Reliability is one of the biggest challenges when using Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks in control systems. This paper exploits the transactional guarantees offered by the LILAC coordination environment to provide reliability and robustness in wireless control systems. First, LILAC transactions were embedded in the microcontrollers to deal with possible communication errors, faulty devices, and concurrent access to the devices. Then, an active replication mechanism was provided so that the system can be correctly recovered from hardware and communication failures. A case study of a ball and plate problem is detailed. The plate is lift up and down by three motors. Each motor is controlled by a micro-controller communicating wirelessly with the system controller.

This paper presents our work on the Coordination Scheme Editor (CSE). This editor provides a web interface to design building automation rules. Rules are designed with a drag and drop programming. Then rules are validated, generated and activated in the buildings. CSE allows to define template rules. The rules are then instantiated in building rooms with the available sensors and actuators. CSE also offers a monitoring interface to know which scenario is impacted by one or several faulty sensors/actuators. The CSE relies on the LILAC middleware to provide coordination across several building automation systems and sensors/actuators technologies.

This paper details how LINC a coordination middleware, can fasten the development of prototypes that integrate several equipment. A case study of rapid prototyping is presented. It illustrates how a smart parking prototype has been built from several independent and autonomous equipment, coming from different vendors. This has been achieved by parallel development thanks to the resource based approach offered by LINC. This paper also describes how LINC helps building rich user interfaces quickly and easily.

This paper focuses on energy optimisation in the context of lifts. Modern lifts embed batteries that are so far used only in emergency. We propose a multi-level optimisation strategy to reduce the electricity bill by combining harvesting, the grid and energy stored in batteries. The strategy combines several analytic components (forecaster, optimisers), modelled/measured variables, and is used by the control system. A coordination middleware enables the cooperation between the components embedded in the lift or located in the cloud, thus requiring communication through firewalls of different companies. Early results are presented. They illustrate new features for improving energy efficiency and they demonstrate our capacity to build such an optimisation architecture in a real environment. Part of the results are simulated to extrapolate the reachable energy gain.

This paper provides an overview of the architecture for self-organizing, co-operative and robust Building Automation Systems (BAS) proposed by the EC funded FP7 SCUBA1project. We describe the current situation in monitoring and control systems and outline the typical stakeholders involved in the case of building automation systems. We derive seven typical use cases which will be demonstrated and evaluated on pilot sites. From these use cases the project designed an architecture relying on six main modules that realize the design, commissioning and operation of self-organizing, co-operative, robust BAS.

There is a strong push towards smart buildings that aim to achieve comfort, safety and energy efficiency, through building automation systems (BAS) that incorporate multiple subsystems such as heating and air-conditioning, lighting, access control etc. The design, commissioning and operation of BAS is already challenging when handling an individual subsystem; however when introducing co-operation between systems the complexity increases dramatically. Balancing the contradictory requirements of comfort, safety and energy efficiency and coping with the dynamics of constantly changing environmental conditions, usage patterns, user needs etc. is a demanding task. This paper outlines an approach to the systematic engineering of cooperating, adaptive building automation systems, which aims to formalize the engineering approach in the form of an integrated tool chain that supports the building stakeholders to produce site-specific robust and reliable building automation.

Building Automation usually involves a large number of systems that should cooperate in order to improve e.g. the user comfort, security, but also decrease the overall energy consumption. One aim of the EU funded SCUBA project is to improve the coordination among devices and systems installed in a building. This paper deals with the extension of a framework dedicated to Building Automation and built on top of the LINC resource-based middleware. Two particular tools developed in SCUBA and that make use of the middleware are also presented together with the encapsulation of the ontology-based Building Automation System model named BASOnt.

Building Automation Systems (BAS) aim at providing control of indoor environment while for instance decreasing energy consumption. Most of these BAS exist and work in stand-alone configuration but the global objective for the whole building could be properly reached if the various BAS were able to cooperate. Thus, an abstraction layer is required to overcome this heterogeneity drawback. The objective of this paper is to describe a resource-based middleware that provides coordination capabilities and ensure the main properties required by the Building Automation (BA) domain. Then a dedicated framework is presented together with its exemplification scenario.

SMECY project is an ambitious European initiative involving 29 partners across 9 countries to enable Europe to have a leader role in multi-core domain by developing new programming technologies enabling the exploitation of architectures offering hundreds of cores. Multi-core technologies will rapidly provide to the parallel computing field improved performance, energy saving and cost reduction and will become of strategic value in winning market share in all areas of embedded systems. Given the need, SMECY lays the focus on targeting programming multi-core architecture for consumer electronics with efficient resources management. The first presentation describes the overall project while the two others are respectively dedicated to the multi-core platforms targeted in the project and the description of the tools constituting the bricks of the tool chains.

We explore the situation in which documents have to be categorized into more than one category system, a situation we refer to as multiple-view categorization. More particularly, we address the case where two different categorizers have already been built based on non-necessarily identical training sets, each one labeled using one category system. On the top of these categorizers considered as black-boxes, we propose some algorithms able to exploit a third training set containing a few examples annotated in both category systems. Such a situation arises for example in large companies where incoming mails have to be routed to several departments, each one relying on its own category system. We focus here on exploiting possible dependencies between category systems in order to refine the categorization decisions made by categorizers trained independently on different category systems. After a description of the multiple categorization problem, we present several possible solutions, based either on a categorization or reweighting approach, and compare them on real data. Lastly, we show how the multimedia categorization problem can be cast as a multiple categorization problem and assess our methods in this framework.

This article illustrates how to easily address scalability issues within distributed applications built on top of the Coordination Language Facility (CLF) middleware. CLF provides a distributed object computing framework with high expressiveness, flexibility and dynamicity. Our solutions rely on a core set of techniques such as replication, caching and distribution. We decline them along a geographical, a numerical, and an administrative dimension. We illustrate our approach with examples taken from Yaka, an application in the field of knowledge management and document awareness. In the context of this application we show in detail how the coordination model of the CLF and its associated scripting language enable straightforward solutions to various scalability issues.

This paper presents a concrete experiments in assembling components from different "protocol-aware" component frameworks such as Java/Jini (Sun), Corba 3.0 (Object Management Group), Enterprise JavaBeans (Sun) and our own framework called CLF (Coordination Language Facility). We describe how the CLF coordinator can be used to negotiate and perform distributed transactions across several components belonging to the previously cited frameworks, taking advantage of the native transactional capabilities they provide. Since the classical two-phase commit protocol ensures not only serializability but also linearizability, we are able to combine operations in a linearizable way on the whole set of components and thus enforce the serializability of the resulting transaction. We illustrate this approach through a showcase application implementing the coordination of heterogeneous components.

CLF/Mekano is a distributed object infrastructure oriented towards the high-level coordination of coarse grain components. Unlike other infrastructures of the same class, such as CORBA or DCOM, coordination in CLF/Mekano is built-in at the lowest level, namely at the inter-component communication protocol level, and not as a side service (such as the event, transaction or negotiation services of Corba). Although the CLF protocol is "lightweight" (it relies on very few concepts and only 8 communication "verbs"), it makes the design and implementation of components more complex, but also more valuable if it can be reused. The Mekano library has been developed in order to deal with this complexity, targeting reusability. It provides ready-to-use generic classes of customizable components, as well as useful component parts which can be reassembled according to application specific needs. Of course, further layers of domain-specific libraries (so called business object libraries), can then be developed on top of Mekano, to provide ready-to-use components dedicated to specific business needs (in the line of Enterprise Java Beans).

DUPLEX is a distributed collaborative editor for users connected through a large-scale environment such as the Internet. Large-scale implies heterogeneity, unpredictable communication delays and failures, and inefficient implementations of techniques traditionally used for collaborative editing in local area networks. To cope with these unfavorable conditions, DUPLEX proposes a model based on splitting the document into independent parts, maintained individually and replicated by a kernel. Users act on document parts and interact with co-authors using a local environment providing a safe store and recovery mechanisms against failures or divergence with co-authors. Communication is reduced to a minimum, allowing disconnected operation. Atomicity, concurrency, and replica control are confined to a manageable small context.