Rapid Application Deployment Research Articles

Rapid Automation Application Deployment Framework for Real Time Process and Industrial Automation Systems

Rapid Automation Application Deployment Framework for Real Time Process and Industrial Automation Systems

Inspection Technologies and Crisis Management: Field Automation lessons from the field

The task of capturing accurate information from the field and sharing it with response teams, incident commanders, command posts, regional offices, and internal/external agencies in a timely manner is a goal that has been difficult to achieve, especially on large-scale events. Growing fiscal constraints necessitate that solutions be part of a stable reusable system that is easily used by responders/inspectors, and also easily expanded when additional support and complexity become necessary. However, the various types of events/activities can be very challenging for both responders and inspectors. Government agencies are not always homogenous; their regional branches may collect different details on the same object, leading to incompatibilities between regional information. If the various agencies' engaged in data collection and dissemination does not standardize their efforts, then, information meltdown occurs. Ultimately, the data that were collected and disseminated become untrustworthy and unreliable. In some cases, this can compromise enforcement actions. Once information is collected, it also requires processing and distribution to different internal, external, non-profit, and private agencies. Recent mobile technologies that are available through smart phones and tablets offer solutions that allow quick customizations, scalability, and low-cost alternatives to data collection/dissemination. The concept of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) helps agencies to utilize existing equipment/infrastructure and to standardize policies and minimize training/software needs. These technologies can be utilized during all phases of Disaster Management – mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery, and day-to-day inspection activities. This shifting paradigm offers opportunities for all field-deployed personnel to share data in a near real-time environment. Over the past few decades, we have been actively involved in developing field inspection applications and establishing an infrastructure for Disaster Response/inspection programs that has allowed EPA to successfully manage field data collection. This poster intends to share these efforts and to demonstrate their effectiveness. The following is a list of issues that will be covered by the application of field automation: cost sharing, rapid application deployment, ease of training, Internet sharing, data quality, and data dissemination.

Harvest: an open platform for developing web-based biomedical data discovery and reporting applications

Biomedical researchers share a common challenge of making complex data understandable and accessible as they seek inherent relationships between attributes in disparate data types. Data discovery in this context is limited by a lack of query systems that efficiently show relationships between individual variables, but without the need to navigate underlying data models. We have addressed this need by developing Harvest, an open-source framework of modular components, and using it for the rapid development and deployment of custom data discovery software applications. Harvest incorporates visualizations of highly dimensional data in a web-based interface that promotes rapid exploration and export of any type of biomedical information, without exposing researchers to underlying data models. We evaluated Harvest with two cases: clinical data from pediatric cardiology and demonstration data from the OpenMRS project. Harvest's architecture and public open-source code offer a set of rapid application development tools to build data discovery applications for domain-specific biomedical data repositories. All resources, including the OpenMRS demonstration, can be found at http://harvest.research.chop.edu

Architecture for Adaptive Mobile Applications

Mobile computing is a relatively new field. While the challenges arising from mobility and the limitations of the portable devices are relatively well understood, there is no consensus yet as to what should be done to address these challenges. A comprehensive solution has to address many different aspects, such as the issue of dynamically changing bandwidth, the power, computational, and other limitations of the portable devices, or the varying availability of services in different environments. In this paper, we present our architecture for such adaptive mobile applications. We motivated the architecture by classifying likely mobile applications and identified common properties. The architecture intends to be more general than previous work with respect to adaptability, flexibility, and user mobility. We developed various pieces of the overall architecture and collected some preliminary experience with adaptive mobile applications. We give an overview of the intersection of the areas of software architecture and mobile applications. We consider the mobile applications, which represent the computing functionality designed to migrate across hardware devices at runtime and execute on mobile hardware platforms, and the mobile systems, which are computing applications that include mobile software and hardware elements. We are developing the components of a flexible and general-purpose runtime infrastructure to facilitate the rapid development and deployment of such adaptive mobile applications. We will evaluate our infrastructure by implementing a number of wireless applications and by building simulation tools to validate the scalability of our architecture when considering metropolitan and provincial cellular systems.

Effect Of Packet Delay Variation On Video/Voice Over Diffserv-Mpls In Ipv4/Ipv6 Networks

Over the last years, we have witnessed a rapid deployment of real-time applications on the Internet as well as many research works about Quality of Service (QoS), in particular IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4). The inevitable exhaustion of the remaining IPv4 address pool has become progressively evident. As the evolution of Internet Protocol (IP) continues, the deployment of IPv6 QoS is underway. Today, there is limited experience in the deployment of QoS for IPv6 traffic in MPLS backbone networks in conjunction with DiffServ (Differentiated Services) support. DiffServ itself does not have the ability to control the traffic which has been taken for end-to-end path while a number of links of the path are congested. In contrast, MPLS Traffic Engineering (TE) is accomplished to control the traffic and can set up end-to-end routing path before data has been forwarded. From the evolution of IPv4 QoS solutions, we know that the integration of DiffServ and MPLS TE satisfies the guaranteed QoS requirement for realtime applications. This paper presents a QoS performance study of real-time applications such as voice and video conferencing in terms of Packet Delay Variation (PDV) over DiffServ with or without MPLS TE in IPv4/IPv6 networks using Optimized Network Engineering Tool (OPNET). We also study the interaction of Expedited Forwarding (EF), Assured Forwarding (AF) traffic aggregation, link congestion, as well as the effect of performance metric such as PDV. The effectiveness of DiffServ and MPLS TE integration in IPv4/IPv6 network is illustrated and analyzed. This paper shows that IPv6 experiences more PDV than their IPv4 counterparts.

COEUS: “semantic web in a box” for biomedical applications

BackgroundAs the “omics” revolution unfolds, the growth in data quantity and diversity is bringing about the need for pioneering bioinformatics software, capable of significantly improving the research workflow. To cope with these computer science demands, biomedical software engineers are adopting emerging semantic web technologies that better suit the life sciences domain. The latter’s complex relationships are easily mapped into semantic web graphs, enabling a superior understanding of collected knowledge. Despite increased awareness of semantic web technologies in bioinformatics, their use is still limited.ResultsCOEUS is a new semantic web framework, aiming at a streamlined application development cycle and following a “semantic web in a box” approach. The framework provides a single package including advanced data integration and triplification tools, base ontologies, a web-oriented engine and a flexible exploration API. Resources can be integrated from heterogeneous sources, including CSV and XML files or SQL and SPARQL query results, and mapped directly to one or more ontologies. Advanced interoperability features include REST services, a SPARQL endpoint and LinkedData publication. These enable the creation of multiple applications for web, desktop or mobile environments, and empower a new knowledge federation layer.ConclusionsThe platform, targeted at biomedical application developers, provides a complete skeleton ready for rapid application deployment, enhancing the creation of new semantic information systems. COEUS is available as open source at http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/coeus/.

Service Oriented Framework for Industrial Automation Systems

Design and development of Industrial automation systems are undergoing rapid transformation from being islands of automation to large network of Reconfigurable, service based systems. Development of a Low Cost Industrial Automation and Control System Framework based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) using OSGi Framework for rapid application deployment has been attempted here. Objective is to develop a user-friendly, Platform and Hardware Independent Industrial Automation System using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and COTS Hardware. The developed prototype successfully integrates a SCADA system, which has real time data acquisition and controls various industrial applications using Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). The prototype also provides informative Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the ease of use, process visualization and remote controllability. An Alarm Event Handling Service with an integrated Short Message Service (SMS) and Remote Service Invocation are the salient features of the developed system. Implementations using Interactive Graphical SCADA System (IGSS) an industry standard SCADA software used world-wide, proves that the work is scalable as required for real-world applications.

TinyVM: an energy‐efficient execution infrastructure for sensor networks

SUMMARYEnergy‐efficient implementation techniques for virtual machines (VMs) have received little attention yet: conventional wisdom claims that VMs have a diametrical effect on energy consumption, and VM‐based applications are therefore short‐lived. In this paper, we argue that bytecode interpretation is affordable if we synthesize VMs specifically for energy efficiency. We present TinyVM, an execution infrastructure that seamlessly integrates with C and nesC/TinyOS‐based programming environments. TinyVM achieves high code density through the use of compressed bytecode as the primary program representation. Compressed bytecode allows rapid application deployment with low communication overhead. TinyVM executes compressed bytecode in place, which eliminates the need for a decompression stage and thereby reduces memory consumption on sensor nodes. Our infrastructure automates the creation of energy‐efficient application‐specific VMs. Applications are partitioned in machine code, bytecode, and VM instruction set extensions. Partitioning is manually controlled and/or fully guided by a discrete optimization problem that produces a partitioning with lowest energy consumption for a given program size limit. We provide experimental results for sensor network benchmarks and for selected applications on various CPU architectures including Atmega128‐based motes and the ARM‐based Intel iMote2. TinyVM has been released under the GNU General Public License. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A general framework for managing and processing live video data with privacy protection

Though a large body of existing work on video surveillance focuses on image and video processing techniques, few address the usability of such systems, and in particular privacy issues. This study fuses concepts from stream processing and content-based image retrieval to construct a privacy-preserving framework for rapid development and deployment of video surveillance applications. Privacy policies, instantiated to as privacy filters, may be applied both granularly and hierarchically. Privacy filters are granular as they are applicable to specific objects appearing in the video streams. They are hierarchal because they can be specified at specific objects in the framework (e.g., users, cameras) and are combined such that the disseminated video stream adheres to the most stringent aspect specified in the cascade of all privacy filters relevant to a video stream or query. To support this privacy framework, we extend our Live Video Database Model with an informatics-based approach to object recognition and tracking and add an intrinsic privacy model that provides a level of privacy protection not previously available for real-time streaming video data. The proposed framework also provides a formal approach to implement and enforce privacy policies that are verifiable, an important step towards privacy certification of video surveillance systems through a standardized privacy specification language.

A robust and extendible framework for medical image registration focused on rapid clinical application deployment

Development and integration of image registration methods become increasingly important for clinical workstations. Due to the complexity of such methods, prototyping, evaluation and workflow integration require in-depth knowledge foremostly available to registration developers. Rapid development and deployment is therefore often difficult, particularly for comprehensive software frameworks. In this article, we introduce a novel rapid prototyping framework for voxel-based registration. It is specifically designed to allow evaluation and adaption by developers with less knowledge on registration internals. Based on a unique “one-iteration” paradigm, it enables accelerated algorithm development. Furthermore, methods are interchangeable at runtime using an intuitive graphical plugin interface, allowing a genuine comparison of methods. We discuss the concepts of this framework, compare it to other software and demonstrate its effectiveness for several demanding registration applications, highlighting its versatility and reliability.

Gibbs: Phase equilibria and symbolic computation of thermodynamic properties

A general purpose open source, Python-based framework, Gibbs , is presented to perform multiphysical equilibrium calculations of material properties. The developed architecture allows to prototype symbolic and numerical representations of materials by starting from analytic models, tabulated experimental data, or Thermo-Calc data files. These constructions are based on the addition of arbitrary energy contributions that range from the traditional thermochemical to mechanical and surface tension. Gibbs seamlessly interfaces with FiPy to prototype interdiffusion and microstructural evolution (phase field) models. Through its flexible Graphical User Interface, Gibbs allows rapid deployment of computational thermodynamic applications with intuitive user interfaces, and through the developed viewers, direct visualization and analysis of data can be readily performed for those physical properties that are relevant for the problem at hand. Example applications to chemically homogeneous ferroelectrics and two component (binary) solids are presented.

SU-FF-T-659: CRADLE - A Software Architecture for Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning

Purpose: The treatment planning process has not changed in 20 years: patient data is imported, “invisible” data is created inside the treatment planning system (TPS) to describe the treatment course, and data is exported to the treatment device. An oncology information system manages this exported data and has become the center of the modern department, while the TPS has remained largely static. We deem it essential to incorporate new capabilities, such internal data management, into the TPS. Method and Materials: We present a novel architecture (implemented as CRADLE) that addresses three problems: (1) application data management congruent with DICOM, (2) user‐interface management based on the immediate mode model (IMGUI), and (3) fine‐grained state and version data management. We demonstrate CRADLE in our proton scanning application. Results: DICOM defines a model for RT data associations, but is only used between application entities. We internalize this model and design our data associations congruent with it and achieve a near‐transparent mapping between internal and external representations. Current user‐interface (UI) designs use an event call‐back model. This model moves authority from the application to the UI‐code (created by builders), requires user synchronization between application and UI‐code data, and is characterized by a static, UI‐code controlled, environment. In contrast, IMGUI moves authority and data into the application, achieves local UI and context control and allows for dynamic UI control. Finally, TPS data management must achieve fine‐grained version control to allow distributed and multi‐user access to data and correlation of state with departmental events such as physician sign‐off. Conclusion: The immediate mode user‐interface solves these problems and results in strict management of data context and state and produces easily extendable code. The stated objectives implemented in CRADLE allow rapid deployment of advanced applications in radiation oncology.

Next-generation networks application traffic modeling

One of the key selling points of the next-generation network (NGN) architecture is that it facilitates the rapid deployment of numerous applications onto the same core infrastructure. Before this advantage can be fully realized, however, new methods for traffic estimation are needed to assess the performance impact of new applications and ensure adequate quality of service (QoS). We have created a method to assist network operators with such estimates as part of comprehensive design, capacity planning, or business case analyses. The method identifies the key input parameters that impact traffic, provides a library of application building blocks, assembles them to model new applications quickly, and provides a method for calculating the aggregate signaling and bearer traffic for a given set of applications. In this way, a new network model for each application can be created quickly, and the impact of introducing a new set of applications can be estimated without requiring detailed systems engineering expertise on each aspect of the network.

FPGA-based Ultra-Low Latency HIL Fault Testing of a Permanent Magnet Motor Drive using RT-LAB-XSG

Presented is a real-time simulator of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) drive implemented on an FPGA card. Real-time simulation of PMSM drives enables thorough testing of control strategies and software protection routines and therefore allows rapid deployment of vehicular or industrial applications. The proposed PMSM model is a phase domain model with sinusoidal flux induction. A 3-phase IGBT inverter drives the PMSM machine. Both models are implemented on an FPGA chip, without any VHDL coding, with the RT-LAB real-time simulation platform of Opal-RT Technologies using a Simulink blockset called Xilinx System Generator (XSG). The paper explains various aspects of the design of the motor drive models in fixed-point representation in XSG, as well as simulation validation against a standard PMSM drive model built in Simulink. The PMSM drive, along with a open-loop test source for the pulse width modulation, is coded for an FPGA card. The model has user-selectable dead time, modulation index, source angle offset, and frequency. The PMSM drive is completed with various encoder models (quadrature, Hall effects and resolver). The overall model compilation and simulation is entirely automated by RT-LAB. The drive can also run in a closed loop with a controller executing on a CPU of a real-time simulator. The phase-domain PMSM drive model runs with an equivalent 10 nanosecond time step (100 MHz FPGA card) and has a latency of 300 nanoseconds (PMSM machine and inverter). The motor drive is directly connected to digital inputs and analog outputs with 1 microsecond settling time on the FPGA card and has a resulting total hardware-in-the-loop latency of 1.3 microseconds.

A performance comparison of self-organising application layer multicast overlay construction techniques

Application layer multicast (ALM) uses overlays built on top of existing network infrastructure for rapid deployment of multicast applications. Key to the efficiency of this technique is the structure of the overlay tree used. This work reviews and compares various self-organising techniques that strive to build low cost, and low delay trees using extensive simulations. Protocols investigated include HMTP, HostCast, switch-trees, DCMALTP, NICE, TBCP and Narada which encompass a wide spectrum of overlay construction, optimisation and maintenance techniques. The protocols are evaluated based on their ability to achieve their objectives, overlay path penalties, protocol convergence and overhead. We also conduct detailed analysis of two main components in building an overlay: initial construction and the overhead of periodical improvement. Based on the observed results, we identify strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, and provide suggestions for future work on ALM overlay optimisation.

Incentive-compatible adaptation of Internet real-time multimedia

The rapid deployment of new applications and the interconnection of networks with increasing diversity of technologies and capacity make it more challenging to provide end-to-end quality assurance to the value-added services, such as the transmission of real-time multimedia and mission critical data. In a network with enhancements for QoS support, pricing of network services based on the level of service, usage, and congestion provides a natural and equitable incentive for multimedia applications to adapt their sending rates according to network conditions. We have developed an intelligent service architecture that integrates resource reservation, negotiation, pricing and adaptation in a flexible and scalable way. In this paper, we present a generic pricing structure that characterizes the pricing schemes widely used in the current Internet, and introduce a dynamic, congestion-sensitive pricing algorithm that can be used with the proposed service framework. We also develop the demand behavior of adaptive users based on a physically reasonable user utility function. We introduce our multimedia testbed and describe how the proposed intelligent framework can be implemented to manage a video conference system. We develop a simulation framework to compare the performance of a network supporting congestion-sensitive pricing and adaptive reservation to that of a network with a static pricing policy. We study the stability of the dynamic pricing and reservation mechanisms, and the impact of various network control parameters. The results show that the congestion-sensitive pricing system takes advantage of application adaptivity to achieve significant gains in network availability, revenue, and user-perceived benefit relative to the fixed-price policy. Congestion-based pricing is stable and effective in limiting utilization to a targeted level. Users with different demand elasticity are seen to share bandwidth fairly, with each user having a bandwidth share proportional to its relative willingness to pay for bandwidth. The results also show that even a small proportion of adaptive users may result in a significant performance benefit and better service for the entire user population-both adaptive and nonadaptive users. The performance improvement given by the congestion-based adaptive policy further improves as the network scales and more connections share the resources. Finally, we complement the simulation with experimental results demonstrating important features of the adaptation process.

A self-adaptive service provisioning framework for 3G+/4G mobile applications

In light of the increasing acceptance of the notion of next generation networks (NGN), which results from the convergence of the fixed and mobile telecommunications, Internet, and entertainment sectors, there is a need for the realization of next-generation service delivery platforms to allow seamless and adaptive provisioning of multimedia information and communication services to mobile users. This means that in such an NGN environment different end systems, access networks, and service platforms have to be integrated. For this highly heterogeneous communications and services environment, we propose a self-adaptive service provisioning middleware framework (ASPF), which, by interoperating with existing wireless and wireline service delivery platforms, aims to enable seamless omnipresent service provisioning to mobile users anywhere, anytime, and in any context. The ASPF is intended to "liberate" applications from space and time limitations, networks, platforms, and device dependences, minimize time-to-market constraints, and eliminate major hurdles that hinder the rapid deployment of new mobile services and applications. Key to this goal is interworking/integration with current SDPs, such as IN/CAMEL, OSA/Parlay, and the emerging IMS.

The Parlay proxy manager-Architecture considerations

The Parlay/OSA standards enable service providers to safely expose, in a regulated manner, pre-packaged network service capabilities to a large body of external third-party application developers. The objective is to facilitate the rapid development and deployment of new applications that could significantly enhance the end-user experience and improve the revenue-generating potential. The Parlay/OSA model supports service sessions to permit client applications to connect to various services hosted by a Parlay or open service access (OSA) gateway. Framework services may be configured to enable a suitable distribution of load at a session level granularity among the various service instances. Finer granularity of request distribution and more reliable end-to-end service access may be achieved through support for proxy manager architectures. In this paper, we present schemes for load distribution and higher reliability, and proxy manager architecture alternatives. We then further extend the proxy concept to application mediation and cross-protocol, cross-domain service reuse. © 2003 Lucent Technologies Inc.

Active networks for efficient distributed network management

The emerging next generation of routers exhibit both high performance and rich functionality, such as support for virtual private networks and QoS. To achieve this, per-flow queuing and fast IP filtering are incorporated into the router hardware. The management of a network comprising such devices and efficient use of the new functionality introduce new challenges. A truly distributed network management system is an attractive candidate to address these challenges. We describe how active network techniques can be used to allow fast and easy deployment of distributed network management applications in IP networks. We describe a prototype system where legacy routers are enhanced with an adjunct active engine, which enables the safe execution and rapid deployment of new distributed management applications in the network layer. This system can gradually be integrated in today's IP network, and allows smooth migration from IP to programmable networks. This is done with an emphasis on efficient use of network resources, which is somewhat obscure by many of today's high-level solutions.