Oliver Dohndorf

Towards the Web of Things: Using DPWS to bridge isolated OSGi platforms

Bringing heterogeneous devices like industrial machines, home appliances, and wireless sensors into the Web assumes the usage of well-defined standards and protocols. Our approach combines the Web Service standard for devices DPWS with the embedded system and component management standard OSGi. It implements the specifications of OSGi Remote Services, as well as OASIS Discovery, Eventing, SOAP-over-UDP, and DPWS. Furthermore, runtime WSDL generation and interpretation is supported, as well as the presentation URL feature which automatically provides a web browser user interface for interactive device access. Thus, our approach is an appropriate and comprehensive basis for the seamless, flexible, and standard-compliant integration of things into the Web.

Location-Transparent Integration of Distributed OSGi Frameworks and Web Services

The OSGi Alliance defines an open, modular, and scalable service delivery platform. The DPWS specification standardizes the process of consuming and exposing Web Services in a lightweight footprint. In our work, we provide a solution for the mutual integration of OSGi and DPWS. The approach adopts the mechanisms of distributed object systems. It employs OSGi-based service proxies and service skeletons.

Generic platform for advanced E-health applications

The demographic change and the cost pressure in the healthcare sector drive the need for efficient and secure medical homecare solutions which apply for the people who are elderly or in anastasis. As the complexity of such systems is rising, there is a need of a common foundation of components which can be reused to lower the implementation effort of such systems. The European ITEA2 OSAmI research project targets such a common foundation of basic components for a basic, widely applicable service-oriented component platform. The German OSAmI-D subproject develops a construction kit based on the OSAmI component platform with a particular focus on services for medical and E-Health applications. The results of the ongoing project and especially the foundation of reusable components are demonstrated in the scenario of home-based ergometer training during the rehabilitation of patients with cardiologic illnesses.

OSAMI Commons — An open dynamic services platform for ambient intelligence

Today we live in an environment surrounded with networked converging devices. Human computer interactions are becoming personalized and a new concept of a global and cross-domain platform is emerging to exploit the full potential of the network in all business areas. In this convergence process, the software platform should be able to personalize itself dynamically in devices according to the context. OSAmI-Commons, an ITEA2 project for developing an open-source common approach to such a dynamic service-based platform, allows any type of device to connect and exchange information and services. OSAMI consortium is contributing to defining the foundations of a cross-platform open-services ecosystem. The sustainability of this platform is an objective beyond the project duration.

Adaptive and reliable binding in ambient service systems

Supported by an automated runtime management system even critical applications, like healthcare applications, can be build upon the interaction with ambient services. They are provided by mobile resource-constrained devices and subject to frequently changing environmental conditions and exceptions. The runtime management has to ensure stable bindings between interacting services and applications, thus it has to provide the monitoring and control functionality necessary for binding reconfiguration and adaption. Furthermore, due to the resource restriction of mobile devices like, for example mobile phones, such a management system must have a small footprint to be implementable on these devices. To realize a management system fulfilling these requirements, we follow the approach of model-based management which divides the overall management process in a planning phase and a runtime phase. This paper concentrates on the presentation of how bindings and their management are planned and how the binding policies governing the management are derived in the planning phase. Furthermore, it gives an overview of how these low-level binding policies are enforced in the runtime phase.

Policy-Based Management for Resource-Constrained Devices and Systems

The presented policy-based management system supports autonomous control and adaptation of a distributed system according to changing conditions and requirements by means of event-condition-action (ECA) rules. Furthermore, it supports policy-aware application programming. Application components can request evaluations of policy expressions and decisions in order to govern their behavior depending on global system state and environment conditions. That rich functionality has to be provided very efficiently since the distributed system consists of resource-constrained devices. The model-based management (MBM) approach is applied separating comfortable tool-assisted policy definition and refinement at design time from lightweight runtime policy enforcement. New enhancements of MBM extend the policy refinement to the derivation of ECA rules. The new backend functions generate executable Java byte code for policy expressions and decisions as well as for policy rules. The code is appropriately partitioned and allocated to the devices. A simplified healthcare scenario demonstrates the approach and its application.

Lightweight Policy-Based Management of Quality-Assured, Device-Based Service Systems

Intelligent connected devices become a more vital part of our lives. In contrast to prior years, today embedded systems and devices are loosely coupled and cooperate with each other according to changing objectives. Following the service-oriented architectural style, the approach of so called device-based service systems emerges. The challenge is to build and manage these systems in a reliable, secure, and efficient manner. New and innovative solutions are needed regarding the problems of interoperability, maintainability, as well as automated configuration and management. In our work, these requirements are met by means of policies which are modeled at different levels of abstraction in a design phase and efficiently enforced at runtime by a lightweight management system.

GlobalSensing: A Supervised Outdoor-Training in Cardiological Secondary Prevention

The GlobalSensing system has the aim to supervise (bicycle-) hiking of a group of patients in a cardiologic rehabilitation by taking advantage of user-friendly components. A smartphone application, the patient component, records the vital data and data of the training by using a sensor-broker. These data is transmitted via internet to the group leader and to the cardiologist. This arrangement offers the possibility to monitor the data in real time, to ensure an optimal individual training and to protect the patient against overloads.

RehaWeb - An Information System for Cardiologic Rehabilitation Assistance in the Third Phase

The RehaWeb system aims at motivating heart patients in rehab with a combination of social networking features, editorial contents as well as mobile support and monitoring. Hikes on selected routes can be planned with RehaWeb community friends. A smartphone application guides the way and collects vitals. All data is transmitted to the RehaWeb server, where it can be accessed as exercise diary by the patient and medical staff. The personal progress and other topics can be discussed with other user in the forums.