Smart Office Research Articles

SALA: Smartphone-Assisted Localization Algorithm for Positioning Indoor IoT Devices

This paper proposes a Smartphone-Assisted Localization Algorithm (SALA) for the localization of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are placed in indoor environments (e.g., smart home, smart office, smart mall, and smart factory). This SALA allows a smartphone to visually display the positions of IoT devices in indoor environments for the easy management of IoT devices, such as remote-control and monitoring. A smartphone plays a role of a mobile beacon that tracks its own position indoors by a sensor-fusion method with its motion sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer. While moving around indoor, the smartphone periodically broadcasts short-distance beacon messages and collects the response messages from neighboring IoT devices. The response messages contains IoT device information. The smartphone stores the IoT device information in the response messages along with the message’s signal strength and its position into a dedicated server (e.g., home gateway) for the localization. These stored trace data are processed offline through our localization algorithm along with a given indoor layout, such as apartment layout. Through simulations, it is shown that our SALA can effectively localize IoT devices in an apartment with position errors less than 20 cm in a realistic apartment setting.

Research on the Space Layout of a Smart Office to Improve Work-life Balance

Research on the Space Layout of a Smart Office to Improve Work-life Balance

A System-Level Modeling and Design for Cyber-Physical-Social Systems

The design of cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) is a novel and challenging research field due that it emphasizes the deep fusion of cyberspace, physical space, and social space. In this article, we extend our previously proposed system-level design framework [Zeng et al. 2015] to tailor it to the needs of social scenario of multiple users. A hierarchical Petri net-based model and social flow are presented to extend the control flow and formally describe the social interactions of multiple users, respectively. By using the extended model, the system-level optimization for CPSS can be achieved by the improved design flow. Specifically, object emplacement and user satisfaction are further extended into the social environment. Also maximal power estimation algorithm is improved, leveraging the extended intermediate representation model. Finally, we use a smart office case to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our improved design approach for multiple users.

A Review of Prospects and Challenges of Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects physical objects such as baby monitors, cars, tablet computers, fridges through the internet and they are equipped with capabilities to communicate with each other. They exchange information about themselves and their surroundings and provide improved efficiencies for the benefit of users. The future Internet is an emerging world of highly networked smart items that will be able to independently communicate with each other with little or no human intervention as the world moves into the era of smart phones, smart homes, smart offices, smart vehicles, smart classrooms, smart factories to smart everything. As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow security including new attack vectors, new vulnerabilities, and perhaps most concerning of all, a vastly increased ability to use remote access to cause physical destruction becomes a major concern. In this paper we seek to explain what the Internet of Things is, its future impact, challenges and how Digital Forensics Technology can be used to get evidence to prosecute offenders in the law court.

Semantic analysis and verification of context-driven adaptive applications in intelligent environments

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), assistive applications and smart environments can tap into a growing amount of context information to learn about their users, their surroundings and typical behavior. This information is useful to adapt intelligently, autonomously and non-intrusively to a myriad of circumstances. However, trustworthiness and reliable adaptation to changes in line with user expectations—especially to situations that the developers did not anticipate—remain key concerns. Understanding the impact of changes from a developer (design time) and system (runtime) perspective, and ensuring that no undesired side effects take place are two non-trivial research challenges to increase the adoption of such applications. Given the limited tool support for anticipating change at design time and runtime, we present our change impact analysis (CIA) methodology—found in the formal semantic modeling of intelligent environments and rule-based application behavior—to contribute to the development and deployment of reliable context-aware adaptive applications. We validate our contributions on non-trivial smart home and office scenarios, and demonstrate how our framework helps increase trust in intelligent environment applications by anticipating change implications upfront at design time and by minimizing the occurrence of undesired side effects at runtime.

Call for papers: Special Issue on Internet of Things

Nowadays, Internet has evolved into a platform that reshapes modern life and removes borders between real, social and cyber worlds. Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm and a cutting edge technology that harnesses a network of embedded, interconnected objects (sensors, actuators, tags or mobile devices) in order to collect various types of information at anytime and anywhere. These devices can be used for building different complex smart environments, such as smart homes, smart classrooms, smart offices, smart factories, smart cities, smart power grids or smart e-government. Further, the networks of devices are based on advanced Internet standards. IoT implies seamless integration of numerous types of devices into existing Internet infrastructure. Smart environments can be customized according to users’ needs and preferences which are suitable for automating these environments.

A Fuzzy-Based Building Automation Control System: Optimizing the Level of Energy Performance and Comfort in an Office Space by Taking Advantage of Building Automation Systems and Solar Energy

Building automation systems (BASs) are the key to improving the energy performance of buildings as well as the occupants? comfort. There is a need to build a knowledge base on the matter and to grow suitable algorithms for a smart management of intelligent buildings. Therefore, fuzzy logic is a valuable candidate for developing robust algorithms. The scope of this article is to validate a fuzzy-logic approach with the ability to optimize the level of energy performance and comfort in an office space by taking advantage of BASs and solar energy. In BASs, dynamic elements, e.g., dynamic facade and luminaires, can exploit daylight and solar gain based on the condition that well-programmed integrated multicriteria decision-making methods are used. In this article, a virtual model of a smart office room (SOR) equipped with dynamic shading, lighting, and an air-conditioning control system was studied, and four different scenarios were considered: control versus no control, economy versus comfort mode, fluorescent versus lightemitting diode (LED), and dimming versus switching. Both economy and comfort mode showed a better energy performance than the noncontrolled scenarios. In conclusion, the proposed model is a valuable tool for optimizing comfort features and energy demand.

Organization Innovation through Smart Work : A Case Study for Etners’ Smart Office

스마트 워크는 정보통신기술의 발전을 통해 시간과 장소의 유연성을 극대화 한 근무형태 또는 환경으로 궁극적으로 조직의 생산성을 향상하기 위한 혁신활동으로 볼 수 있다. 최근 스마트 워크에 대한 폭발적 관심에도 불구하고 스마트 워크가 어떻게 기업현장에서 적용되고 있으며, 또한 이를 통해 어떤 효과가 나타나는지에 대한 연구가 매우 부족한 실정이다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 스마트 워크를 추진하는 기업을 통해 스마트 워크의 동기와 실행과정, 성과, 향후과제 등에 대한 질문에 답하려는 목적을 갖고 있다. 또한 본 연구는 스마트 워크의 효과를 심층적으로 파악하기 위해 참여관찰 방법을 활용하여 스마트 워크가 작업환경에 미치는 영향이나 종업원들의 반응을 구체적으로 검토하고 있다.BR 사례기업인 이트너스는 전략적 공간관리의 관점에서 스마트 오피스라는 혁신적인 사무공간을 조성하고, 그와 관련된 다양한 제도와 시스템을 도입하고 활용하였으며 이를 기업 브랜드 이미지 제고에도 연결시키는 통합적인 스마트 워크를 추진하였다. 이트너스는 스마트 오피스를 도입하여 종업원 및 부서 단위의 의사소통을 크게 향상시켰으며, 스마트 워크와 관련된 시간관리 및 기술도입을 통해 종업원의 만족과 조직 정체성을 높일 수 있었다. 그러한 성과는 스마트 워크에 대한 경영진의 확고한 추진의지 및 조직 내에서 적극적인 교육훈련에 기인한 바 크다.BR 본 사례에서는 스마트 워크를 공간, 시간, ICT 기술의 세가지 측면에서 살펴보았으며, 그러한 과정에서 나타나는 작업조직 및 종업원의 태도 변화를 포괄적으로 관찰했다. 본 연구는 질적 연구방법을 활용하여 스마트 워크의 도입과정 및 성과를 과정적인 측면에서 검토하였으며, 향후 스마트 워크의 효과를 높이기 위한 성공조건이나 향후 과제를 깊이있게 논의 할 수 있는 기반을 제공하였다는데 의의가 있다.

Two-level medium access control in cyber physical system-based smart wireless networks

Most of the literature review of wireless sensor actuator networks WSANs focused on single level collision avoidance while accessing a medium. In this paper, we try to solve the issues that arise after completing a particular stage of medium access. This paper executes collision avoidance in WSANs for cyber physical system CPS based smart wireless networks CPS_SWNs. We tried to improvise the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol to handle the successive collisions that occur between any two base stations. Since we are concentrating more on CPS applications like smart offices, smart homes, we implemented a medium access control methodology referred as priority with counter modified backoff PCMB that suits for non-beacon enabled WSANs. A priority with counter is maintained at each device to avoid collisions in unslotted 802.15.4 protocol. Further, we have proved from the simulation results that successive collisions can be delayed rather than providing data loss in critical situations.

Soft Actuation: Smart Home and Office with Human-in-the-Loop

Considerable effort the area of context-aware systems goes into applications that process sensor data to proactively drive actuators. However, there are concerns about such fully automated operation. Most notably, due to imperfect context inferences, actuating decisions can be contrary to the user's desires. In this article, the authors focus on what they refer to as soft actuation: issuing low-key, nonverbal hints prompting the user to optionally perform a simple manual operation on a nearby object. Soft actuation targets noncritical applications for the home or office. In the spirit of calm technology, special care is taken to respect the user's attention. The authors elaborate the interaction concept and present its experimental evaluation in the wild. The results are encouraging, given that users liked the soft-actuating system and accepted quite a few hints.

A collaboration based context prediction in smart office

Context prediction plays a vital role in an assistive ubiquitous environment. The environmental configuration in a ubiquitous environment is heavily dependent on the context of the events occurring in the environment. Current state of the art approaches utilize the user's history information for predicting the context of the events. When the user's history does not provide apposite contextual information for the observed activity/event at time t, the history based state of the art context prediction tech- niques fails to predict the appropriate future context. To overcome the gap of missing context information in the user's context history, we propose a Profile based Collaborative Context Prediction (PCCP) approach. PCCP is a predictive association rules based system which utilizes the history of similar users and collaborate among users of the ubiquitous environment. PCCP gener- ates rules at high level of abstraction, human readable and understandable that helps in avoiding the underline details. To evaluate the PCCP, a smart office is considered as an experimental environment. Experiments are carried out on indigenous multi user smart office data set. Our experiments showed significant level of accuracy in both environments. Due to the understandability of output and higher accuracy of PCCP, it can be extended to assist the user in a smart environment.

An Energy Management Service for the Smart Office

The evolution of the electricity grid towards the smart grid paradigm is fostering the integration of distributed renewable energy sources in smart buildings: a combination of local power generation, battery storage and controllable loads can greatly increase the energetic self-sufficiency of a smart building, enabling it to maximize the self-consumption of photovoltaic electricity and to participate in the energy market, thus taking advantage of time-variable tariffs to achieve economic savings. This paper proposes an energy management infrastructure specifically tailored for a smart office building, which relies on measured data and on forecasting algorithms to predict the future patterns of both local energy generation and power loads. The performance is compared to the optimal energy usage scheduling, which would be obtained assuming the exact knowledge of the future energy production and consumption trends, showing gaps below 10% with respect to the optimum.

Integrated semantics service platform for the Internet of Things: a case study of a smart office.

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows machines and devices in the world to connect with each other and generate a huge amount of data, which has a great potential to provide useful knowledge across service domains. Combining the context of IoT with semantic technologies, we can build integrated semantic systems to support semantic interoperability. In this paper, we propose an integrated semantic service platform (ISSP) to support ontological models in various IoT-based service domains of a smart city. In particular, we address three main problems for providing integrated semantic services together with IoT systems: semantic discovery, dynamic semantic representation, and semantic data repository for IoT resources. To show the feasibility of the ISSP, we develop a prototype service for a smart office using the ISSP, which can provide a preset, personalized office environment by interpreting user text input via a smartphone. We also discuss a scenario to show how the ISSP-based method would help build a smart city, where services in each service domain can discover and exploit IoT resources that are wanted across domains. We expect that our method could eventually contribute to providing people in a smart city with more integrated, comprehensive services based on semantic interoperability.

Fault detection analysis using data mining techniques for a cluster of smart office buildings

There is an increasing need for automated fault detection tools in buildings. The total energy request in buildings can be significantly reduced by detecting abnormal consumption effectively. Numerous models are used to tackle this problem but either they are very complex and mostly applicable to components level, or they cannot be adopted for different buildings and equipment. In this study a simplified approach to automatically detect anomalies in building energy consumption based on actual recorded data of active electrical power for lighting and total active electrical power of a cluster of eight buildings is presented. The proposed methodology uses statistical pattern recognition techniques and artificial neural ensembling networks coupled with outliers detection methods for fault detection. The results show the usefulness of this data analysis approach in automatic fault detection by reducing the number of false anomalies. The method allows to identify patterns of faults occurring in a cluster of bindings; in this way the energy consumption can be further optimized also through the building management staff by informing occupants of their energy usage and educating them to be proactive in their energy consumption. Finally, in the context of smart buildings, the common detected outliers in the cluster of buildings demonstrate that the management of a smart district can be operated with the whole buildings cluster approach.

Towards MMIC-Based 300GHz Indoor Wireless Communication Systems

SUMMARY This contribution presents a full MMIC chip set, transmit and receive RF frontend and data transmission experiments at a carrier frequency of 300GHz and with data rates of up to 64Gbit/s. The radio is dedicated to future high data rate indoor wireless communication, serving application scenarios such as smart offices, data centers and home theaters. The paper reviews the underlying high speed transistor and MMIC process, the performance of the quadrature transmitter and receiver, as well as the local oscillator generation by means of frequency multiplication. Initial transmission experiments in a single-input single-output setup and zero-IF transmit and receive scheme achieve up to 64Gbit/s data rates with QPSK modulation. The paper discusses the current performance limitations of the RF frontend and will outline paths for improvements in view of achieving 100Gbit/s capability.

Future Energy Paradigm of Microgeneration Technologies for Decentralized Smart Home and Office Buildings

Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) and Canmet Energy have initiated the joint research project in carrying out investigation and analysis of energy savings of load sharing applications featuring single detached residential and commercial buildings. Moreover, the energy savings of the system which employ ground source heat pump (GSHP), and the hybrid systems of Fuel Cell (FC) – GSHP and Photovoltaic thermal (PVT) – GSHP were also investigated and analyzed. The simple sum of residential and commercial building conventional case was considered as the reference case. The systems' performance was simulated over one full year in TRNSYS software environment under typical weather conditions for Ottawa, Canada and Incheon, Republic of Korea. Reference and advanced load sharing cases were simulated and analyzed in terms of thermal/cooling load satisfied and operational and capital energy savings. These cases were systematically summarized into seven cases, as following: Case 1 is utilizing conventional set up – boiler and chiller to meet heating and cooling demands of a single detached house. Case 2 is utilizing the same conventional set up as Case 1 – boiler and chiller to meet heating and cooling demands of an office building that has the same layout as the house in Case 1. Case 3 is a simple summation of Case 1 and Case 2 systems and loads. Case 4 is a load sharing setup featuring common boiler and chiller used to meet the combined loads of the house and office. Case 5 is a load sharing case utilizing a ground source heat pump (GSHP) to meet the combined loads of the house and office. Case 6 is a load sharing case where a hybrid PEM fuel cell (FC)/ground source heat pump (GSHP) system is used to meet the combined loads of the house and office. Case 7 is a load sharing case where a hybrid Photovoltaic Thermal (PVT)/ground source heat pump (GSHP) system is used to meet the combined loads of the house and office. The simulation results show that by using the same equipment with different capacities the load sharing system can achieve operational energy saving of 3–4 % in comparison to the reference system. Furthermore, Case 5, Case 6, and Case 7 were able to save energy up to 40%, 25%, and 57% in comparison to the case 3 respectively.

PS4PCSim

Web Service for Devices (WSFD) sees a perspective of being able to build service-oriented and event-driven applications on top of these devices with Web service capabilities and a seamless integration into existing World Wide Web infrastructure. The authors introduce in this paper PS4PCSim, a proactive simulator toolkit for pervasive computing applications and environments. It has been implemented and used to test and simulate various context-aware pervasive systems in different application areas using UPnP infrastructure and the WSFD technology like a smart office or house with ambient sensors, actuators and physical devices.

Design of a Sliding Window over Distributed and Asynchronous Event Streams

The event stream model of computation has a wide range of applications, e.g, computer system monitoring, physical environment sensing/surveillance, and stock trade monitoring. Sliding windows are widely used to facilitate effective event stream processing. However, it is greatly challenged when the event sources are distributed and asynchronous. One important technique to cope with the asynchrony is to utilize that the meaningful snapshots of an asynchronous computation form a distributive lattice. It thus becomes the central challenge whether this lattice structure still preserves and how to maintain it at runtime, when we restrict our attention to events within sliding windows. To address this challenge, we first prove that the snapshots of the asynchronous event streams within the sliding windows form a convex distributive lattice (denoted by Lat-Win). This enables us to easily integrate existing predicate specification and detection techniques, to express and monitor properties of our concern over asynchronous event streams. Then we propose an algorithm to maintain Lat-Win at runtime. The proposed scheme is evaluated in a context-aware smart office scenario, where activities of the user can be recognized by monitoring multiple streams of sensed events. The Lat-Win algorithm is implemented on the open-source context-aware middleware we developed. The evaluation results first show the advantage of adopting sliding windows over asynchronous event streams. Then they show the performance of detecting specified predicates within Lat-Win, with dynamic changes in the computing environment.

원격 데스크톱 프로토콜(RDP) 기반의 스마트 오피스 시스템 설계 및 구현

원격 데스크톱 프로토콜(RDP) 기반의 스마트 오피스 시스템 설계 및 구현

RETE-ADH: An Improvement to RETE for Composite Context-Aware Service

We propose a new pattern matching algorithm for composite context-aware services. The new algorithm, RETE-ADH, extends RETE to enhance systems that are based on the composite context-aware service architecture. RETE-ADH increases the speed of matching by searching only a subset of the rules that can be matched. In addition, RETE-ADH is scalable and suitable for parallelization. We describe the design of the proposed algorithm and present experimental results from a simulated smart office environment to compare the proposed algorithm with other pattern matching algorithms, showing that the proposed algorithm outperforms original RETE by 85%.