Tullio Salmon Cinotti

Semantic Interoperability Architecture for Pervasive Computing and Internet of Things

Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potential for new business. To fully realize this potential, there is a need for a common way to abstract the heterogeneity of devices so that their functionality can be represented as a virtual computing platform. To this end, we present novel semantic level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and IoTs. There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with semantic web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a semantic information broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a resolution infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios. In addition, to validate that the proposed architecture conforms to the common IoT-A architecture reference model (ARM), we map the central components of the architecture to the IoT-ARM.

An interoperable architecture for mobile smart services over the internet of energy

The Internet of Energy (IoE) for Electric Mobility is an European research project that aims at deploying a communication infrastructure to facilitate and support the operations of Electric Vehicles (EVs). In this paper, we present three research contributions of IoE. First, we describe a software architecture to support the deployment of mobile and smart services over an Electric Mobility (EM) scenario. The proposed architecture relies on an ontology-based data representation, on a shared repository of information (Service Information Broker), and on software modules (called Knowledge Processors -KPs) for standardized data access/management. As a result, information sharing among the different stakeholders of the EM scenario (i.e. EVs, EVSEs, City Services, etc) is enabled, and the interoperability of smart services offered by heterogeneous providers is guaranteed by the common ontology. Second, we rely on the proposed architecture to develop a remote charging reservation system, that runs on top of mobile smarthphones, and allows drivers to monitor the current state-of-charge of their EV, and to reserve a charging slot at a specific EVSE. Finally, we validate our architecture through a benchmark framework, that supports the embedding of mobile EV applications and of real KPs into a simulated vehicular scenario, including realistic traffic, wireless communication and battery models. Evaluation results confirm the scalability of our architecture, and the ability to support EVs charging operations on a large-scale scenario (i.e. the downtown of Bologna).

A Semantic Publish-Subscribe Architecture for the Internet of Things

This paper presents a publish-subscribe architecture designed to support information level interoperability in smart space applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). The architecture is built on top of a generic SPARQL endpoint where publishers and subscribers use standard SPARQL Updates and Queries. Notifications about events [i.e., changes in the resource description framework (RDF) knowledge base] are expressed in terms of added and removed SPARQL binding results since the previous notification, limiting the network overhead and facilitating notification processing at subscriber side. A novel event detection algorithm, tailored on the IoT specificities (i.e., heterogeneous events need to be detected and continuous updates of few RDF triples dominate with respect to more complex updates), is presented along with the envisioned application design pattern and performance evaluation model. Eventually, a reference implementation is evaluated against a benchmark inspired by a smart city lighting case. The performance evaluation results show the capability to process up to 68k subscriptions/s triggered by simple single-lamp updates and up to 3.8k subscriptions/s triggered by more complex updates (i.e., 10 to 100 lamps).

An Integrated Simulation Framework to Model Electric Vehicle Operations and Services

At present, battery-charging operations constitute one of the most critical obstacles toward a large-scale uptake of electric mobility (EM), due to performance issues and implementation complexities. Although several solutions based on the utilization of information and communication technologies and on mobile applications have been investigated to assist electric vehicle (EV) drivers and to coordinate charging operations, there is still the problem of how to evaluate and validate such solutions on realistic scenarios, due to the lack of accurate simulators integrating vehicular mobility, wireless communication, and battery charging/discharging models. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by proposing a novel EV simulation platform that can assist in the predeployment of charging infrastructures and services on realistic large-scale EM scenarios. The simulation platform, which is realized within the ARTEMIS EU project “Internet of Energy for Electric Mobility,” supports two utilization modes, i.e., evaluation of EM scenarios and immersive emulation of EM-related mobile applications, due to a semantic architecture through which virtual and real components can be integrated in a seamless way. We provide three major contributions with respect to the state of the art. First, we extend the existing cosimulation platform composed of SUMO (a vehicular traffic simulator) and OMNET++ (a network simulator) with realistic models of EVs, electric vehicle supply equipment, and ontology-based communication protocols that enable the deployment of city-wide mobile services (e.g., charging reservation). Second, we validate the battery model against the consumptions data of target EVs, and we evaluate the operations of EVs on a large-scale scenario (the city of Bologna, Italy), by analyzing the effectiveness of the charging reservation process and the resulting impact to the smart grid. Finally, we introduce the Mobile Application Zoo, which is a sandbox through which EM-related mobile applications can be seamlessly integrated within the simulation platform to be validated on virtual environments before their deployment on real scenarios, and we describe the implementation of an Android application for battery monitoring and charging reservation.

Impact of Interdisciplinary Research on Planning, Running, and Managing Electromobility as a Smart Grid Extension

The smart grid is concerned with energy efficiency and with the environment, being a countermeasure against the territory devastations that may originate by the fossil fuel mining industry feeding the conventional power grids. This paper deals with the integration between the electromobility and the urban power distribution network in a smart grid framework, i.e., a multi-stakeholder and multi-Internet ecosystem (Internet of Information, Internet of Energy, and Internet of Things) with edge computing capabilities supported by cloud-level services and with clean mapping between the logical and physical entities involved and their stakeholders. In particular, this paper presents some of the results obtained by us in several European projects that refer to the development of a traffic and power network co-simulation tool for electro mobility planning, platforms for recharging services, and communication and service management architectures supporting interoperability and other qualities required for the implementation of the smart grid framework. For each contribution, this paper describes the inter-disciplinary characteristics of the proposed approaches.

A Mobile Application to Assist Electric Vehicles' Drivers with Charging Services

Electric Vehicles (EVs) represent one of the most promising solutions toward sustainable transportation systems. However, some aspects of EV-based mobility pose challenges for a larger market uptake. Among the others, the overhead of charging operations (e.g. Long recharge time), and the lack of accurate information about availability of EV supply stations (EVSSs) while being on board of an EV are perceived by customers as important limitations, and determine a low user acceptance. To tackle these issues, additional assistance must be provided to EV drivers, through the utilization of ICT-based solutions. In this paper, we describe the implementation of a mobile Android application, which has been deployed within the EU Internet of Energy (IoE) project, with the goal of supporting a larger uptake of EV-based mobility. The application provides full assistance to EV drivers, through functionalities of battery monitoring, dynamic range prediction, and EVSS discovery along the way. Moreover, it supports the IoE semantic architecture, and allows EV drivers reserving a charging slot based on their preferences, and on current availability of EVSSs. The user acceptance of the application has been tested through a questionnaire. Test results confirm the importance of charging reservation mechanisms to mitigate EV driver anxiety problems.

A modular lightweight implementation of the Smart-M3 semantic information broker

Interoperability among heterogeneous devices is one of the main topics investigated nowadays to realize the Ubiquitous Computing vision. Smart-M3 is a software architecture born to provide interoperability through the Semantic Web technologies and reactivity thanks to the publish-subscribe paradigm. In this paper we present a new implementation in Python of the central component of the Smart-M3 architecture: the Semantic Information Broker (SIB). The new component, named pySIB, has been specifically designed for embedded or resource constrained devices. pySIB represents a new open source lightweight and portable SIB implementation, but also introduces new features and interesting performances. JSON has been introduced as the default information encoding notation as it offers the flexibility of XML with minor bandwidth requirements. Memory allocation on disk and at runtime is in the order of Kilobytes i.e. minimal, if compared with the other reference implementations. Performance tests on existing (SP2B) and ad-hoc benchmarks point out possible improvements but also encouraging data such as the best insertion time among the existing SIB implementations.

A Multi-Broker Platform for the Internet of Things

The emerging paradigm of the Internet of Things with millions of devices dynamically interconnected to share data imposes new requirements to applications and infrastructures. New challenges raise in terms of connectivity, resource discovery and support for multidomains distributed applications. Furthermore, the connection parameters of involved devices can dynamically change over the time and must be properly discovered. This paper proposes a multi broker platform (MBP) built on top of an existing interoperability platform, Smart-M3. MBP enables the original platform to manage multi-domain scenarios, it also provides a semantic mechanism for context-broker discovery and a virtualization interface to reach remote nodes.

Dynamic Linked Data: A SPARQL Event Processing Architecture

This paper presents a decentralized Web-based architecture designed to support the development of distributed, dynamic, context-aware and interoperable services and applications. The architecture enables the detection and notification of changes over the Web of Data by means of a content-based publish-subscribe mechanism where the W3C SPARQL 1.1 Update and Query languages are fully supported and used respectively by publishers and subscribers. The architecture is built on top of the W3C SPARQL 1.1 Protocol and introduces the SPARQL 1.1 Secure Event protocol and the SPARQL 1.1 Subscribe Language as a means for conveying and expressing subscription requests and notifications. The reference implementation of the architecture offers to developers a design pattern for a modular, scalable and effective application development.

A Route Planner Service with Recharging Reservation: Electric Itinerary with a Click

In most countries the share of circulating electric vehicles (EV) is less than 1%. Beside cost issues, the detrimental factors that most discourage people from purchasing EVs are their limited range and the rather poor coverage area of the recharging infrastructure. This clearly indicates the need for higher investments in vehicular technologies and infrastructures; however, software services and applications also play a major role in the transition to electric mobility, e.g. to mitigate EV driver anxiety. In this paper we illustrate the recipe proposed by the European Internet of Energy (IoE) project toward interoperable services for large-scale EV mobility scenarios: it consists of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SoA) to collect and integrate data coming from the heterogeneous actors of the EV scenario thanks to a semantic data tier. On top of it, we describe the implementation of an advanced Route Planning service to compute the optimal path towards a destination according to user-defined parameters and goals; differently from other approaches, our tool integrates reservation mechanisms of charging slots, so that a complete planning of the itinerary can be produced. Effectiveness of the route planning service is evaluated on large-scale EV scenarios (e.g. the Italian Emilia-Romagna region) thanks to an innovative emulation-simulation platform.