Vassilis Papataxiarhis

MNISIKLIS:Indoor Location Based Services for All

MNISIKLIS is an integrated system aiming to provide universal, indoor locationbased services focusing on navigation. This paper presents the overall MNISIKLIS architecture and certain implementation details. In the context of the Design for All approach, the system targets to the support of several types of users, including persons with disabilities as well as elderly, by exploiting multimodal interaction. Moreover, the system implements effi cient path fi nding algorithms and provides advanced user experience through highly personalized services. MNISIKLIS adopts Semantic Web technologies (e.g., ontologies and reasoning methods) for representing an d managing application models. Furthermore, MNISIKLIS exploits modern positioning techniques in order to achieve high quality positioning. The paper discusses the algorithms and the models that accommodate the services provided by the system. Additionally, an analysis of the positioning subsystem, the user interaction subsystem and the peripheral infrastructure is given. Hence, a new paradigm in the area of location-based systems is presented.

Busfinder: A Personalized Multimodal Transportation Guide with Dynamic Routing

Multimodal routing services with public transportation are already present in many large cities across the globe. In this paper we describe a mobile guide that goes beyond existing solutions, mainly due to its service personalization and its dynamic routing algorithm. Personalization is based on knowledge engineering principles and Semantic Web technologies. The dynamic routing algorithm is based on short term history and estimators and supports cities with pre-installed fleet management systems in the public transport means.

Sensor interoperability for disaster management

This paper describes how to use sensor information in international disaster management operations. The focus is on enabling sensor interoperability by using standardized interfaces. For this work the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Observation Service (SOS) is used to exchange sensor information between different systems. Further individual sensor values have to be interpreted to bring benefit to commanders in disaster operations. We are proposing a Sensor Fusion Engine to combine sensor data stemming from heterogeneous sources and provide a condensed output in different standard formats and protocols. An example of such a format is the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) which is a standardized interface used in disaster operations. Real world deployments in large scale disaster exercises have shown the applicability of the approach.

Smart-Sensor Infrastructure in the IPAC Architecture

The exploitation of modern sensing technologies constitutes an essential issue when targeting to context-aware applications in mobile environments. However, most of the existing solutions (commercial products, research pilots) assume proprietary sensor platforms, thus restricting the deployment of these applications only to computing nodes that are compatible with these platforms. This paper discusses how this topic is addressed in the context of the EU ICT project IPAC. The architecture and design of the proposed sensor framework exhibit a significant degree of portability across different platforms as they are based on the IEEE 1451 family of standards.

Optimal Task Assignment in Sensor Networks

Typical wireless sensor networks are based on resource constrained devices with certain limitations in terms of available energy, data processing capabilities and sensing. In order to maximize their potential to support the execution of complex tasks efficiently, algorithmic solutions that minimize the total energy spent are needed. In this paper, we are dealing with the important problem of minimizing the overall energy required for the accomplishment of tasks in WSNs. We provide a modeling framework and we apply 0-1 Integer Linear Programming to solve the optimization problem optimally. Preliminary evaluation results are also provided to the reader.

A reconfigurable middleware for context-aware applications in autonomic computing

The vision of autonomic computing involves distributed nodes capable of managing and preserving themselves. In practice, autonomic computing is also strongly connected to the concepts of mobility and platform heterogeneity since next generation networks assume different types of mobile nodes that operate inside ad hoc environments. In such cases where the context changes can be frequent, the capability of capturing the environmental changes is crucial. However, it cannot be assumed that all the nodes are equipped with all possible types of sensors in order to locally retrieve the required contextual information. Sensor information exchange between the nodes through efficient data dissemination mechanisms can further improve the overall awareness of the network. Another challenging task for autonomic computing concerns the self-reconfiguration of the autonomous nodes according to the sensed context. This paper presents the overall architecture design, the implementation and the evaluation of a middleware developed in the context of the Integrated Platform for Autonomic Computing (IPAC). This middleware is targeted to embedded devices and supports mobile context-aware applications that render the aforementioned desired behavior. The paper focuses on two aspects of autonomic computing: collaborative context-awareness and self-reconfiguration.