Raafat Aburukba

Role of Internet of Things in the Smart Grid Technology

The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently emerged as enabling technology for the smart gird, smart health, smart transportation, and smart environment as well as for smart cities. The major smart grid devices are smart home appliances, distributed renewable energy resources and power substations. The seven domains existing smart grid conceptual model was developed without the IoT concept in mind. As the smart grid evolved, many attempts started to introduce the IoT as enabling technology to the grid. Each device in the grid can be considered as an object. Utilizing the concept of IoT, each device can have a unique IP address that can upload its status and download control commands via the Internet. This paper proposes a conceptual model for the smart grid within the Internet of Things context. The proposed model is based on IPV6 as the backbone of the smart grid communications layer.

Privacy-based computation model in e-business

In the rapidly growing electronic business domain, organisations in the open environment are required to cooperate to achieve certain goals related to their business model. Given such an open environment, maintaining the privacy of organisations becomes a critical challenge. We believe the electronic marketplace (eMarketplace) is a promising architecture model for achieving cooperation between organisations. This is because of the nature of the market, where each entity selfishly attempts to achieve its own goals. The primary objective of this work is to model cooperation between different entities in the eMarketplace where the entities’ privacy requirement is inherited. The proposed architecture, the eMarketplace, exists as a collection of software agents in cooperative distributed systems. It enables and supports scheduling services between market participants. These services take into consideration any privacy desires that may be required from various participants in an open, dynamic, and heterogeneous environment.

Smart grid cyber security: Challenges and solutions

Cyber security in smart grid systems is becoming a major concern throughout the grid communication networks and software platforms that operate and manage the entire grid. The smart grid networks characteristics such as heterogeneity, delay constraints, bandwidth, scalability, and others make it challenging to deploy uniform security approaches all over the networks segments. Therefore, more research is required to develop standards and techniques that meet the smart grid network requirements at a low cost. In this paper, we discuss some of the existing cyber security challenges in smart grid networks, highlight some of the latest solutions, and recommend a new security conceptual model based on the Internet of Things paradigm.

An Integer Linear Programming model and Adaptive Genetic Algorithm approach to minimize energy consumption of Cloud computing data centers

Abstract Cloud computing infrastructures are designed to support the accessibility and availability of various services to consumers over the Internet. Data centers hosting Cloud applications consume massive amount of power, contributing to high carbon footprints to the environment. Hence, solutions are needed to minimize the energy consumption. This paper focuses on the development of a dynamic task scheduling algorithm by proposing an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model that minimizes the energy consumption in a Cloud data center. Furthermore, an Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (GA) is proposed to reflect the dynamic nature of the Cloud environment and to provide a near optimal scheduling solution that minimizes the energy consumption. The proposed adaptive GA is validated by simulating the Cloud infrastructure and conducting a set of performance and quality evaluation study in this environment. The results demonstrate that the proposed solution offers performance gains with regards to response time and in reducing energy consumption.

An Agent-Based Personal Assistant for exam scheduling

Scheduling exams and allocating rooms and proctors is one of the crucial administrative activities that the advising unit of each college does according to certain procedures, rules and assumptions. This paper presents an Agent-Based Personal Assistant architecture that provides an innovative approach to automate the scheduling processes as well as allocating different proctors and exam rooms. The proposed scheduling model has been implemented using JADE a FIPA complaint platform.

Agent-Based Dynamic Scheduling Approach for Collaborative Manufacturing

The rapidly changing market requires integrating information and collaborating among organizations to schedule jobs to machines that satisfy the objectives of service providers, and requesters. Moreover, delivering dynamic scheduling remains a major challenge especially when a diverse number of service providers and service requesters are geographically distributed. In this dynamic environment, scheduling usually involves complex and non-deterministic interactions between different participants. In this work, we propose a distributed multi-agent approach to model dynamic scheduling solution in manufacturing. We believe that agent-based model is appropriate due to its characteristics to support both dynamic behavior and distributed structure. The proposed approach is validated through a prototype implementation using the Coordinated Intelligent Rational Agent (CIR-Agent) model.

Configurable ZigBee-based control system for people with multiple disabilities in smart homes

Nowadays, home appliances manufacturers are increasingly relying on wireless sensor network and single chip embedded technologies to build smart environment. Many existing systems are already in the market, however, they were designed without envisioning the need of residents with special needs. This work presents a framework that enables the integration and control of devices within a smart home environment for residents with disabilities. The framework supports the integration of multiple control devices for different residents with different disabilities. Moreover, the work addresses the safety of the users by providing warnings and notifications in case of an emergency. A prototype was designed, implemented and tested.

IoT based energy management for residential area

One of the major challenges in todays electric grid is the ability to meet the rising energy demands. This work presents a conceptual model that closes the cycle between the electric utility and residential consumers through defining rules and objectives that govern the behavior of the planning and distribution in the electric grid. Each home appliance, utility server, homeowner, and operator is considered as an object with a unique address. A prototype is implemented and tested to proof the concept.

Bidding specification language and winner determination for Grid computing scheduling

In the Grid computing environment, computation, services, and storage belong to different organizations or individuals with different objectives. Entities in this domain are autonomous and self-interested; however, they are willingly to share their resources to achieve their individual and collective goals. In such open environment, the scheduling decision is a challenge given the decentralized nature of the environment. Each entity has specific requirements that need to achieve. This work analysis the environment structure for the Grid, proposes a bidding language that is expressive and a winner determination algorithm that is adequate for the Grid computing environment.

Agent- Based Intelligent Media Distribution in Advertisement

Networked electronic displays provide unique and effective capabilities for businesses and industries to communicate with their consumers. Today there are many solutions for static distribution of media-contents. However; delivering dynamic media-contents remains a major challenge. The overall goal of this work is to provide an intelligent media-content distribution, by which business intelligence is utilized to strengthen the business-customer relationships and increase profitability. This paper proposes a multi-agent approach to model the dynamic scheduling problem in media-content distribution. The proposed approach is validated through a prototype implementation.