IoTranx: Transactions for Safer Smart Spaces

Smart spaces such as smart homes deliver digital services to optimize space use and enhance user experience. They are composed of an Internet of Things (IoT), people, and physical content. They differ from traditional computer systems in that their cyber-physical nature ties intimately with the users and the built environment. The impact of ill-programmed applications in such spaces goes beyond loss of data or a computer crash, risking potentially physical harm to the space and its users. Ensuring smart space safety is therefore critically important to successfully deliver intimate and convenient services surrounding our daily lives. By modeling smart space as a highly dynamic database, we present IoT Transactions, an analogy to database transactions, as an abstraction for programming and executing the services as the handling of the devices in smart space. Unlike traditional database management systems that take a “clear room approach,” smart spaces take a “dirty room approach” where imperfection and unattainability of full control and guarantees are the new normal. We identify Atomicity, Isolation, Integrity and Durability (AI 2 D) as the set of properties necessary to define the safe runtime behavior for IoT transactions for maintaining “permissible device settings” of execution and to avoid or detect and resolve “impermissible settings.” Furthermore, we introduce a lock protocol, utilizing variations of lock concepts, that enforces AI 2 D safety properties during transaction processing. We show a brief proof of the protocol correctness and a detailed analytical model to evaluate its performance.

Autonomic Security Management for IoT Smart Spaces

Embedded sensors and smart devices have turned the environments around us into smart spaces that could automatically evolve, depending on the needs of users, and adapt to the new conditions. While smart spaces are beneficial and desired in many aspects, they could be compromised and expose privacy, security, or render the whole environment a hostile space in which regular tasks cannot be accomplished anymore. In fact, ensuring the security of smart spaces is a very challenging task due to the heterogeneity of devices, vast attack surface, and device resource limitations. The key objective of this study is to minimize the manual work in enforcing the security of smart spaces by leveraging the autonomic computing paradigm in the management of IoT environments. More specifically, we strive to build an autonomic manager that can monitor the smart space continuously, analyze the context, plan and execute countermeasures to maintain the desired level of security, and reduce liability and risks of security breaches. We follow the microservice architecture pattern and propose a generic ontology named Secure Smart Space Ontology (SSSO) for describing dynamic contextual information in security-enhanced smart spaces. Based on SSSO, we build an autonomic security manager with four layers that continuously monitors the managed spaces, analyzes contextual information and events, and automatically plans and implements adaptive security policies. As the evaluation, focusing on a current BlackBerry customer problem, we deployed the proposed autonomic security manager to maintain the security of a smart conference room with 32 devices and 66 services. The high performance of the proposed solution was also evaluated on a large-scale deployment with over 1.8 million triples.

Interactive Smart Space for Single-Person Households Using Electroencephalogram through Fusion of Digital Twin and Artificial Intelligence

The core technology for building a smart space includes the capability to analyse the space for users using various sensors. The purpose of this study was to propose a personalised interactive smart space implementation model driven by the fusion of digital twin (DT) and artificial intelligence (AI) based on electroencephalogram (EEG) data. This study utilised a handheld EEG sensor to identify a user’s emotion information and focused on the connection with the space. A smart space for single-person households that responds to EEG-based biometric information was designed for an interactive space that can improve the current emotional state of the space user. The technical characteristics of DT and AI were analysed to control spatial changes according to the user’s emotional state and to address safety-related issues. Furthermore, a fusion mechanism for DT and AI was developed for intelligent motor control to change the dimensions of the space in order to improve the EEG state of the user. In addition, using an AI model that converts EEG data into emotional state information, the user’s emotional state was analysed, and key issues related to the spatial dimensions and change of space that induce psychological stability were investigated.

A Study of the Business Model Development of Human Centric Lighting: Based on Eco-Science Methodology

Human centric lighting (HLC) is a promising market for innovations in the lighting market, but there is a lack of research on sustainable business models. Therefore, this study proposes a service, ecosystem, business model, and platform to innovate the HLC industry using eco-science methodologies suitable for manufacturing servitization. The study’s findings show that the introduction of a platform-based B2B smart space service can have an impact on the spread of HCL. Accordingly, this study derives a business model and billing strategy that industry stakeholders involved in the smart space can cooperate with. Further, the study proposes a platform design to realize the proposed business model and verifies a service prototype to analyze the completeness of the research results and their economic ripple effects. As for the implications, this study presents an integrated perspective business model to revitalize the HCL market based on a systematic methodology from the convergence studies perspective. Additionally, there are academic implications that, instead of just proposing the research results, objectively evaluate and verify the completeness of the results. The results of this study suggest a future-oriented direction for the field of HCL.

Formal Specification Approach for Smart Space Development

Being an important application of the Internet of Things, smart spaces are increasingly developed throughout the world for different purposes ranging from home automation to smart grids. Despite the considerable focus given to the practical development of smart spaces, there are few attempts of utilizing formal methods in this domain. Especially, the requirements of developing a smart space have not yet been formally specified, to the best of the authors’ knowledge. To fill this gap, a formal specification approach is presented in this paper for smart space development. The proposed approach first identifies the key components of a smart space, then it uses a state-based formal specification language – Z, to formally specify the requirements of these components. The requirements of developing a hypothetical smart space are considered for formal specification in this paper. This work does not only demonstrate how the components of complex systems, such as smart spaces, can elegantly be modeled using a Software Engineering formalism. But it can also be used as a step towards defining a holistic smart space development framework, along with requirement engineering and system design techniques.