18116843
Service lifecycle management infrastructure for smart items
Smart items are physical objects that are enhanced by information technology. There are a number of different smart item technologies available, all of which have different capabilities, protocols, and management functionality. These devices have become an attractive solution for enterprise scenarios. In such scenarios lifecycle management can become a challenge when considering the differences of the smart item types while at the same time providing an abstraction for common functionality. We propose an infrastructure for service lifecycle management of smart items. It is part of a middleware called Smart Item Services Infrastructure (SI)2, which is able to provide a uniform access to various smart item types. The presented architecture addresses the platform heterogenity challenge with a separation of platform-specific and platform-independent functionality. Service Lifecycle Managers for the individual platforms translate the platform-independent requests into the device-specific protocol. Besides platform abstraction, the deployment planning of services is a major requirement. Thus, we put special focus on the Service Mapper component, which determines a deployment plan that satisfies a number of constraints.
16200249
Collaborative Smart Items
Business information systems provide computer support for decision making across huge data sets. Smart Items are miniaturized computer and sensing systems embedded into physical goods, items and assets. This paper proposes collaborative Smart Items for pushing business relevant computing as close as possible into the real world. Collaboration is enabled through an auction-based negotiation mechanism running distributed between the Smart Items. This mechanism serves as an abstraction across Smart Items in order to enable a common reasoning on business critical contexts as they may occur in logistics, safety and highly dynamic planning scenarios. In this paper, we investigate auction-based collaboration for Smart Items and present first experimental results. We conclude that auctions facilitate reliable business information processing even under harsh industrial conditions such as information loss or device failure.
14036610
Service-oriented support of cooperative workflows considerations for urban planning processes
Web-based information sources have evolved to an essential element in our daily and professional life. To process this faster and faster growing amount of information, web portals provide personalized access to specific information and communication services. In this paper, an example from urban planning is given. In this workflow, different actors are interacting in an ad-hoc manner. Therefore, a Portal Architecture has been built up, which provides the relevant information. This paper proposes a Service Orientated Architecture to provide access to business processes, software applications and hardware resources in a workflow oriented way.
45661231
Customizing Enterprise Software as a Service Applications: Back-End Extension in a Multi-tenancy Environment
Since the emerge of Salesforce.com, more and more business applications tend to move towards Software as a Service. In order to target Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, platform providers need to lower their operational costs and establish an ecosystem of partners, customizing their generic solution, to push their products into spot markets. This paper categorizes customization options, identifies cornerstones of a customizable, multi-tenancy aware infrastructure, proposes a framework that encapsulates multi-tenancy, and introduces a technique for partner back-end customizations with regard to a given real-world scenario.
9104094
Generic Web Services - Extending Service Scope While Preserving Backwards Compatibility
An apparatus for sorting blocks made of concrete or concrete-like material, in particular paving slabs, having a vibration arrangement and a sorting arrangement which slopes with respect to the horizontal, has an entry part for the blocks which are to be sorted and a sorting part, which has at least one collecting channel running in the conveying direction. The collecting channel has a central part and two lateral run-on surfaces arranged thereon, the width of the central part corresponding at least approximately to one of the two shorter edge lengths of the blocks which are to be sorted. The run-on surfaces are provided with stop elements, the stop elements on one run-on surface being offset in the longitudinal direction with respect to the stop elements on the other run-on surface.
8412425
A probabilistic sonar sensor model for robust localization of a small-size blimp in indoor environments using a particle filter
In recent years, autonomous miniature airships have gained increased interest in the robotics community. This is due to their ability to move safely and hover for extended periods of time. The major constraints of miniature airships come from their limited payload which introduces substantial constraints on their perceptional capabilities. In this paper, we consider the problem of localizing a miniature blimp with lightweight ultrasound sensors. Since the opening angle of the sound cone emitted by a sonar sensor depends on the diameter of the membrane, small-size sonar devices introduce the problem of high uncertainty about which object has been perceived. We present a novel sensor model for ultrasound sensors with large opening angles that allows an autonomous blimp to robustly localize itself in a known environment using Monte Carlo localization. As we demonstrate in experiments with a real blimp, our novel sensor model outperforms a popular sensor model that has in the past been shown to work reliably on wheeled platforms.
9477654
An Aggregating Discovery Service for the EPCglobal Network
Although the achievements of EPCglobal standardization efforts in the last years are substantial and the diffusion of the EPCglobal network continues, a service to access item-level information stored at potentially unknown supply chain partners is still missing. Without this 'Discovery Service' the EPCglobal network cannot be used with unknown business partners. In this contribution we present a novel Discovery Service approach. In contrast to other Discovery Service approaches we use the Discovery Service to aggregate the data of interest. This eliminates problems other approaches cannot solve, e.g. assuring data ownership, low access control maintenance effort, and minimal complexity for the information requester. We present a requirements model, describe the implementation of our Discovery Service approach, and compare it to existing Discovery Service approaches. Finally we show how to overcome scalability challenges to implement our Discovery Service approach in a real-world environment.