Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems at the University

This chapter describes proposals for organizing university programs on the internet of things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems. The final goal is to provide a structure for a basic educational course for the internet of things and related areas. This base (template) could be used both for direct training and for building other courses, including those that are more deeply specialized in selected areas. For related areas, the authors see, for example, machine-to-machine communications and data-driven cities (smart cities) development. Obviously, the internet of things skills are in high demand nowadays, and, of course, IoT models, architectures, as well as appropriate data proceedings elements should be presented in the university courses. The purpose of the described educational course is to cover information and communication technologies used in the internet of things systems and related areas. Also, the authors discuss big data and AI issues for IoT courses and highlight the importance of data engineering.

Smart Museum

The chapter presents the authors' study on the smart museum concept. Semantic Web technology and ontology modeling methods are applied to construct advanced digital services, supporting the study and evolution of museum collections. The concept aims at significant increase of the information impact of museum exhibits by providing augmented annotations, identifying semantic relations, assisting the visitors to follow individual trajectories in exposition study, finding relevant information, opening the collection to knowledge from visitors. A museum collection is advanced to a knowledge base where new information is created and evolved by museum visitors and personnel. The chapter discusses reference information assistance services, which are oriented for use as mobile applications on users' smartphones. The proof-of-the-concept case study is the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. The pilot implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the smart museum concept in respect to the user mobility, service personalization, and collaborative work opportunity.

Ontology-Driven Design and Development of Situation Assessment Software in Cyber-Physical Systems

Evolution of cyber-physical systems (CPS) and extension of their application areas complicate, among other things, their software design and development. This requires improvements in programming techniques used to build CPS. One of the important tasks arising in complex CPS is a situation assessment (SA) based on data received from diverse sources. In the chapter, an ontology-driven approach for CPS SA software design and development automation is proposed. The approach is based on the JDL data fusion model and flexible enough to be applied for any class of CPS applications. In contrast to known approaches, ontologies are used not only for domain knowledge representation but also for SA calculation process formalization. It provides a higher level of automation of SA software synthesis and, in the end, increases design and development efficiency.

Ambient Assisted Living At-Home Laboratory for Motor Status Diagnostics in Parkinson's Disease Patients and Aged People

The chapter summarizes the authors' development on the concept of “at-home lab” (AHL). The concept employs the methods of artificial intelligence (AI), smart internet of things (IoT) technologies, and data mining techniques. The aim is at support for patients with Parkinson's disease and aged people to continuously monitor and evaluate their motor and cognitive status using own smartphone (in particular, IMU as wearable sensor, apps for testing cognitive status, camera for motor tracking). In addition, other devices in the IoT environment can participate in creating the information assistance support for people. This chapter presents and discuss the AHL concept as a further development step of AI in respect with human evolution (NeoNeoCortex). The focus is on evolutionary, environmental, and biological aspects of AI.

Mobile Heart Monitoring System Prototype

This chapter describes a design of prototype of mobile heart monitoring system based on the Texas Instruments ADS1298R ECG front end and NRF52832 wireless data transmission chip. The described design and technical details allow developing a new mobile heart monitoring system consisting of ECG recording device, mobile computer (smartphone or tablet). The algorithm for ECG recovery using a reverse filter, whose parameters are determined by means of bioimpedance measurement, is described. The new algorithm of J-point detection is described and examined on the test ECG database. The detection rate is from 88% to 93%. It will allow mobile monitoring system to inform the user about any signs of dangerous heart condition in ECG. The chapter also describes experimental results of wireless protocol bandwidth and contact break detection. The results confirm the efficiency of the proposed technical solutions to mobile heart monitoring for wide range of applications from sports and fitness to monitoring for medical reasons.

Embedded Networks Design and Simulation

This chapter presents an approach for the design and simulation of embedded networks for spacecraft. The chapter provides an analysis of existing simulation tools for the on-board and local area networks. The authors overview the main abilities of the existing software and then propose the computer-aided design system for SpaceWire onboard networks design and simulation. This CAD system supports the full on-board network design and simulation flow, which begins from the network topology automated generation and finishes with getting the network structure, configuration and parameters setting, simulation results, and statistics – SpaceWire Automated Network Design and Simulation (SANDS). The authors describe formal theories, algorithms, methods, and approaches, which are used to solve general issues that appear in developing of onboard networks. The chapter covers topics of fault-tolerance in onboard networks, discusses routing problems, and approaches to organize deadlock-free routing. The authors propose schedule creation algorithms for STP ISS protocol and consider network simulation issues.

Internet of Things Technologies for Smart Grid

Smart grid is a new revolution in the energy sector in which the aging utility grid will be replaced with a grid that supports two-way communication between customers and the utility company. There are two popular smart-grid reference architectures. NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) has drafted a reference architecture in which seven domains and actors have been identified. The second reference architecture is elaborated by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), which is an extension of the NIST model where a new domain named distributed energy resources has been added. This chapter aims at identifying the use of IoT and IoT-enabled technologies in the design of a secure smart grid using the ETSI reference model. Based on the discussion and analysis in the chapter, the authors offer two collaborative and development frameworks. One framework draws parallels' between IoT and smart grids and the second one between smart grids and edge computing. These frameworks can be used to broaden collaboration between the stakeholders and identify research gaps.

Human-Computer Cloud and Its Applications in E-Tourism

The chapter addresses two problems that typically arise during the creation of decision support systems that include humans in the information processing workflow, namely, resource management and complexity of decision support in dynamic environments, where it is impossible (or impractical) to implement all possible information processing workflows that can be useful for a decision-maker. The chapter proposes the concept of human-computer cloud, providing typical cloud features (elasticity, on demand resource provisioning) to the applications that require human input (so-called human-based applications) and, on top of resource management functionality, a facility for building information processing workflows for ad hoc tasks in an automated way. The chapter discusses main concepts lying behind the proposed cloud environment, as well as its architecture and some implementation details. It is also shown how the proposed human-computer cloud environment solves information and decision support demands in the dynamic and actively developing area of e-tourism.

Model-Based Techniques and Tools for Programming Embedded Multicore Platforms

The chapter considers VIPE development environment with the main emphasis on its formal ground. The detailed description of a formal VIPE model of computation (MoC) and the semantics of language constructs let the reader reason about the behavior of the constructs in question. The authors propose a rigorous description of program transformations applied to the program while it is compiled. The program after all the transformations is a correct one from the view of the host MoC. Its behavior meets the programmer's expectations even when it includes fragments, which belong to a guest MoC. Techniques for translation of the guest MoC (OpenVX) constructs into the host MoC (VIPE) constructs were proposed. The approach described here leads to the end program that is fully conformant to the host MoC. In addition, the whole toolset is at the programmer's disposal, namely visual editor, compiler, runtime, and analysis tools. They stay applicable to the program, some parts of which are now guest MoC constructs.

Ontology-Based Coalition Creation by Autonomous Agents in Smart Space

The chapter presents an approach to agent indirect interaction in smart space based on the publication/subscription mechanism. It is proposed to describe every agent with an ontology and support the ontology matching between ontologies of different agents in smart space to enrich the semantic interoperability between them. When the agents reach the semantic interoperability, they are aimed to create a coalition to perform a task. The task is described by ontology and the agents determine what they can propose to implement it. Group of agents that can perform the task together is called coalition. The considered case study describes the mobile robot interaction for the case of joint obstacle overcoming by the 6WD robot with lifting chassis, quadrocopter that scans an obstacle, and knowledge base service that contains algorithms for obstacle overcoming.