistance communities. Service matching algorithms are developed providing flexible choices on both requested services content and the organization forms of the services.

Towards Meta-Adaptation Support with Reusable and Composable Adaptation Components

Software systems today are increasingly used in changing environments and expected to adapt with variable adaptation concerns. This requirement demands a systematic approach to efficiently construct system global adaptation behaviour according to the dynamic adaptation requirements. This paper presents Transformer a framework for adaptation behaviour composition support based on reusable and compos able adaptation components. Rather than using one adaptation module for all possible contexts, Transformer constructs system global adaptation behaviour by contextually fusing adaptation plans from multiple adaptation components. Explicit conflict resolution is provided to handle possible conflicts raised in the fusion process. In addition to the description of the Transformer framework, this paper also presents its implementation and its application to a video conferencing system. Qualitative analysis and simulation results show that our framework exhibits significant advantage over traditional approaches in light of flexibility and reusability of the adaptation components with little performance overhead.

Towards Building Virtual Community for Ambient Assisted Living

Elder people are becoming a predominant aspect of our societies. As such, solutions both efficacious and cost-effective need to be sought. This paper proposes a design to construct a virtual ambient assisted living community where dwellers make contributions to the community so as to best utilize resources and minimize costs. We use service oriented architecture (SOA) to orchestrate the available resources inside the community, thus bringing social intelligence to the social computing. We also propose building such a virtual community making use of virtual reality and in the form of serious game [Stuart Rory, 1996]. Daily activities and instruments (such as sensors, cameras, etc.) in real-life may be translated into their virtual community equivalents, and activities happening in the virtual world will trigger corresponding actions in the real world, so that inter-reality may be obtained through this virtual community. We expect such a virtual community could help not only efficiently utilizing the social resources in maintaining the independent living of the elderly people, but also helping these people maintain their connections to the society and bring them entertainment, so that the quality of their living standard may be improved at the same time.

Transformer: an adaptation framework supporting contextual adaptation behavior composition

As software systems today increasingly operate in changing and complex environments, they are expected to dynamically adapt to the changing environments sometimes with multiple coexisting adaptation goals. In this paper, an adaptation framework to facilitate adaptation with multiple concerns by using reusable and composable adaptation modules is proposed. Rather than using one‐size‐fits‐all approach, in this framework, system global adaptation behavior is generated by contextually fusing adaptation plans from multiple adaptation modules. In order to handle possible conflicts from multiple adaptation plans, supports for conflict detection and resolution are provided. Following the framework design principles, a supporting middleware is implemented based on the service‐oriented component model. Adaptation behaviors are realized as individually deployable adaptation components. A strategy called normalized context matching degree is proposed to rate and select applicable adaptation components. Possible conflicts in dealing with multiple adaptation concerns are resolved by using the semantics of actuators and context conditions. This middleware is also designed to be readily reconfigurable to support new features. Case studies and experiment results show that our framework exhibits significant advantage over traditional approaches in light of flexibility and reusability of the adaptation modules, with little complexity and performance overhead. Copyright