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The last decade has seen explosive growth in the technologies required to implement Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. Technologies such as facial and speech recognition, home networks, household cleaning robots, to name a few, have become commonplace. However, due to the multidisciplinary nature of AmI systems and the distinct requirements of dif...
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... libraries from which blocks can be selected and downloaded. System design will become the process of software component selection, configuration and interconnection, just as much of electronic hardware design is now primarily concerned with the selection and interconnection of IC chips. In a function block world, the system designer’s main focus is to take standard proven encapsulated functionality and link it together in the quickest and most intuitive way possible. The use of function blocks is nearer to the mind-set of the industrial system designer who is familiar with connecting physical devices together in different ways to provide a particular system solution [44,45]. The Function Block (FB), the basic construct of IEC61499, consists of a head and a body as shown in Figure 1. The head is connected to the event flows and the body to the data flows, while the functionality of the function block is provided by means of algorithms, which process inputs and internal data and generate output data. The sequencing of algorithm invocations is defined in the FB type specification using a variant of state charts called Execution Control Chart (ECC). An ECC consists of EC states, EC transitions and EC actions. An EC state may have zero or more associated EC actions, except from the initial state that shall have no associated EC actions. An EC action may have an associated algorithm and an event that will be issued after the execution of the algorithm. EC transitions are directed links that represent the transition of the FB instance from one state to another. An EC transition has an associated Boolean expression that may contain event inputs, data inputs, and internal variables. As soon as this expression becomes true the EC transition fires [48]. FB instances are interconnected to form a Function Block Network (FBN), as shown in Figure 2. A FBN may be executed on a single device or on a network of interconnected devices. A device may contain zero or more resources, where a resource is considered to be a functional unit, contained in a device which has independent control of its operation and may be created, configured, parameterized, started-up, deleted, etc ., without affecting other resources within a device. The event connections and behavior of every single block completely determines the behavior of the network. An application in IEC 61499 is composed by one or more ...
Citations
... When comparing platforms for older people, Palumbo [11] considered abstraction level, programming model, control type, interaction type, context management, and service management. Baquero et al. [12] analyzed ambient intelligence frameworks in terms of their purposes, architecture, used platform, inclusion of component supervision module, and repository sensor handling. Madureira et al. [13] analyzed middleware platforms for active and healthy aging by specifying a set of features that such platforms should have. ...
The EU PlatformUptake project’s main goal is to investigate the usage of EU open and partly-open platforms in active and healthy aging (AHA) and ambient-assisted living (AAL) domains, from a software viewpoint. The aim of the project was to provide tools for a deeper interpretation and examination of the platforms, gather user feedback, and use it to improve the state-of-the-art approach in the AHA and AAL domains, and define instructions to enhance the platforms within the recommended order. The emphasis is on the software viewpoint for decision makers. In this paper, we present (i) the PlatformUptake methodology for AHA open platform assessments and its main objectives; (ii) clustering of the analyzed platforms; and (iii) the taxonomies generated from the text descriptions of the chosen platforms. With the use of the clustering tools, we present which platforms could be grouped together due to their similarities. Different numbers of clusters were obtained with two clustering approaches, resulting in the most informative two and four cluster groups. The platforms could be rather neatly presented in this way and, thus, potentially guide future platform structuring. Moreover, taxonomies, i.e., decision trees of platforms, were generated to easily determine each specific platform or to find platforms with the desired properties. Altogether, the computer comprehension of the platforms may be important additions to the human way of dealing with the AHA platforms, influencing future design, publications, related work, and research.
... Attention to the large scale implementation is considered a critical feature: "Integrating AmI developments into full-scale systems is not an easy task" [21]. Implementation of Funblocks [21], addresses those issues looking for equilibrium between completeness and practicality. ...
... Attention to the large scale implementation is considered a critical feature: "Integrating AmI developments into full-scale systems is not an easy task" [21]. Implementation of Funblocks [21], addresses those issues looking for equilibrium between completeness and practicality. They select a minimalist modular framework for the development of AmI systems, based on the function module abstraction used in the IEC 61499 standard for distributed control systems. ...
The MonAMI project aims to investigate the feasibility of the deployment of open platforms for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services provision based on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and to test user acceptance and the usability of the services. Services were designed to provide support in the areas of environmental control, security, well-being and leisure. These services were installed and evaluated in a Spanish geriatric residence. The participants included elderly persons with disabilities, nursing home care givers and informal carers. The concept of the open platform proved to be satisfactory for the provision of the services in a context aware framework. Furthermore, the usability of the technology was viewed positively and the overall results indicate that this system has the potential to prolong independent living at home for elderly people with disabilities. Deployment was proven successful and awareness of open-platform AAL service delivery was raised in local communities throughout Europe.
... A reduced version of MidBlocks is currently being used in FunBlocks [10][11][12]. FunBlocks is an event based, minimalist, modular framework for the development of Ambient Intelligence systems. Figure 6 shows a diagram of the basic components of FunBlocks FunBlocks approaches the development of AmI systems from the point of view of distributed control systems. ...
Intelligent Environments (IEs) are expected to have a dramatic impact on our daily lives in the near future. Environments that can assist users in their daily activities, aid the elderly in continuing productive and independent lives, keep people safe and help them make better use of resources can provide great benefits. However, due to the multidisciplinary nature of IEs, the complexity of the technologies involved, and the distinct requirements of different user groups, the development of full scale IEs is a difficult and error prone task. Although a robust design is a fundamental part in the development of an IE, proper supervision of the system for failure detection is important to guarantee the reliability of the systems. In this paper we propose MidBlocks, an event-based component supervising middleware. Through the use of MidBlocks, Intelligent Environments can perform constant supervision of their components and communication links in order to warn users in case of a system malfunction or to perform corrective actions such as dynamic system reconfiguration.
In the past decade, the need for flexibility and reconfigurability in automation has contributed to the rise of the distributed concept in control systems engineering. The IEC 61499 standard is used to define a distributed model for dividing various components of an industrial application in automation process and complicated control of machinery into function blocks. Such function blocks have the flexibility to be distributed and interconnected across a number of controllers. However, this new standard for automation faces two main challenges: the complexity in designs of distributed systems and the lack of utilization of the standard in industry. Most applications of controllers based on functional block programming are for linear systems. As most of industrial processes are nonlinear there is a need to extend the functional block approach for implementation of nonlinear controllers. Design complexity involves the exact modeling of the system in function blocks to obtain its accurate behaviour and the lack of utilization of the standard is understandable because new technologies are not easily accepted in industry due to their high prices and risks of compromising the performance at the production level. The thesis describes a methodology for design and implementation of nonlinear controllers for nonlinear plants in IEC 61499 standard compliant real-time environment of TwinCAT 3 and Beckhoff Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). The first step is to design the nonlinear controllers and simulate the closed-loop system in MATLAB/SIMULINK software. Then the new engineering based concepts to transform the obtained closed-loop system model to an IEC 61499 Function Block Model. This is accomplished by applying one method which involves a complete model transformation between two block-diagram languages: Simulink and TwinCAT 3. The development tools that support the transformation algorithm in the thesis sets the foundation stone of the verification and validation structure for IEC 61499 function blocks approach. The transformed model of the closed-loop system is downloaded to the Beckhoff PLC and is simulated in real-time. The obtained results demonstrate that the developed methodology allows complex nonlinear controllers to be successfully transformed to IEC 61499 standard compliant environment and to be applied for real-time PLC control of complex plants.
The creation of smart environments that are adaptive and responsive to the context in which they are being used has been one
of the strongest ideas in ambient intelligence, but also one of the areas in which there seems to be a persistent gap between
the initial promises and its real achievements. A possible reason why this is so challenging is that context-driven interaction
and systems support are highly interdependent, but are rarely designed together. In this paper, we analyse the implications
of context-driven interaction to the type of systems support provided by smart environments. The analysis is based on the
study of previous work in this area and structured around three main dimensions of interaction with smart environments: physical
integration; spontaneous interoperation and application programming abstractions. The contributions of this paper are 2-fold:
a characterization of the system design space according to the requirements raised by context-driven interaction and the identification
of new alternative paths for the integration of context-driven interaction into smart environments.
