Interoperability Requirements Research Articles

A Fog Computing-Based Architecture for Medical Records Management

The aging of the world’s population and the growth in the number of people with chronic diseases have increased expenses with medical care. Thus, the use of technological solutions has been widely adopted in the medical field to improve the patients’ health. In this context, approaches based on Cloud Computing have been used to store and process the information generated in these solutions. However, using Cloud can create delays that are intolerable for medical applications. Thus, the Fog Computing paradigm emerged as an alternative to overcome this problem, bringing computation and storage closer to the data sources. However, managing medical data stored in Fog is still a challenge. Moreover, characteristics of availability, performance, interoperability, and privacy need to be considered in approaches that aim to explore this problem. So, this article shows a software architecture based on Fog Computing and designed to facilitate the management of medical records. This architecture uses Blockchain concepts to provide the necessary privacy features and to allow Fog Nodes to carry out the authorization process in a distributed way. Finally, this paper describes a case study that evaluates the performance, privacy, and interoperability requirements of the proposed architecture in a home-centered healthcare scenario.

OpenAIRE compatibility for CRIS systems: recent progress

This paper reports on the progress that the OpenAIRE-funded, euroCRIS-led METIS2OpenAIRE project means for the implementation of the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers. An update of these guidelines has taken place in the past two years to enable a smoother and more effective information exchange process between CRIS systems and the OpenAIRE aggregation. METIS2OpenAIRE aimed to ensure OpenAIRE compatibility based on these version 1.1 guidelines for a first institutional research information management system, namely METIS at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. This three-and-a-half-month project also set out to support a number of parallel implementations by external, budget-neutral stakeholders that would ensure a widespread adoption of the newly released CRIS interoperability standard. These were PURE, the single most widely adopted CRIS platform worldwide, and OMEGA-PSIR, a widespread CRIS solution in Poland.The work carried out under the METIS2OpenAIRE initiative and its results as of mid-2018 are described in this piece. These results include the development of a minimally sufficient OpenAIRE validator for CRIS systems. This software, specifically designed to support the interoperability requirements for the METIS institutional CRIS at Radboud, should gradually evolve into the default mechanism for other CRIS systems to use in order to test their own level of compliance with the OpenAIRE Guidelines. As for the external stakeholders, by mid-2018 there is already significant progress in the route towards OpenAIRE compatibility for both PURE and OMEGA-PSIR.

Integrating Digital Health Services: An Open Platform Approach for Resource-Constrained Countries

Better health enables greater wealth. And digital health enables better healthcare. Also across resource-constraint countries digital health applications are becoming more prevalent. To establish a resilient national or district Digital Health Ecosystem, not only a holistic strategy – based on health policy priorities – is mandatory, but it must also be followed by a realistic roadmap and its comprehensive implementation,taking into account the success factors needed for its long-term sustainability and growth.A key challenge in this context is that deployed eHealth systems are usually in silos, such that no system or application is integrated with another. It is the missing interoperability of the many siloed systems which constitutes a core barrier towards reaping greater benefits from digital health. To successfully transform the provision of quality healthcare services it is mandatory to put into place an open digital health platform that comprehensively integrates eHealth services across all healthcare facilities in a timely, efficient and seamless manner. The open platform concept and its technical approach are developed, and core elements and aspects are critically explored. A constituent complement of such an open approach is a detailed interoperability framework which must be adhered to by all services and applications coordinated via the platform. The key question in this context of how to determine interoperability requirements is briefly discussed. This is complemented by identifying leading open source eHealth software products available and being applied in emerging market and developing economies around the world.Digital health is different from almost any other sector. By identifying the challenges encountered in healthcare the discussion reviews how the open platform approach helps to overcome these barriers, and identifies important pitfalls to be avoided.

Utilization profile of the Canadian-led coalition Role 2 Medical Treatment Facility in Iraq: the growing requirement for multinational interoperability

The Canadian Armed Forces deployed a Role 2 Medical Treatment Facility (R2MTF) to Iraq in November 2016 as part of Operation IMPACT. We compared the multinational interoperability required of this R2MTF with that of similar facilities previously deployed by Canada or other nations. We reviewed data (Nov. 4, 2016, to Oct. 3, 2017) from the electronic Disease and Injury Surveillance Report and the Daily Medical Situation Report. Clinical activity was stratified by Global Burden of Diseases category, ICD-10 code, mechanism of injury, services used, encounter type, nationality and blood product usage. We reviewed the literature to identify utilization profiles for other MTFs over the last 20 years. In total, 1487 patients were assessed. Of these, 5.0% had battle injuries requiring damage-control resuscitation and/or damage-control surgery, with 55 casualties requiring medical evacuation after stabilization. Trauma and disease non-battle injuries accounted for 44% and 51% of patient encounters, respectively. Other than dental conditions, musculoskeletal disorders accounted for most presentations. Fifty-seven units of fresh frozen plasma and 64 units of packed red blood cells were used, and the walking blood bank was activated 7 times. Mass casualty activations involved coordination of health care and logistical resources from more than 12 countries. In addition to host nation military and civilian casualties, patients from 15 different countries were treated with similar frequency. The experience of the Canadian R2MTF in Iraq demonstrates the importance of multinational interoperability in providing cohesive medical care in coalition surgical facilities. Multinational interoperability derives from a unique relationship between higher medical command collaboration, international training and adherence to common standards for equipment and clinical practice.

A PVT-Tolerant >40-dB IRR, 44% Fractional-Bandwidth Ultra-Wideband mm-Wave Quadrature LO Generator for 5G Networks in 55-nm CMOS

Precise generation of quadrature signals over a wide frequency range is a key function for the next-generation 5G communication systems. In this paper, we present a wideband quadrature generator based on a single-stage polyphase filter (PPF). A phase detector senses the phase error from quadrature signals generated by a single-stage PPF, and a feedback circuit continuously tunes the filter center frequency to the input signal frequency by varying the polyphase resistance of an nMOS device in triode. Transformer-based resonant circuits at the input and output of the PPF ensure wide bandwidth and low loss. Prototypes have been realized in a 55-nm CMOS technology. Tailored to the next-generation 5G systems for cross-network interoperability requirements, the measured quadrature generator shows an image rejection ratio IRR > 40 dB over a bandwidth from 28 to 44 GHz. The power consumption is 36 mW for the PPF and buffers, and 3 mW only for the calibration loop. One key aspect of the proposed solution is its robustness over process, voltage and temperature (PVT), one of the weak aspects of alternatives proposed in the literature. This solution compares favorably with the state of the art and shows the largest fractional bandwidth (44%) among the quadrature generators at frequencies greater than 20 GHz, to authors’ knowledge.

Data Integration for Future Medicine (DIFUTURE).

Summary Introduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on the German Medical Informatics Initiative. Future medicine will be predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory and digital. Data and knowledge at comprehensive depth and breadth need to be available for research and at the point of care as a basis for targeted diagnosis and therapy. Data integration and data sharing will be essential to achieve these goals. For this purpose, the consortium Data Integration for Future Medicine (DIFUTURE) will establish Data Integration Centers (DICs) at university medical centers. Objectives: The infrastructure envisioned by DIFUTURE will provide researchers with cross-site access to data and support physicians by innovative views on integrated data as well as by decision support components for personalized treatments. The aim of our use cases is to show that this accelerates innovation, improves health care processes and results in tangible benefits for our patients. To realize our vision, numerous challenges have to be addressed. The objective of this article is to describe our concepts and solutions on the technical and the organizational level with a specific focus on data integration and sharing. Governance and Policies: Data sharing implies significant security and privacy challenges. Therefore, state-of-the-art data protection, modern IT security concepts and patient trust play a central role in our approach. We have established governance structures and policies safeguarding data use and sharing by technical and organizational measures providing highest levels of data protection. One of our central policies is that adequate methods of data sharing for each use case and project will be selected based on rigorous risk and threat analyses. Interdisciplinary groups have been installed in order to manage change. Architectural Framework and Methodology: The DIFUTURE Data Integration Centers will implement a three-step approach to integrating, harmonizing and sharing structured, unstructured and omics data as well as images from clinical and research environments. First, data is imported and technically harmonized using common data and interface standards (including various IHE profiles, DICOM and HL7 FHIR). Second, data is preprocessed, transformed, harmonized and enriched within a staging and working environment. Third, data is imported into common analytics platforms and data models (including i2b2 and tranSMART) and made accessible in a form compliant with the interoperability requirements defined on the national level. Secure data access and sharing will be implemented with innovative combinations of privacy-enhancing technologies (safe data, safe settings, safe outputs) and methods of distributed computing. Use Cases: From the perspective of health care and medical research, our approach is disease-oriented and use-case driven, i.e. following the needs of physicians and researchers and aiming at measurable benefits for our patients. We will work on early diagnosis, tailored therapies and therapy decision tools with focuses on neurology, oncology and further disease entities. Our early uses cases will serve as blueprints for the following ones, verifying that the infrastructure developed by DIFUTURE is able to support a variety of application scenarios. Discussion: Own previous work, the use of internationally successful open source systems and a state-of-the-art software architecture are cornerstones of our approach. In the conceptual phase of the initiative, we have already prototypically implemented and tested the most important components of our architecture.

Secure Protocol and IP Core for Configuration of Networking Hardware IPs in the Smart Grid

Nowadays, the incorporation and constant evolution of communication networks in the electricity sector have given rise to the so-called Smart Grid, which is why it is necessary to have devices that are capable of managing new communication protocols, guaranteeing the strict requirements of processing required by the electricity sector. In this context, intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) with network architectures are currently available to meet the communication, real-time processing and interoperability requirements of the Smart Grid. The new generation IEDs include an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), to support specialized networking switching architectures for the electric sector, as the IEEE 1588-aware High-availability Seamless Redundancy/Parallel Redundancy Protocol (HSR/PRP). Another advantage to using an FPGA is the ability to update or reconfigure the design to support new requirements that are being raised to the standards (IEC 61850). The update of the architecture implemented in the FPGA can be done remotely, but it is necessary to establish a cyber security mechanism since the communication link generates vulnerability in the case the attacker gains physical access to the network. The research presented in this paper proposes a secure protocol and Intellectual Property (IP) core for configuring and monitoring the networking IPs implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The FPGA based implementation proposed overcomes this issue using a light Layer-2 protocol fully implemented on hardware and protected by strong cryptographic algorithms (AES-GCM), defined in the IEC 61850-90-5 standard. The proposed secure protocol and IP core are applicable in any field where remote configuration over Ethernet is required for IP cores in FPGAs. In this paper, the proposal is validated in communications hardware for Smart Grids.

Designing learning management system interoperability in semantic web

The extensive adoption of learning management system (LMS) has set the focus on the interoperability requirement. Interoperability is the ability of different computer systems, applications or services to communicate, share and exchange data, information, and knowledge in a precise, effective and consistent way. Semantic web technology and the use of ontologies are able to provide the required computational semantics and interoperability for the automation of tasks in LMS. The purpose of this study is to design learning management system interoperability in the semantic web which currently has not been investigated deeply. Moodle is utilized to design the interoperability. Several database tables of Moodle are enhanced and some features are added. The semantic web interoperability is provided by exploited ontology in content materials. The ontology is further utilized as a searching tool to match user’s queries and available courses. It is concluded that LMS interoperability in Semantic Web is possible to be performed.

Železnički mostovi na interoperabilnim prugama - aspekt interakcije kolosek/most

The Institute for Standardization of Serbia has adopted a large number of en standards in the field of bridges as Serbian standards. Unfortunately, technical regulations based on the implementation of the adopted en standards in the field of bridges are still not made. The paper presents requirements for railway bridges based on en standards, UIC leaflets and German technical regulations. The aspect of track/bridge interaction is primarily considered. The parameters of track/bridge interaction, principles of calculation, as well as the overview of open points are presented. As the most important parameters of the bridge structure were considered: bridge expansion length, stiffness of the bridge substructure, as well as the bending stiffness and height of the bridge deck. Further, the effects of vertical load, temperature changes, and acceleration/breaking of the vehicle on the mentioned interaction are especially analysed. In addition, the conclusions of the paper apply to both ballasted track and slab track. The aim of the paper is to create a basis for the harmonisation of technical regulations in Serbia with European regulations in order to meet the requirements of interoperability.

Digital economy: Conceptual architecture of a digital economic sector ecosystem

Yury M. Akatkin - Head of Laboratory of Social-Demographic Statistics, Plekhanov Russian University of EconomicsAddress: 36, Stremyanny Lane, Moscow, 117997, Russian FederationE-mail: u.akatkin@semanticpro.orgOleg E. Karpov - Corresponding Member, Russian Academy of Sciences; General Director of Pirogov National Medical-Surgical CenterAddress: 70, Nizhnyaya Pervomaiskaya Street, Moscow, 105203, Russian FederationE-mail: nmhc@mail.ruValery A. Konyavskiy - Head of Information Security Department, Moscow Institute of Physics and TechnologyAddress: 1A, Kerchenskaya Street, Moscow, 117303, Russian FederationE-mail: konyavskiy@gospochta.ruElena D. Yasinovskaya - Senior Researcher, Laboratory of Social-Demographic Statistics, Plekhanov Russian University of EconomicsAddress: 36, Stremyanny Lane, Moscow, 117997, Russian FederationE-mail: elena@semanticpro.org The main objective of digital transformation is to fulfill the needs of a “new digital generation customer” for on-demand delivery, quality and personalization. ”Anything as a service” has become the key principle of the digital paradigm. This is about a data-oriented service which relies on sharing information resources (including public ones) and the requirements for interoperability, security and trust. This paper presents the main approaches to digital transformation based on the example of the most innovatively active sectors such as banking and healthcare. We compare the proprietary development of digital services (products) to the building of a digital sector ecosystem aimed at attracting an unlimited number of participants. We defined the purpose of creating an ecosystem that is to provide the population with digital services formed on demand, in real time, in compliance with legislation and regulations, as well as in the context of maximum trust. We emphasize the role of openness for uniting the efforts of the community interested in the development of a digital industry, extension of public-private partnerships and building a competitive environment in order to ensure the rapid growth of available digital services, as well as to improve their quality. Since the knowledge economy is the basis for the digital economy, the authors consider it especially important to form a semantic core which acts as the carrier of knowledge in a digital sector ecosystem. We confirmed the necessity to implement the semantic core by a brief analysis of modern semantic approaches to standardization of information sharing in the above-mentioned industries, such as FIBO, BIAN (banking), HL7 and UMLS (health). The research carried out allowed the authors to design the conceptual architecture of the ecosystem and to suggest several proposals for digital transformation of an industry. The proposals express the necessity of state support for innovation and providing the conditions for the entry of new digital products based on the following principles: accessibility, timeliness, personalization, adaptability and security.

ASSESSING INTEROPERABILITY REQUIREMENTS IN NETWORKED ENTERPRISES: A MODEL‐BASED SYSTEM ENGINEERING APPROACH

ABSTRACTWhen two or more systems work together, it is crucial to verify interoperability. Systems engineers should be working to continuously improve the ability to interoperate for maintaining a sustainable and efficient collaboration among the networked systems. Systems could benefit from the use of interoperability assessments for identifying their strengths and weakness as well as their compatibility with potential collaborative peer systems. However, the current assessment approaches do not explicitly define the interoperability requirements and their interdependencies. Acknowledging the different requirement dependencies supports the identification of impacts on the overall system, for example implications within a network caused by changes in the collaboration strategy or the introduction of a new information technology tool. Thus, based on model‐based systems engineering, this paper defines a networked enterprise as a system of systems (SoS) and proposes to use the SoS characteristics for identifying interoperability requirements and their dependencies. Further, we formalise and utilise inputs for an assessment tool.

Design and Evaluation of SunSpec-Compliant Smart Grid Controller with an Automated Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed

With increasing penetrations of inverter-based, renewable energy resources on electrical grids around the world, new distributed energy resource (DER) interconnection and interoperability requirements have been introduced to address emerging power system operator needs. The inverter-based power conversion systems are capable of communicating with grid operators, providing voltage and frequency support, and supporting the grid during faults. However, DER vendors are under pressure to quickly and reliably update the interoperability and electrical capabilities of their equipment for different jurisdictions with the rapidly changing landscape of disparate codes and standards. The necessary power hardware required for testing power systems under the wide variety of operational conditions may be untenable for many organizations. Therefore, we introduce an approach for the concurrent development of controls and application software through a controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) testbed integrated with an automated testing platform that allows for the cost-effective, flexible evaluation of advanced grid support functions without the need for large and expensive power hardware. We show this CHIL capability through the demonstration and automation of interconnection tests with a 34.5 kW Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) smart grid converter (SGC) connected to a Typhoon HIL system. We have demonstrated the CHIL system with regards to connect/disconnect, active power curtailment, fixed power factor, reactive power control, volt-var, and frequency-watt advanced grid functionality tests. For all tests, the automated CHIL testing protocols for advanced functions were sufficient to demonstrate and evaluate the grid support behavior of the equipment under test.

The TRANSFoRm project: Experience and lessons learned regarding functional and interoperability requirements to support primary care.

IntroductionThe current model of medical knowledge production, transfer, and application suffers from serious shortcomings. Learning health systems (LHS) have recently emerged as a potential solution—systems in which health information generated from patients is continuously analyzed to improve knowledge that will be transferred to patient care.MethodVarious approaches of data integration already exist and could be considered for the implementation of a LHS. We discuss what are the possible informatics approaches to address the functional requirements of LHS, in the specific context of primary care, and present the experience and lessons learned from the TRANSFoRm project.ResultImplemented in 4 countries around 5 systems, TRANSFoRm is based on a local‐as‐view data mediation approach integrating the structural and terminological models in the same framework. It clearly demonstrated that it has the potential to address the requirements for a LHS in primary care, by dealing with data fragmented across multiple points of service. Also, it has the potential to support the generation of hypotheses from the context of clinical care, retrospective and prospective research, and decision support systems that improve the relevance of medical decisions.ConclusionThe LHS approach embodies a shift from an institution‐centered to a patient‐centered perspective in knowledge production and transfer and can address important challenges in the primary care setting.

Big Building Data - a Big Data Platform for Smart Buildings

Future buildings will more and more rely on advanced Building Management Systems (BMS) connected to a variety of sensors, actuators and dedicated networks. Their objectives are to observe the state of rooms and apply automated rules to preserve or increase comfort while economizing energy. In this work, we advocate for the inclusion of a dedicated system for sensors data storage and processing, based on Big Data technologies. This choice enables new potentials in terms of data analytics and applications development, the most obvious one being the ability to scale up seamlessly from one smart building to several, in the direction of smart areas and smart cities. We report in this paper on our system architecture and on several challenges we met in its elaboration, attempting to meet requirements of scalability, data processing, flexibility, interoperability and privacy. We also describe current and future end-user services that our platform will support, including historical data retrieval, visualisation, processing and alarms. The platform, called BBData - Big Building Data, is currently in production at the Smart Living Lab of Fribourg and is offered to several research teams to ease their work, to foster the sharing of historical data and to avoid that each project develops its own data gathering and processing pipeline.

An Extension of Common Information Model for Power System Multiarea State Estimation

This paper proposes an extension of International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Common Information Model (CIM) to accomplish the interoperability requirements for the power system state estimation (SE). The proposed method utilizes a multiarea SE (MASE) approach, suitable for the power system networks, which can be divided into several independently controlled subareas. The standard IEC CIM model is extended for exchanging the SE results of the MASE from subareas to a central coordinator (CC) in the standard format, which might individually use diverse proprietary software applications and databases. The suggested schema defines the data exchange format among the subareas and the CC without modifying proprietary databases and software applications. The new MASE approach, used to demonstrate the proposed CIM extension process, requires lesser data exchange as there is no topology information exchange among the subareas and the CC, thus resulting in reduced communication bandwidth requirement. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been demonstrated on IEEE 30 bus system and 246-bus reduced Northern Regional Power Grid Indian system.

OpenICE medical device interoperability platform overview and requirement analysis.

We give an overview of OpenICE, an open source implementation of the ASTM standard F2761 for the Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) that leverages medical device interoperability, together with an analysis of the clinical and non-functional requirements and community process that inspired its design.

Optimized dispatch in a first-principles concentrating solar power production model

Concentrating solar power towers, which include a steam-Rankine cycle with molten salt thermal energy storage, is an emerging technology whose maximum effectiveness relies on an optimal operational and dispatch policy. Given parameters such as start-up and shut-down penalties, expected electricity price profiles, solar availability, and system interoperability requirements, this paper seeks a profit-maximizing solution that determines start-up and shut-down times for the power cycle and solar receiver, and the times at which to dispatch stored and instantaneous quantities of energy over a 48-h horizon at hourly fidelity. The mixed-integer linear program (MIP) is subject to constraints including: (i) minimum and maximum rates of start-up and shut-down, (ii) energy balance, including energetic state of the system as a whole and its components, (iii) logical rules governing the operational modes of the power cycle and solar receiver, and (iv) operational consistency between time periods.The novelty in this work lies in the successful integration of a dispatch optimization model into a detailed techno-economic analysis tool, specifically, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s System Advisor Model (SAM). The MIP produces an optimized operating strategy, historically determined via a heuristic. Using several market electricity pricing profiles, we present comparative results for a system with and without dispatch optimization, indicating that dispatch optimization can improve plant profitability by 5–20% and thereby alter the economics of concentrating solar power technology. While we examine a molten salt power tower system, this analysis is equally applicable to the more mature concentrating solar parabolic trough system with thermal energy storage.

Reverse Engineering Risk: Converging Medical Standards for Improved Systems Engineering

AbstractEarly systems engineering and active risk management have been credited with improving the Department of Defence's (DoD) ability to deliver on cost, schedule, and technical requirements. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) continues to identify risk management of critical technologies as a key contributor in schedule delays and cost overruns. A review by GAO of key DoD programs has found that specifically an increase in technical scope, interoperability requirements, and advanced technology integration has been the root cause for many of these delays. To address these findings, DoD mandates Technology Risk Assessments (TRA) of key technologies at specific milestone gates. Unfortunately, the tools and metrics supplied for the TRAs continue to rely on dated concepts that have failed to provide the objective insight into modern technology integration and interoperability requirements. This paper proposes a new approach for technical risk management that borrows from concepts in the medical field that treat risk management as a top‐down integrated system concept.

Implementation of SNOMED CT in an online clinical database

A number of strategies have been published to accelerate the use of electronic health records in caring for patients across the UK. These visions of 'eHealth' have a common requirement for robust interoperability between different systems with the use of appropriate information and data standards. SNOMED CT, a comprehensive terminology that NHS England intends to adopt across all care settings by 2020, is a key component of these standards but there is currently limited experience in its use in live clinical settings. Within NHS Wales, an electronic patient record system has been developed since 2009 with a focus on a core generic clinical information model built using SNOMED CT. Our experience is that SNOMED CT is a usable and clinician-friendly terminology but that its size and scope must be considered during implementation.

Different Test Cases for e-Governance using Web Services

SOA is an ideal architectural solution for resolving the adaptation, interoperability and dynamic requirements of information services in e-government applications. Construction and test Web Service solution for e-government is becoming more and more important for e-government adoption. Test cases play an important role in software applications and tracing of bugs in many software projects. In web services there are different techniques and software tools used for accessing the information however sometime, data is updated from different remote locations and give common information. There are different approaches for service composition, ranging from manual to semi-automatic to fully automatic. However it is quite complex when taking independently developed services and integrate them. In e-governance, there are many applications, which work concurrently and give different values to different persons at an instance, which can be traced improperly. In this paper we propose how a service is working properly which is having many services in e-governance applications. Web sites are of different servers and databases but they can integrate by using web services i.e. by using SOA. In SOA architecture a service can test to other service as service requester and what the services are tested as service provider. The trust of service testing is an important criteria while testing a service about its performance, efficiency and accurate.