SUMMARY

In modern applications there is an increasingly need of coordination models for distributed systems that can face the unpredictability of behaviour of certain system subparts that cannot be handled at design-time because of legacy or deployment issues. Examples include sensor networks, pervasive computing systems, and all those distributed and open systems that involve different entities (services, devices, sensors, humans, and so on) that should opportunistically interoperate.The main requirements of these scenarios are robustness against failures, situatedness and adaptivity, all of which are to be achieved without human or supervised control, thus calling for innovative coordination models. Such scenarios are typically tackled by drawing inspiration from natural systems, where an intrinsic self-organisation exist by which the globally intended behaviour emerges out of local interaction of individuals.

The research team seeks to develop new innovative techniques and tools for their analysis, design and deployment, are to be conceived. They have to support the designer in “controlling the emergence of adaptive behaviours” and in making qualitative and quantitate predictions about how the system works and about possible design errors.

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SOLUTIONS

• Identifying formal models for specifying self-organising systems and analysing their properties, such as stability and resilience
• Developing simulation tools for performing “what-if” analysis
• Developing a rich catalogue of self-organising design patterns and of a methodology supporting their composition to obtain new patterns useful in system engineering
• Conceiving of new computational abstractions and languages, and of corresponding middleware technologies and tools, to mainstream the self-organisation paradigm
• Implementing specific applications of pervasive computing systems, in contexts like smartcities or traffic control

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LINK:http://www.cse.unibo.it/en/research/areas/artificial-intelligence-autonomic-and-complex-systems/adaptive-and-self-organising-systems

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Back to Italy

SUMMARY

The goal of the EDGE project is to increase the integration of wind energy into the power grid. This goal will be achieved through improved management of dynamic elements (such as production units, storages and loads) connected to the power grid. To be able to respond efficiently to system changes, an overall control system and strategy must be developed. This control system and strategy must contain mechanisms which are robust, distributed, and self-organising. Furthermore, price dynamics will become an important control issue in the future power system. Through improved management of production and consumption, it will be possible to decrease the necessity for spinning reserves on standby, and to improve the stability of the grid as well as the utilisation of green energy.

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SOLUTIONS

• Developing new, rigorous control methods for decentralized and self-organising load balancing that respects distribution and communication constraints and can adapt to market pricing as well as the varying QoS properties of communication networks.
• Designing new optimisation-based strategies that utilise consumption and production flexibility for distributing supply and demand throughout the grid.
• Developing generic models of production and (aggregated) consumption units for control.
• Producing algorithms for information access and forwarding of actuator information across variable, heterogeneous communication networks.
• Conducting a thorough economic analysis of the energy market which exposes the strengths and weaknesses of the current market structure, and leads to the identification of new market elements that utilise the flexibility of electricity-consumption and production.
• Designing an open software toolbox for implementing practical realisations of the developed mechanisms for control and communication.
• Enabling a higher penetration of wind energy in projected future energy grid scenarios.
• Solving problems relation to the flexibility of consumption

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LINK: http://kom.aau.dk/project/edge/

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Back to Austria

SUMMARY

The IDSECOM project aims to create a safe platform for autonomous systems and services not currently provided by the existing conventional Internet of Things environments.

The project will involve the implementation of functionality layer identifiers at the network level and the integration of autonomous mobility, security and privacy mechanisms into a single network infrastructure. Platforms incorporating the project’s technology outputs will thus offer safer and easier access to the Internet of Things.

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SOLUTIONS

• Developing a platform which integrates new, autonomous facilities and services for the Internet of Things; eg: mobility, security and privacy mechanisms. This platform will be characterised by the implementation of functionality layer identifiers at the network level, thereby simplifying communication services in a heterogeneous Internet of Tings environment.
• Designing new mechanisms and algorithms to ensure the security and privacy at the functionality layer.
• Creating an Internet of Things test environment for performing tests on new facilities and services

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LINK: http://badania.ca.pw.edu.pl/index/projekt/4399

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Back to Poland

SUMMARY

Traffic congestion is a significant problem in most major European cities, and has been estimated to cost as much as 1% of EU GDP. In its present form, the use of Traffic Light to control and regulate road traffic has proven to be very costly and inadequate scalable. Through leveraging the new vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication capability of modern cars, the VTL (Virtual Traffic Lights) project proposes to design and validate an alternative scheme of urban traffic control that envisions traffic lights as in-vehicle virtual signs. Such a scheme would enable ubiquity of signalised intersections, and would allow the automatic synchronisation of light phases, cycle durations and green splits through the coordination of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs).

The project team will aim to take advantage of the mandatory adoption by the automotive industry of the Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE) protocol, and the ability of vehicles to communicate with each other, thus creating a distributed and highly reliable system of in-vehicle virtual traffic lights (VTL). Preliminary simulations of this self-organising traffic paradigm show a potential to increase the average flow rates substantially. In addition, traffic control and management will be rendered more ubiquitous and cost-effective.

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SOLUTIONS

• Creating an automated, self-organising system which, through the use of vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication will allow the replacement of physical traffic lights with more efficient and cost-effective virtual, in-vehicle traffic lights
• Designing a VTL communication protocol and techniques for the distributed optimisation of traffic flow.
• Testing the security and reliability of the VTL system.
• Developing human-machine interface of the VTL system and usability evaluation
• Producing a hardware design for retrofitting and field trial experiments.

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LINK: http://www.it.pt/project_detail_p.asp?ID=1730

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Back to Portugal

SUMMARY

Long-term energy consumption reduction can be achieved more readily through sensible cooperation between end users and technological advancements. Monitoring energy use within buildings requires clear and reliable methods with outputs that are meaningful and helpful. End users play a pivotal role in shaping any such outputs as energy use revolves around their presence and comfort.

Consumers appreciate that innovative technology can increase their quality of life. However, a lasting bond between the two can only occur when users have confidence in the technology around them. This is more likely to happen when users and technologists work collectively in the system design process.

The DANCER project takes insights from users’ behaviour analysis, metering schemes, wireless sensors and embedded software to produce a system that both interactively and automatically manages users’ energy consumption within indoor environments. It will tailor users’ energy consumption to their habits aiming to reduce energy consumption. To achieve this DANCER adopts a multidisciplinary approach where knowledge from psychology, social and economic research, wireless communication and computer science unite to provide a viable solution that is beneficial to all the stakeholders on the energy supply-consumer chain.

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SOLUTIONS

• Using wireless sensor networks to collect, collate and study end users’ energy consumption habits so as to inform the design of energy control systems and the user interfaces
• Employing an iterative, participatory design approach to explore how end users feel about the project’s digital technologies and how they imagine these technologies can assist them in reducing their energy consumption and carbon footprint
• Testing increasingly mature versions of the DANCER system through a series of pilot studies with volunteers so that users’ queries about the sensors, networks and control policies being used to monitor and interactively manage their energy use can be further examined
• Verifiying and validating the mature DANCER system in a control trial experiment where samples of households will be either provided with DANCER or allocated to appropriate control conditions

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LINK: http://dclgw.essex.ac.uk/index.php/projects/current/dancer

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Back to United Kingdom