Services In Smart Environments Research Articles

A decision-making approach for determining strategic priority of sustainable smart city services from citizens’ perspective: A case study of Hong Kong

The development of sustainable smart city (SC) services is often carried out with limited resources, but there is little discussion about the strategic priority of promoting SC development from the citizens’ perspective. This study developed a decision-making approach to determine the supply and demand priority of SC services using utility and need theories, with Hong Kong as a case study. The results show that smart environment services should be prioritized for all population groups, while the differences in priority among older adults, people with lower digital literacy, and people with lower income were relatively small. On the one hand, the supply of SC services should be prioritized for those that are closely linked to citizens’ daily lives, have a long-term impact on communities, and are targeted to large user groups. On the other hand, priority should be given to those services that meet citizens’ demands for physiological, safety, and self-actualization needs. This study enriches the theoretical framework of people-centric SC research through the innovative integration of Bradley-Terry and rank-ordered logit models for determining the development priority for SC services, which can serve as a practical decision-making tool for policy makers to effectively allocate resources for sustainable SC development.

EAAM: Energy-aware application management strategy for FPGA-based IoT-Cloud environments

An efficient integration of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing techniques accelerates the evolution of next-generation smart environments (e.g., smart homes, buildings, cities). The advanced modern cloud networking architecture also helps to efficiently host, manage and optimize the IoT services in smart environments. In this paper, we have considered an “IoT-Cloud” environment where servers are composed of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) which are reconfigurable in nature. The energy consumption is considered as a major driving factor for the operational cost of the “IoT-Cloud” platform. We have proposed an “energy-aware application management” strategy for FPGA-based IoT-Cloud environments, which can efficiently handle sensors’ data transmission by positioning them into the best possible coordinates and execute the Service Requests requested by the users. We have compared our strategy performances with an existing technique and the results show that our proposed strategy is capable to achieve high resource utilization with low energy consumption over different simulation scenarios.

Action Graphs for Performing Goal Recognition Design on Human-Inhabited Environments.

Goal recognition is an important component of many context-aware and smart environment services; however, a person’s goal often cannot be determined until their plan nears completion. Therefore, by modifying the state of the environment, our work aims to reduce the number of observations required to recognise a human’s goal. These modifications result in either: Actions in the available plans being replaced with more distinctive actions; or removing the possibility of performing some actions, so humans are forced to take an alternative (more distinctive) plan. In our solution, a symbolic representation of actions and the world state is transformed into an Action Graph, which is then traversed to discover the non-distinctive plan prefixes. These prefixes are processed to determine which actions should be replaced or removed. For action replacement, we developed an exhaustive approach and an approach that shrinks the plans then reduces the non-distinctive plan prefixes, namely Shrink–Reduce. Exhaustive is guaranteed to find the minimal distinctiveness but is more computationally expensive than Shrink–Reduce. These approaches are compared using a test domain with varying amounts of goals, variables and values, and a realistic kitchen domain. Our action removal method is shown to increase the distinctiveness of various grid-based navigation problems, with a width/height ranging from 4 to 16 and between 2 and 14 randomly selected goals, by an average of 3.27 actions in an average time of 4.69 s, whereas a state-of-the-art approach often breaches a 10 min time limit.

Testing SERVQUAL in a smart service environment: evidence from oil and gas sector of the UAE

The importance of service quality in the oil and gas sector of the UAE has grown as a result of the government policy to promote smart services in all sectors of the economy. As a result of this policy unveiled recently with great passion and emphasis, customers have come to demand smart service quality. This paper makes an attempt to test the oft-quoted SERVQUAL in the context of the emerging smart service environment in the oil and gas sector of the UAE. By linking SERVQUAL and smart service quality streams of literature, this study extends our understanding of how firms respond to government policy on smart services to enhance their legitimacy in the national environment. It is our hope, this paper would lead to SERVQUAL extension to encompass a wide array of dimensions of smart service quality.

Testing SERVQUAL in a smart service environment: evidence from oil and gas sector of the UAE

The importance of service quality in the oil and gas sector of the UAE has grown as a result of the government policy to promote smart services in all sectors of the economy. As a result of this policy unveiled recently with great passion and emphasis, customers have come to demand smart service quality. This paper makes an attempt to test the oft-quoted SERVQUAL in the context of the emerging smart service environment in the oil and gas sector of the UAE. By linking SERVQUAL and smart service quality streams of literature, this study extends our understanding of how firms respond to government policy on smart services to enhance their legitimacy in the national environment. It is our hope, this paper would lead to SERVQUAL extension to encompass a wide array of dimensions of smart service quality.

IoT-Cloud Service Optimization in Next Generation Smart Environments

The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on the evolution toward next generation smart environments (e.g., smart homes, buildings, and cities) will largely depend on the efficient integration of IoT and cloud computing technologies. With the predicted explosion in the number of connected devices and IoT services, current centralized cloud architectures, which tend to consolidate computing and storage resources into a few large data centers, will inevitably lead to excessive network load, end-to-end service latencies, and overall power consumption. Thanks to recent advances in network virtualization and programmability, highly distributed cloud networking architectures are a promising solution to efficiently host, manage, and optimize next generation IoT services in smart environments. In this paper, we mathematically formulate the service distribution problem (SDP) in IoT-Cloud networks, referred to as the IoT-CSDP, as a minimum cost mixed-cast flow problem that can be efficiently solved via linear programming. We focus on energy consumption as the major driver of today’s network and cloud operational costs and characterize the heterogeneous set of IoT-Cloud network resources according to their associated sensing, computing, and transport capacity and energy efficiency. Our results show that, when properly optimized, the flexibility of IoT-Cloud networks can be efficiently exploited to deliver a wide range of IoT services in the context of next generation smart environments, while significantly reducing overall power consumption.

A Study On Customized Products and Services in Smart Environments

A Study On Customized Products and Services in Smart Environments

Generation of human computational models with machine learning

Services in smart environments pursue to increase the quality of people’s lives. The most important issues when developing this kind of environments is testing and validating such services. These tasks usually imply high costs and annoying or unfeasible real-world testing. In such cases, artificial societies may be used to simulate the smart environment (i.e. physical environment, equipment and humans). With this aim, the CHROMUBE methodology guides test engineers when modeling human beings. Such models reproduce behaviors which are highly similar to the real ones. Originally, these models are based on automata whose transitions are governed by random variables. Automaton’s structure and the probability distribution functions of each random variable are determined by a manual test and error process. In this paper, it is presented an alternative extension of this methodology which avoids the said manual process. It is based on learning human behavior patterns automatically from sensor data by using machine learning techniques. The presented approach has been tested on a real scenario, where this extension has given highly accurate human behavior models.

TOF Sensor Network for AAL Monitoring Services

The main goal of Ambient Assisted Living solutions is to provide assistive technologies and services in smart environments allowing to elderly people to have high quality of life. Since Time-Of-Flight vision technologies are increasingly investigated as monitoring solution able to outperform traditional approaches, in this work a monitoring framework based on a Time-Of-Flight sensor network has been investigated with the aim to provide a wide-range solution suitable in several assisted living scenarios. Detector nodes are managed by a low-power embedded PC to process Time-Of-Flight streams and extract features related with person's activities. The feature level of detail is tuned in an application-driven manner in order to optimize both bandwidth and computational resources. The event detection capabilities were validated by using data collected in real-home environments.

Context-Aware AAL Services through a 3D Sensor-Based Platform

The main goal of Ambient Assisted Living solutions is to provide assistive technologies and services in smart environments allowing elderly people to have high quality of life. Since 3D sensing technologies are increasingly investigated as monitoring solution able to outperform traditional approaches, in this work a noninvasive monitoring platform based on 3D sensors is presented providing a wide-range solution suitable in several assisted living scenarios. Detector nodes are managed by low-power embedded PCs in order to process 3D streams and extract postural features related to person’s activities. The feature level of details is tuned in accordance with the current context in order to save bandwidth and computational resources. The platform architecture is conceived as a modular system suitable to be integrated into third-party middleware to provide monitoring functionalities in several scenarios. The event detection capabilities were validated by using both synthetic and real datasets collected in controlled and real-home environments. Results show the soundness of the presented solution to adapt to different application requirements, by correctly detecting events related to four relevant AAL services.

Scenario-Based Smart Services for Single-Person Households

Single-person household has to undergo various difficulties because of living alone. This study proposes smart services with which the difficulties undergone by single-person household can be solved. For proposing this kind of service, configuration method of sensors and devices is quite important. Requirement or life style of single-person household provides important basis for constituting this kind of sensor. In order to raise the habitability of single-person household, construction of smart service environment equipped with adequate sensors is essential. Smart service environment should elastically be responded to the life style of any single-person household. The method adopted for designing smart type service environment in this study was a scenario-based smart service design. Scenario-based service design can provide the tool which may positively reflect behaviour and life style of a single-person household. In addition, flexible mutual consensus between the resident and a single-person household can be realised on the basis of this design.

Ubiquitous Green Computing Techniques for High Demand Applications in Smart Environments

Ubiquitous sensor network deployments, such as the ones found in Smart cities and Ambient intelligence applications, require constantly increasing high computational demands in order to process data and offer services to users. The nature of these applications imply the usage of data centers. Research has paid much attention to the energy consumption of the sensor nodes in WSNs infrastructures. However, supercomputing facilities are the ones presenting a higher economic and environmental impact due to their very high power consumption. The latter problem, however, has been disregarded in the field of smart environment services. This paper proposes an energy-minimization workload assignment technique, based on heterogeneity and application-awareness, that redistributes low-demand computational tasks from high-performance facilities to idle nodes with low and medium resources in the WSN infrastructure. These non-optimal allocation policies reduce the energy consumed by the whole infrastructure and the total execution time.

Ant-based service selection framework for a smart home monitoring environment

Selecting ambient media services in a smart home monitoring environment is challenging. Services in such an environment should be ubiquitous, adaptive, and robust with respect to access and delivery. Many different techniques exist for selecting services in smart environments, for example, dynamic programming, genetic algorithms, and fuzzy logic. However, existing approaches to service selection fail to address the dynamic nature of the services and the requirement of considering the user context and user satisfaction. We address this issue by proposing an ant-inspired service selection framework based on dynamic user preferences and satisfaction. This ant-inspired approach is robust to failures and adaptive to dynamic context. The proposed framework enables different categories of residents (e.g., elderly people, fathers with children, mothers, and so on) to access various media services in such a way that their experiences are optimized with regard to their surrounding environment. Experimental results demonstrate the viability of the proposed framework.

Smart Applications of Context Services using Automatic Adaptive Module and Making users Profiles

Context-awareness is becoming an essential feature of services in smart environments in which various computing and sensing devices and position technologies are involved. Location, the most essential part of contextual information, is useful in many applications for determining position, navigation, routing, and tracking. There can be focus on particular application-specific services, e.g., user navigation for visualizing locations on maps and data providing information relevant to the user's current location. It is difficult for existing approaches to offer services as they are not initially designed as client's location is changing continuously and services need to be adapted accordingly. We have designed an architecture that supports automatic adaptation by triggering and discovery services for applications for timely need of user. We will try to give general service quality architecture with XML and XSD(schema) language for describing general services for applications.

User Preference Model for Conscious Services in Smart Environments

Awareness of user preferences and analysis of the current situation makes capable to provide user with invasive services in various applications of smart environments. In smart meeting rooms context–aware systems analyze user behavior based on multimodal sensor data and provide proactive services for meeting support, including active control PTZ (pan, tilt and zoom) cameras, microphone arrays, context dependent automatic archiving and web–transmission of meeting data at the interaction. History of interaction sessions between a user and a service is used for knowledge accumulation in order to forecast user behavior during the next visit. The user preference model based on audiovisual data recorded during interaction and statistics of his/her speech activity, requests, movement trajectories and other parameters was implemented for the developed mobile information robot and smart meeting room

도시가스 시설 안전관리를 위한 네트워크 인프라 및 지능형 서비스 구축

최근에 정보기술 패러다임은 유비쿼터스 기술이 도입되면서 스마트 서비스 환경으로 변화하고 있다. 도로, 상하수도, 가스 등과 산업 시설물에 유비쿼터스 기술이 접목되어 비용 감소 및 사고 예방성 향상이 높아지면서 관련된 연구 및 기술이 가속화되고 있다. 그러나 현재까지 공통환경 IT기술 위주로 개발되어 산업 도메인 특성이 고려되지 않았기 때문에 유비쿼터스 기술이 생활환경 및 산업시설에 활발하게 도입되지 못하고 있다. 본 논문은 도시가스 주요시설에 유비쿼터스 기술을 도입하기 위하여 현장지향형 무선 데이터 전송 인프라를 구축하고 효율적인 서비스를 제공하는 무선기반 도시가스 안전관리 시스템을 목적으로 한다. The information technology paradigm has been shift to smart service environment, as ubiquitous technology is used in the latest industry trend. The convergency between industry facilities and ubiquitous technologies accelerate related studies and technologies because of increasing accident prevention and decreasing cost. However, ubiquitous technologies are not used to life environment and industry facilities, because those technologies did not consider industry domain characteristics by means of developing IT technology for common environment until now. This paper aims to develop wireless city gas safety management system, which provide efficient service, and establish the field oriented wireless data transmission infrastructure in order to use ubiquitous technology to city gas facilities.

Embedded Multimedia Processors for Road-Traffic Parameter Extension

Combining a multimedia RISC processor and an embedded operating system allows implementation of new value-added services in smart environments. From a hardware viewpoint, multimedia RISC processors provide high digital connectivity, analog and digital video capturing, and good processing capabilities.

A location model for smart environments

This paper presents a location model for location-aware and user-aware services in smart environments. It can be dynamically organized like a tree based on geographical containment, such as that in a user–room–floor–building hierarchy and each node in the tree can be constructed as an executable software component. The model is unique in existing approaches because it enables location-aware services to be managed without any database servers, it can be managed by multiple computers, and it can provide a unified view of the locations of not only physical entities and spaces, including users and objects, but also computing devices and services. A prototype implementation of this approach was constructed on a Java-based mobile agent system. This paper presents the rationale, design, implementation, and applications of the prototype system.