Context life cycle management in smart space environments

Ubiquitous computing as the integration of sensors, smart devices, and intelligent technologies to form a “smart space” environment relies on the development of both middleware and networking technologies. Several kinds of smart space middleware have been developed and OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) was initiated mainly for interoperability support with service distribution among various middleware environments. In this paper, we analyze the weaknesses in the OSGi service platform such as a non-distributed framework, passive user management, device management, and service bundle management. Moreover, we propose that in a smart space environment, Location-aware SBM (Service Bundle Manager) is most capable of efficiently managing various service bundles. This paper concludes with the implementation results for the SBM.

This paper describes LocMAC, a new location aware power saving MAC layer for target tracking applications in smart space environments. Target tracking applications focus on providing proximity based local services to mobile users within a fixed deployment of wireless nodes. Conventional wireless sensor MAC layers increase the lifespans of battery powered wireless nodes by scheduling sleep periods for the entire network, which are either of fixed length, or vary based upon current network metrics. LocMAC bases its sleep schedule on the relative physical location of network nodes and allows target tracking service to be guaranteed. It propagates user location updates, and uses this knowledge to perform 'location based sleep scheduling' (LBSS). LBSS describes the use of wireless node and network target positions to maximise the potential sleep periods. Adding knowledge of user mobility allows those nodes which will not be required by the network application to sleep for longer periods of time, waking up just in time to service network user requirements. The paper describes the operation of LocMAC and compares its performance against existing sleep scheduling MAC protocols through analysis and simulations of typical application scenarios. The results show that LocMAC performs significantly better for target tracking applications and is particularly appropriate for use in future Smart Spaces.

A two phase hybrid algorithm for estimating the location of a mobile node, which has the capability of measuring signal strength, azimuth, and elevation, in a smart space environment over the visible light channel is proposed. In contrast to conventional triangulation approaches which are performed in a simplified plane, the smart room architecture requires a non-planar solution due to the illumination requirement. Furthermore, conventional triangulation approaches can at times produce numerically ill-defined solutions, thereby prohibiting a notion of target location. Instead of solely relying on triangulation, the mobile node estimate their locations through a two phase approach in which they firstly exploit the signal strength observables with unique IDs to establish a coarse estimate, and secondly use the azimuth and elevation observables to establish a fine estimate. In many cases, the fine estimate will improve upon the coarse estimate; however when triangulation fails, the algorithm yield the coarse estimate rather than a localization failure. Since the environment model relies on the primary requirement of adequate illumination, the number of LED anchors and transmit power for communication functions are determined. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the hybrid two phase localization approach in a smart space indoor environment by having a median coarse phase accuracy of 34.88 cm and a fine phase median accuracy of 13.95 cm.

Urban development bestows a great opportunity to increase sustainability in the built environment as cities are responsible for the majority of environmental impacts. However, the urban development process is fragmented and sub-optimization leads to unsustainable life cycle outcomes. The purpose of this study is to examine the urban development process from a life cycle perspective and identify how different actors understand life cycle management. By utilizing an inductive qualitative research design, 38 in-depth thematic interviews were conducted within the Finnish urban development industry including a case study and independent interviews from different phases of the urban development life cycle. The theoretical perspective is a combination of the ecosystem construct and life cycle management. Results show that there is no clear responsible actor for life cycle management in urban development. All actors claim that there is value to be added, mostly in economic, but also environmental and social terms. This study reveals that investors should be the responsible actor in the urban development process. By claiming responsibility and focusing on life cycle leadership we can improve sustainability in urban development, and respond to the urban sustainability challenge, thus improving the quality of life and welfare in our urban society.

Cyber-physical systems revolve around context awareness, empowering objective-oriented services, products and operations based on real data. Self-aware and self-control systems are core elements in the Industry 4.0 framework towards self-sustainable adaptive manufacturing and personalized services. This development is witnessed by the context-aware pervasive assistance to users and machines in decisions making process for optimizing product performance and economic yield. While integration of the virtual and the physical world entails smart sensors communication and complex data analytics, it relies on artificial intelligence tools to manage process operations. The objective of the article is to create awareness that systems & control community must address theoretical and practical aspects from a larger perspective. Context aware control is emerging as a natural solution to maximize the use of available sensing instrumentation and the relatively low cost data logging, i.e. an important source for extracting information, interpreting and using context information and adapt its functionality to the current context of use. This article presents a concise overview of applications where context aware systems and control methodologies are relevant in the seven societal challenges acknowledged by European policy-makers: Digital Society; Food; Health and Well-Being; Smart Resource Management; Urban Planning, Mobility Dynamics and Logistics; New Energy Demand and Delivery; and Society.

Thinking in terms of product life cycles is one of the challenges facing manufacturers today: Efforts to increase efficiency throughout the life cycle do not only mean extended responsibility of the parties concerned. Economically successful business areas can also be explored. Whether new service concepts are required, new regulations have been passed or consumer values are changing, the differences between business areas are disappearing. Life cycle management (LCM) considers the product life cycle as a whole and optimizes the interaction of product design, manufacturing and life cycle activities. The goal of this approach is to protect resources and maximize effectiveness by means of life cycle assessment, product data management, technical support and, last but not least, life cycle costing. This paper shows the existing approaches of LCM and discusses their prospects and further development.

Currently, there is a trend to develop context-aware mobile distributed systems (MDS), such as systems that recommend places according to the location and the path of users. Some of the key challenges in the development of this type of systems are the following: acquisition, management and use of data context. In this paper, we propose two-level software architecture to obtain, use and provide context information in a MDS. From our point of view, the proposed architecture takes into account the requirements that emerge from data collection, use and management of context, as well as the own features of MDS. Based on our software architecture, a context-aware group communication system is implemented, which allows members to have four types of context: physical activity, logical activity, location and level of sound.

Initial construction costs are overly concerned in traditional construction projects and the economic, social and environmental impacts are neglected during their whole life cycle. The application of Life Cycle Management (LCM) is fundamental in pursuing sustainability and improvements in the construction industry. Based on the current situation of LCM and Building Information Modeling (BIM), this paper proposes a theoretical model of BIM-based information integrated platform for sustainable construction projects. Process models for LCM and the design phase implementing BIM-based information integrated platform are built using IDEF0 modeling method. Then, the whole process of using BIM-based information integrated platform in sustainable construction projects is analyzed through its application in a real-life construction project in Shanghai. This paper analyzes the function and application methods of BIM to promote sustainability in each phase. Meanwhile, some important best practices are analyzed and discussed, which are significant to future projects. The results of applying BIM-based LCM method are evaluated through one-to-one expert evaluations interviews. The findings show that applying BIM-based information integrated platform to the full building life cycle is vital to reduce environmental loads and improve sustainability.

In response to recent demand, context-aware application performs significantly in the field of pervasive computing and smart environment. Many approaches have been proposed to provide functionalities and implementation using context information to observe the environment. Developing context-awareness system becomes more essential issue in order to support into the real situation and system deals with many components and complexity. There are many hardware with different platforms that make them have difficulty to communicate to each other with different layers processing in the system of context such as physical, middleware and application layers. Services in each layer need to adapt the way they behave according to the current context information. This research introduces the development of context-aware system and middleware developments that support the creation of smart application with the purpose of providing the framework of the system and deploy middleware as being the bridge to integrate physical layer and application layer seamlessly to support monitoring ubiquity environment. The system controls multi sensors to monitor the real environment from raw data through prototype platforms for managing, sensing, computing and user interacting as the outcome of the system’s performance. Implementation and experiment have been performed where user moves in / moves out from the sensor range. The proposed middleware is able to handle the complicated system and fulfill its requirement such as heterogeneity, scalability and mobility, the system and complicated components are integrated to be a completed system that operate, interpret and representation context entities to an end users. Having this control system makes a lot of benefits such as real time information access, become intermediary between layers and support to control energy system with the purpose of reducing the energy consumption, rapid communication to the users.

The Walt Disney Company has been dedicated to understanding and reducing its environmental impacts for years. As a large and complex corporation, quantifying and understanding the most beneficial and cost-effective ways to reduce these impacts can be a challenge. Life cycle costing (LCC) has already played an important role in the evaluation of design decisions at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI). Recently, WDI has started to incorporate environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) alongside existing LCC efforts to move towards life cycle management (LCM). In order to be a practical tool for large-scale developments, LCM must be scalable and effective at a wide level of detail. Evaluating the large footprint of a major resort is highly complex and involves a wide variety of components and processes, at a scale shared by small to mid-size cities and communities. To deliver a sustainable design for a new Disney resort, our research is focused on determining what level of detail and scope will be sufficient to support design decisions on this scale, without expending more resources than necessary. Furthermore, the development of internal tools and processes will be necessary to integrate environmental impact information into the design process. Providing life cycle information to the broad spectrum of park designers and planners in a useful and understandable format is critical to fully pursuing life cycle management. Integrating these tools into the design process will help establish sustainability as a core consideration in the design of our resorts.

The management of the whole life cycle of equipment is one of the central tasks of the army. According to the traditional examination and registration method, the centralized data are easy to cause single point failure and data tampering. Moreover, with the evolution of the war form and the continuous improvement of the intelligence level of weapons and equipment, the military has put forward higher requirements for real-time performance control and efficient management of the whole life cycle of weapons and equipment. In order to effectively ensure the efficient management and safe use of weapons and equipment in the whole life cycle, the Consortium Blockchain technology system is applied to the management of the whole life cycle of equipment. Based on the chain local storage, the data of management, configuration, operation and maintenance of the whole life cycle of equipment are stored. The problems of single point failure threat, long management response time and large traceability tracking consumption in current equipment management are solved, which provides an exploration direction for military equipment management.

Maintenance: Changing Role in Life Cycle Management

Due to the growing threat of climate change, we are challenged to find improved assessment practises to recognize solutions for sustainable urban development. The focus of the study is on the life cycle design of a district energy system for a new residential development in Finland. This study analyses LCC (life cycle costs) and carbon emissions (LCA (life cycle assessment)), i.e., the “viability” of different energy systems through a methodological life cycle framework. By combining LCC and LCA, a LCM (life cycle management) perspective is portrayed to support decision-making on a long-term basis. The comparable energy design options analysed are (1) district heating (reference design), (2) district heating with building integrated photovoltaic panels, (3) ground source heat pump, and (4) ground source heat pump with building-integrated photovoltaic panels. The results show that the design option with the highest initial investment (4) is in fact the most viable from a life cycle perspective. This study further strengthens the connection between cost savings and carbon emissions reduction in a life cycle context. Thus, by implementing LCC and LCA analysis in an early design phase, justified economic and environmental design decisions can be identified to develop more sustainable urban areas.

In this article, we analyze how environmental aspects can be derived from life cycle management instruments for procurement decisions of low-value products. For our analysis, we chose the case of operating room textiles. The review includes the life cycle management instruments: life cycle assessment, environmental labels, and management systems applied within the textile industry. We do so in order to identify the most important environmental decision criteria based on which the procurer of low-value products can decide for the most environmentally friendly option. We conducted a systematic literature search in the relevant literature databases. We critically evaluate the identified life cycle assessment studies for sound methodology, verifiability, completeness, and actuality. Based on this review, we analyze and compare the results of the three most comprehensive studies in more detail and derive the most important environmental aspects of operating room textiles. In a second step, we extend the operational perspective via the strategic perspective, namely environmental management systems and further existing life cycle instruments such as eco-labels. We then synthesize the gathered information into a decision vector. Finally, we discuss how the gathered data can be further exploited and give suggestions for a more sophisticated assessment. The review of the existing life cycle assessments on operating room textiles showed that procurers should not base their decisions exclusively on existing life cycle assessments. In addition to problems such as methodological weakness, incompleteness, outdated data, and poor verifiability, the information provided is far too complex to prepare procurement decisions regarding low-value products. Furthermore, the results for the textiles assessed in the existing life cycle assessments are not necessarily transferrable to the textiles considered by the procurer because of restrictive assumptions. Therefore, it is necessary to downscale the available information and synthesize it in an applicable decision support tool. Our decision vector consists of the key environmental aspects water, CO2, energy, and waste and is completed by environmental management systems, eco-labels, and the countries of origin that matters for environmental and social aspects as well. The decision vector supports procurers when considering environmental aspects in procurement decisions and provides a mechanism for balancing the information between overcomplexity and oversimplification. Therefore, it should be the basis for future development of an eco-label for operating room textiles.

Life cycles and life cycle models are very widely misunderstood concepts. Despite the fact that they are fundamental to almost every project, life cycles and life cycle models are often confused and the terms used (incorrectly) interchangeably. There is also a great deal of misunderstanding about how processes relate to both of these concepts and, once more, people often use the term 'process' interchangeably with both life cycle and life cycle model. A life cycle describes the evolution of a system from conception to its ultimate demise. The most obvious analogy to this is a human life where the life cycle starts at the actual conception, rather than birth, and continues on until death.