IEEHSC 2014 Abstracts

Full Papers Short Papers
Full Papers
Paper Nr: 2
Title:

Service Oriented Development of Building Energy Management Systems - An Architecture Blueprint
Authors:

Rodolfo Santos and Paulo Carreira
Abstract: Building automation and energy management systems increase the value of buildings by making them more comfortable, productive, and energy efficient. However, the hardware and software technologies underlying actual systems are largely monolithic and incompatible with each other hampering extensibility and favouring consumer lock-in. In order to overcome this problem we propose to create an middleware architecture, that abstract the heterogeneity of automation systems and provide sophisticated functionality to applications for intelligent control and energy management. Our middleware, will expose services that allows to abstract the numerous protocols and technical requirements associated with each manufacturer to applications, allowing developers to apply all their effort designing algorithms and innovative techniques that maximize the energy efficiency, without worrying about the technical details of each existing system. The concept will be applied in a real-world setting with the implementation of a service-oriented architecture prototype for energy management and intelligent control of Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) office rooms.
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Paper Nr: 3
Title:

Analysis and Requirements Gathering of User Interfaces for Home Automated Systems
Authors:

Akash Bhrat Manilal and Paulo Carreira
Abstract: As Home and Building Automation Systems become more widespread, the need for more natural forms of interaction also increases. However, many of these technologies are brittle and do not adapt to the user’s explicit or implicit wishes. Indeed, variety of devices and functionalities required in a smart environment makes it difficult to integrate all controls together under a single UI, making it confusing, overwhelming and hard to operate. Moreover, there are no clear guidance when it comes to designing UI for Building and Home Automation Systems. This document analyses existing User Interfaces for Home Automation Systems to uncover their fundamental aspects of interaction. An action plan will be defined in order to develop the ideal UI. In this plan, studies of previous attempts to improve BAS Interfaces will also be presented.
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Paper Nr: 6
Title:

APOLLON - Using Living Lab Methodologies in the Cross-border Context for Energy Efficiency Pilots
Authors:

Manuel Nina, Pentti Launonen and Álvaro de Oliveira
Abstract: The APOLLON Project (CIP–ICT–PSP No. 250516) has addressed the challenge of stimulating and measuring energy user behaviour transformation facilitated by ICT solutions to achieve an increase in energy efficiency. Cross-border pilots in four different countries were established and tested common methodologies and practices. The user-driven Living Lab methodology was implemented to achieve faster and more effective results.
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Paper Nr: 9
Title:

Participatory Design of Scenarios for Future Service Implementation - The Case of Smart Campus Project: ICT based Services for Energy Efficiency
Authors:

Daria Cantù
Abstract: Energy efficiency in public buildings is a fundamental goal for both public and private institutions. Its achievement depends on different factors such as the policy of the institutions but also the behaviour of the buildings users and the selections and availability of integrated technologies and monitoring systems. All these elements require the coordinated activity of many stakeholders with common goals and shared vision of the desired solutions, able to take into account needs and constrains of all the people involved. The paper describes the participatory design process applied in the Italian pilot of Smart Campus EU project to design ICT based services scenarios to reduce energy consumption in university campus buildings. It describes the scenarios’ development process and discusses the results obtained and the positive implications of having the stakeholders involved right from the context research phase. This process is more and more used in Service Design projects in order to increase the possibilities of success for the following prototyping and on field implementation of the solutions. The paper is a contribution to the practice of participatory design of complex services.
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Paper Nr: 10
Title:

Energy Discourses in Europe - Legitimation of EU Energy Efficiency Policy
Authors:

Niina Erkama and Sampo Tukiainen
Abstract: The production and use of energy is an important factor in European politics and science. However, we know little about the discussions that influence how scarce financial resources of governments and organizations are directed to different projects and action related to energy strategy of EU. Therefore, this paper studies the discourses that underlie the ‘energy talk’ of EU decision makers. This is important because discourses are resources that are employed to legitimate governmental and organizational aims and decision, such as new energy saving projects and policies. This paper is based on discourse theory that acknowledges that discourses change understanding of social situations, which also makes discursive activity a form of political activity (Hardy and Phillips, 1999). However, there are multiple and contradictory meanings and realities existing in an organization, or in any discursive space (Hardy, 2001) and discursive actors are commonly embedded in multiple discourses (Hardy and Phillips, 2004). The study will be based on interviews with EU Members of the Parliament. The results are likely to reveal local and EU-level discourses that influence establishing of new energy policies and projects on EU-level and this way affect organizations and business in Europe.
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Short Papers
Paper Nr: 1
Title:

GreenNet - A Centralized Hardware Resources Optimization Tool for Energy Conservation
Authors:

Alice Lacorte, R-Jay Pagcaliwangan, Maureen Monique Ominga, Manuel Lara, Joramae Magpaye, Neil Christian Viana and Philip Mojares
Abstract: Students in higher education institutions have a great contribution in exploring possible areas of research in their field that will have an impact in the society where they belong. The emergence of this so-called “Green Computing” in the fields of Computer Science and Information Technology exposed the awareness of the students to do their part in promoting energy conservation in the institution, thereby initiating the said awareness in the classroom which will later on expand in the outside world. With variety of constraints to consider such as sufficient budget to replace old computer units to green-compliant units to support the programs’ academic requirements would not be the first priority. The idea of developing a software tool to aid in reducing energy consumption in the computer laboratories came into realization. This software tool to reduce the power consumption of the computer units in the laboratories was initiated by the students as a research project. Furthermore, the application of an optimization technique that influences the power consumption of a computer unit was also considered. Testing and evaluation of the said software tool is on-going and once results were generated, this will help lessen the energy expenditure of the school.
Paper Nr: 4
Title:

Adaptive STM32F4 Microcontrollers - Case of Flexible Smart Meters
Authors:

Aymen Jaouadi, Olfa Mosbahi, Mohamed Khalgui and Ahmed Toujani
Abstract: The research paper deals in theoretical level with flexible and adaptive microcontrollers following the well-known industrial technology STM32F4. It is applied in the practical level to a Smart Meter SM which is developed at Cynapsys for future generations of Smart Grids. A reconfiguration scenario in theory is assumed to be any flexible operation allowing the addition-removal-update of OS tasks in order to adapt the microcontroller to its environment according to user requirements. It is assumed in practice to be any addition-removal-update of new services to-from SM such as the energy consumption, the remote information reading and power shutdown, the stabilization of the delivered power, the management of new power provider offers, the sale of energy and finally the peak consumption management. We propose an agent-based architecture for a STM32F4 device where a hierarchical software agent is defined to control the environment evolution before applying local reconfigurations for a required flexibility of the microcontroller. We model the agent by using nested timed automates, and design the whole architecture to manage all possible reconfiguration forms. The agent-based architecture is totally implemented and applied to SM, and a simulator X-SM is developed for the evaluation of this paper's contribution.
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Paper Nr: 5
Title:

New Software Solutions for Low-power Management of Green Smart Homes
Authors:

Aymen Jaouadi, Olfa Mosbahi, Mohamed Khalgui and Asma Sakri
Abstract: The research paper deals with new Green Smart Homes which offer original services such as the optimal power consumption, peak management, and home power selling while assuming an available home green energy. We propose a Master-Slave based architecture following the well-known industrial technology STM32F4. A microcontroller Slave Agent is proposed for each selected Home Device to control its local consumption, and a unique microcontroller Master Agent is proposed to control the whole architecture. The goal is to optimize the use of green energy, to minimize the consumption costs by exploiting the offers from providers and also the peak times. We model these services by using the model checker UPPAAL, and propose UML design diagrams for this architecture. A visual simulator of this STM32-based architecture is developed and applied to a case study proposed by Cynapsys.
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