INFRA - Infrastructures matérielles et logicielles pour la société numérique

Adaptive Supervision of Avatar/Object Links for the Web of Objects – ASAWoO

ASAWoO: Adaptive Supervision of Avatar/Object Links for the Web of Objects

The Web of Things (WoT) aims at interconnecting network-enabled objects using Web standards. However, Web protocols and languages are not adapted to those connected objects. There is also an emerging need for usages of meaningful services relying on interoperable objects. The ASAWoO project promotes communities of avatars to realize collaborative applications involving connected objects on the Web of services.

The aim of this project is to design and deliver a global WoT architecture, to which users will connect their available appliances and where they will deploy WoT applications.

Our WoT architecture will be designed to verify the following properties:<br /><br />- Scalability: our infrastructure will be designed to be deployed from home environments to big<br />organizations, as well as in outdoor environments. Thus, it must be flexible enough to scale over a<br />large and variable number of objects. It will be responsive to dynamic changes thanks to adaptive<br />deployment techniques for cloud infrastructure, replicable from cloud to cloud and able to balance<br />load between different cloud instances. Moreover, application modules will be deployable on the<br />objects, depending on their resources and processing capabilities.<br />- Portability: application modules will be characterized semantically, to be deployable on different<br />types of objects, and WoT applications will be available from simple Web clients.<br />- Disconnection tolerance: while moving, mobile connected objects experience unpredicted<br />disconnections from the architecture and from other objects. Disruption-tolerant routing protocols<br />will be developed to make best use of appliance connectivity and maximize their availability for the<br />WoT architecture.<br />- Green-IT and Green-by-IT awareness: minimizing energy consumption on physical objects is a<br />critical issue. The previously mentioned low-level protocol will be able to optimize battery use by<br />helping balance code processing vs. network communication. In the same direction, application-level<br />protocols will be optimized and tailored to communicate with physical objects as well. Moreover,<br />the cloud infrastructure running our architecture will be optimized to spare energy as much as<br />possible.<br />- Privacy awareness: as sensitive information can be necessary to interact with objects and enable<br />rich user interactions, privacy aspects of the communications among the objects and between the<br />infrastructure and the objects will be taken into account.

The work in the ASAWoO project is organized in 8 tasks.

Task 1 (Global application architecture) aims at validating with the different partners the different interfaces of the components to be developed in further tasks, as well as the global WoT architecture. The tools to be used in the project will also be chosen in this task. In parallel, Tasks 2 (Object architecture), 3 (Cloud infrastructure) and 4 (Context modeling and adaptation) and 7 (Collaborative functionalities) respectively aim at designing and developing a generic internal architecture for objects, setting up the deployment strategy in the cloud,
and developing advanced collaborative and proactive behavior for avatar communities, to be used in later tasks. Subsequently, Task 5 (High level functionality management) aims at developing advanced reasoning mechanisms to enable the enactment of value-added functionalities on top of a set of available objects. Finally, Tasks 6 (Object/avatar communication management) and 7 (Collaborative functionalities) aim at devising object/avatar communication mechanisms and developing context-aware reasoning mechanisms. All along the project timeline, Task 8 (Project management and dissemination) concretizes the project management efforts and the dissemination of the project results.This section presents the research tasks that
are to be investigated in our project.

Our results include:
- an architecture to host the different components of the avatar as an extension of a connected object on the Web.
- semantic reasoning techniques to allow for composing object functionalities
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Future work has been started with the submission of the NAWIGATIO European project to the H2020 ICT 30 call.


COAP over BP for a Delay-Tolerant Internet of Things, Maël Auzias, Yves Mahéo, Frédéric Raimbault. In the 3rd International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud 2015), août 2015, Rome, Italy.

Semantic Discovery and Invocation of Functionalities for the Web of Things. M. Mrissa, L Médini, J.P. Jamont. Dans IEEE International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, Parma. pp. 281-286. 2014.

A Web-based agent-oriented approach to address heterogeneity in cooperative embedded systems. J.P. Jamont, L Médini, M. Mrissa. Dans 12th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Salamanca, Spain. 2014.

Towards semantic resource mashups. L Médini, P-A. Champin, M. Mrissa, A. Cordier. Dans Services and Applications over Linked APIs and Data (SALAD), workshop at ESWC, Heraklion. CEUR . 2014.

Michael Mrissa, Lionel Médini, Jean-Paul Jamont, Nicolas Le Sommer, Jérôme Laplace. An Avatar Architecture for the Web of Things. Internet Computing, IEEE, IEEE, 2014, pp.1.

The Web of Things (WoT) aims at interconnecting network-enabled appliances using Web standards. However, Web protocols and languages are not adapted to those connected objects. There is also an emerging need for usages of meaningful services relying on interoperable objects.
The major challenge of the ASAWoO project is to enhance appliance integration into the Web. Our project builds an architecture to provide users with understandable functionalities under the form of WoT applications, while enabling collaboration between heterogeneous physical objects.
To reach this objective and guarantee our solution verifies additional properties, we combine advances from complementary disciplines: Semantic Web to reason about knowledge models; Service-Oriented Architectures to enable interoperability and scalable deployment from home environments to big organizations; Context-Aware Computing to make situation-based multi-level decisions, Multi-Agent Systems to enable autonomous collaboration between objects; Delay-Tolerant Networks to enable disconnection-tolerance for mobile objects; and Cloud Computing to enable minimize global power consumption through Green-IT and Green-by-IT awareness. In addition, our solution protects sensitive information carried by appliances through Privacy-awareness mechanisms.
Our project embeds each physical object into an avatar that exposes physical functionalities as semantic Web services, supports optimized communication and code deployment, proposes collaborative functionalities with other avatars, and dynamically adapts the preceding points to changing situations.
The project addresses several scientific locks:
- provide an energy-aware cloud infrastructure to manage the lifecycle of WoT architectures supporting WoT application deployment
- enable autonomous, collaborative avatar behavior, semantic description, discovery and composition of object capabilities, and context adaptation at the object, communication and functionality levels
- design and implement energy- and privacy-aware interaction protocols and disruption-tolerant routing protocols for WoT objects
- enable avatar/object protocol negotiation
The ASAWoO project is organized in 8 tasks. First, Task 1 validates the interfaces and tools to be used in the project. Then, in parallel, Tasks 2, 3 and 4 respectively define the object architecture, cloud infrastructure and context-aware reasoning mechanisms. Task 5 focuses on semantic functionalities. Finally, Tasks 6 and 7 devise communication mechanisms and develop collaborative behavior. All along the project, Task 8 handles management and dissemination activities.
We envision several benefits from the ASAWoO project. Our WoT infrastructure will provide a scalable, out-of-the-box framework enabling high-level interaction with sets of heterogeneous objects via the deployment of Web of Things applications. Moreover, the tasks deliverables represent independent advances in their domains.
Assistance robots and co-workers (co-Bots) will be a major market in a near future. This project is an opportunity for vendors like Génération Robots to occupy a strategic market position with the development of advanced applications for connected objects that shall attract customers with easy application deployment and attractive interaction possibilities, leading to the creation of WoT application marketplaces, where software vendors will monetize these apps. For the LIRIS lab, this project concretizes existing work from the Web service and semantic Web research fields. For the IRISA-CASA research team, it leads to context-aware solutions for dynamic code deployment on constrained devices and disruption-tolerant routing protocols. For the LCIS lab, it allows defining new agent interaction models for physical objects. The project is also an experimentation field to validate the work on energy-efficient cloud infrastructures.

Project coordination

Michael MRISSA (Laboratoire d'informatique en image et systèmes d'information)

The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.

Partner

IRISA Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires
Génération Robots Génération Robots
LCIS Laboratoire de Conception et d'Intégration des Systèmes
LIRIS Laboratoire d'informatique en image et systèmes d'information

Help of the ANR 665,632 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project: December 2013 - 48 Months

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