Peter Newman

Tiree Energy Pulse: Exploring Renewable Energy Forecasts on the Edge of the Grid

In many parts of the world, the electricity supply industry makes the task of dealing with unpredictable spikes and dips in production and demand invisible to consumers, maintaining a seemingly unlimited supply. A future increase in reliance on time-variable renewable sources of electricity may lead to greater fluctuations in supply. We engaged remote islanders as equal partners in a research project that investigated through technology-mediated enquiry the topic of synchronising energy consumption with supply, and together built a prototype renewable energy forecast display. A number of participants described a change in their practices, saving high energy tasks for times when local renewable energy was expected to be available, despite having no financial incentive to do so. The main contributions of this paper are in: 1) the results of co-development sessions exploring systems supporting synchronising consumption with supply and 2) the findings arising from the deployment of the prototype.

Software engineering for 'social good': integrating action research, participatory design, and agile development

Software engineering for ‘social good’ is an area receiving growing interest in recent years. Software is increasingly seen as a way to promote positive social change: this includes initiatives such as Code for America and events such as hackathons, which strive to build innovative software solutions with a social conscience. From a software engineering perspective, existing software processes do not always match the needs of these social software projects, which are primarily aimed at social change and often involve vulnerable communities. In this paper, we argue for new software processes that combine elements of agile, iterative development with principles drawn from action research and participatory design. The former allow social software projects to be built quickly with limited resources; the latter allow for a proper understanding of the social context and vulnerable user groups. The paper describes Speedplay, a software development management framework integrating these approaches, and illustrates its use in a real social innovation case study.

The role of design thinking and physical prototyping in social software engineering

Social Software Engineering (Social SE), that is SE aiming to promote positive social change, is a rapidly emerging area. Here, software and digital artefacts are seen as tools for social change, rather than end products or solutions. Moreover, Social SE requires a sustained buy-in from a range of stakeholders and end-users working in partnership with multidisciplinary software development teams often at a distance. This context poses new challenges to software engineering: it requires both an agile approach for handling uncertainties in the software development process, and the application of participatory, creative design processes to bridge the knowledge asymmetries and the geographical distances in the partnership. This paper argues for the role of design thinking in Social SE and highlights its implications for software engineering in general. It does so by reporting on the contributions that design thinking - and in particular physical design - has brought to (1) the problem space definition, (2) user requirements capture and (3) system feature design of a renewable energy forecasting system developed in partnership with a remote Scottish Island community.

A resource-aware framework for resource-constrained service-oriented systems

As embedded systems become increasingly complex, not only are dependability and timeliness critical quality indicators, but also their ability to dynamically adapt to changes in their runtime environment. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) offers a potential solution to this challenge by allowing services to be dynamically bound at runtime. However, resource contention between services and resource saturation can result in significant Quality of Service (QoS) degradation. To address these issues, this paper proposes a runtime, resource-aware architecture that combines resource monitoring with dynamic workflow orchestration to mediate resource contention within the orchestration environment. The architecture was evaluated on a medium-size service-oriented case study, deployed on a resource-constrained device. Our approach combines resource monitoring with dynamic workflow orchestration.We take into account the status of the service and changes in system resources.We provide extensible support for the expression of resource management strategies.We provide extensible support for the expression of activation patterns.We provide explicit support for power resource management.

A Runtime Resource-Management Framework for Embedded Service-Oriented Systems

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has rapidly progressed in recent years, with examples appearing in numerous application areas including business processes, high-performance computing, web-based services, and embedded systems. In the embedded systems domain, ubiquitous devices, context-aware systems, and sensor networks are increasingly being used in a plethora of areas. However, because of the nature of their operating environment, service-oriented embedded systems (SOeS) pose unique challenges to quality management. SOeS have to contend not only with the quality of services from providers, but also with the constrained system resources in their operating environment. SOeS need to efficiently utilise available system resources by dynamically adapting themselves to changes in their runtime environment. This paper discusses current SOC resource-management initiatives, setting out the challenges that SOeS systems must overcome, and proposes a pluggable, runtime resource-management framework for SOeS.

On the edge of supply: Designing renewable energy supply into everyday life

With peak oil behind us, nuclear generation capacity dwindling, and increasingly daunting looking carbon emissions targets, we are moving to a world where we must consider transitioning to renewable energy sources. Renewables are time varying and their inherent unpredictability must challenge our everyday assumptions around energy availability—leading, we believe, to an emphasis on ‘supply’ rather than ‘demand’. Using a range of methods including action research, participatory design and technology mediated enquiry, we report on our work in partnership with the community of Tiree as an exemplar of this future. Tiree is the outermost of the Scottish Inner Hebrides— a remote island on the edge of the national electricity grid with a precarious grip on energy—here we uncover the role of renewables and the resilience of a community in moving away from traditional energy provision. We offer opportunities for designing ICT to support supply driven practices in this context, and a simple framework for exploiting under and over supply.

A Runtime Resource-aware Architecture for Service-oriented Embedded Systems

Embedded systems typically operate in resource-constrained environments and often find themselves in difficult to access locations, making system maintenance expensive and the management of quality difficult to achieve. The service-oriented model of deployment offers a potential solution to these challenges as it allows for software systems to be dynamically composed and reconfigured using services discoverable at runtime. However, the resource contention between services on the orchestration platform can cause significant falls in Quality of Service (QoS). This emergent QoS is difficult to anticipate before deployment as changes in QoS are often dynamic and influenced by many factors. This paper presents EQoSystem, a resource-aware architecture combining resource monitoring with dynamic workflow management and service orchestration. We demonstrate the efficacy of EQoSystem using a medium-sized case study deployed on an embedded platform. The results show that continuous and effective resource management changes can be made to maintain resource consumption within preset thresholds.

Seeding the Design Process for Future Problems

Designing with the community brings about a number of benefits, including tacit and contextual knowledge about the problem domain; this is especially apparent in rural settings. However, designing for problems that have yet to embed themselves in the fabric of society i.e. future problems poses a number of challenges, as they typically present intangible scenarios and concepts that have yet to be experienced by the wider-community. Using the OnSupply project as a case study, we share our experience in working with the Tiree community to address a future problem through a technology-mediated enquiry. Furthermore, we present a novel process that uses creative workshops augmented with physical artefacts to inform and learn from the community about a problem space, and to seed the design of a system that addresses it.

Stimulating a dialogue on renewable energy through making

We are exploring attitudes to renewable energy supply with the remote island community of Tiree. As part of this engagement, we are working with local children to introduce the topic of the energy generation potential of renewables (i.e. from wind and solar power). In this paper, we report on our early attempts to broker this engagement using a physical, co-constructed artefact (the PREP energy detector). Through making and co-construction, our goal was to encourage an ownership in the artefact, and thus foster enthusiasm for exploring energy potential. Observations from a recent workshop based on PREP suggest a high level of engagement and enthusiasm was engendered, which we believe was facilitated through co-construction of the artefact.

Managing resource contention in embedded service-oriented systems with dynamic orchestration

As embedded systems become increasingly complex, not only are dependability and timeliness indicators of success, but also the ability to dynamically adapt to changes in the runtime environment. Typically, they operate in resource-constrained environments and often find application in isolated locations, making them expensive to manage with small resource changes in their operating environment having a significant impact on system quality. The service-oriented model of deployment offers a possible solution to these challenges; however, resource contention between services and resource saturation can result in significant Quality of Service (QoS) degradation. This emergent QoS is difficult to anticipate before deployment as changes in QoS are often dynamic. This paper presents EQoSystem, a runtime, resource-aware framework that combines monitoring with dynamic workflow orchestration to mediate resource contention within the orchestration environment. The results from a medium-sized case study demonstrate the efficacy of EQoSystem.