面向普适计算的动态自适应中间件模型

为了提高普适计算系统的开发效率, 设计了一个基于OSGi框架的动态普适计算中间件模型. 该中间件模型以OSGi框架为基础, 建立移动管理器管理用户和服务的移动, 利用上下文管理器来管理上下文, 动态调整自己的行为, 支持上下文感知应用. 通过标准的接口实现各种异构普适设备间的互操作性. 实验结果表明该中间件能够满足通用普适计算环境的要求, 对于普适计算系统的开发具有一定的借鉴意义.     

A multi-agent based user context Bayesian neural network analysis system

The increasing user mobility demands placed upon IT services necessitates an environment that enables users to access optimal services at any time and in any place. This study presents research conducted to develop a system that is capable of analyzing user IT service patterns and tendencies and provides the necessary service resources by sharing each user’s context information. First, each user’s context information is gathered to provide the multi-agent software training data necessary to describe user operations in a hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) structured communication environment. Next, the data collected about each user’s mobile device is analyzed through a Bayesian based neural network system to identify the user’s tendency and extract essential service information. This information provides a communication configuration allowing the user access to the best communication service between the user’s mobile device and the local server at any time and in any place, thereby enhancing the ubiquitous computing environment.     

Agent-based Gateway Operating System for RFID-enabled ubiquitous manufacturing enterprise

Capturing and processing of real-time manufacturing shop floor field data is essential in improving the performance of shop floor planning, execution and control. Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) has enabled real-time information visibility and realized ubiquitous manufacturing enterprises with proper functionalities of Enterprise Information Systems (EISs). This paper presents a flexible, modularized and re-configurable framework for the new generation RFID middleware system, named Gateway Operating System (GOS). It is an overall software solution designed and proposed not only to address basic functions of RFID middleware system, but also to overcome the particular challenges and requirements for real-life manufacturing scenarios. GOS aims to provide an easy-to-deploy, simple-to-use and affordable RFID middleware solution for manufacturing applications. A multi-agent based model, named gateway smart agent manager, is designed to enable the heterogeneous RFID devices in a “Plug and Play” fashion and to cope with the changes from these connected hardware devices. To guarantee the versatility and scalability of GOS, an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) based message exchanging protocol is designed to fulfill the communication and interactions between applications and devices. Based on this protocol, an easy-to-deploy and simple-to-use application manager is built to manage, configure and use the connected devices as well as deployed applications. The proposed GOS will provide a new referenced framework for the development of lightweight RFID middleware system for manufacturing environment.     

基于SOA与资源即插即用的RFID中间件

融合各种通信网络异构性的无线泛在网将成为网络发展的必然趋势。为实现无线业务的泛在化,提出一种基于SOA与资源即插即用功能的泛在网RFID中间件架构,使其能在未来的基于Web的无线泛在业务环境体系架构中完成智能感知设备资源的即插即用特性。介绍了该架构逻辑框架中各部分的功能与实现方法,并通过具体应用系统验证了该架构不仅可以解决RFID设备与应用系统之间的紧耦合问题,而且能够实现单一物理设备服务多种业务应用的需求。     

一个基于多代理系统的CSCL中间件

移动设备(如手机)由于屏幕小、带宽有限等因素一直在CSCL领域难有作为。该文利用代理的智能、协作等特性，结合一个已有的CSCL应用平台，设计了一种基于多代理系统的CSCL中间什模型。该模型能够根据用户移动设备的显示性能，个性化处理已有的HTML文档，基本满足学习者对课件的访问，并协助移动用户使用CSCL应用平台，与其它协同学习者交流与合作。     

A formally verified application-level framework for real-time scheduling on POSIX real-time operating systems

We present a framework, called meta scheduler, for implementing real-time scheduling algorithms. The meta scheduler is a portable middleware layer component designed for implementations over POSIX-compliant operating systems. It accommodates pluggable real-time scheduling algorithms while offering the flexibility of platform independence - the singular underlying OS requirement is the now nearly ubiquitous POSIX compliance. The versatility of pluggable schedulers positions the meta scheduler for deployment in an interoperable heterogeneous real-time environment. We present the design of the meta scheduler and outline its implementation. Furthermore, we present a mechanized correctness verification using the UPPAAL model checker. Prototype implementation of the meta scheduler over QNX Neutrino real-time operating system demonstrates high performance and a small footprint.     

基于ARM的RFID中间件系统设计

提出一种基于ARM的支持多通信平台（如Internet、GSM/GRPS和CDMA）的RFID中间件系统设计。这种中间件可通过标准的接口（如RS-232接口、RS-485接口、以太网接口）连接不同厂商、不同类型的读写器（13.56MHz和915MHz）,屏蔽了RFID硬件设备的多样性和复杂性,为上层企业应用系统提供统一的、强大的硬件管理支撑,并通过多通信平台实现中间件之间的通信,为更广泛、更丰富的RFID应用奠定了基础。     

A standards‐based Grid resource brokering service supporting advance reservations,coallocation, and cross‐Grid interoperability

The problem of Grid‐middleware interoperability is addressed by the design and analysis of a feature‐rich, standards‐based framework for all‐to‐all cross‐middleware job submission. The architecture is designed with focus on generality and flexibility and builds on extensive use, internally and externally, of (proposed) Web and Grid services standards such as WSRF, JSDL, GLUE, and WS‐Agreement. The external use provides the foundation for easy integration into specific middlewares, which is performed by the design of a small set of plugins for each middleware. Currently, plugins are provided for integration into Globus Toolkit 4 and NorduGrid/ARC. The internal use of standard formats facilitates customization of the job submission service by replacement of custom components for performing specific well‐defined tasks. Most importantly, this enables the easy replacement of resource selection algorithms by algorithms that address the specific needs of a particular Grid environment and job submission scenario. By default, the service implements a decentralized brokering policy, striving to optimize the performance for the individual user by minimizing the response time for each job submitted. The algorithms in our implementation perform resource selection based on performance predictions, and provide support for advance reservations as well as coallocation of multiple resources for coordinated use. The performance of the system is analyzed with focus on overall service throughput (up to over 250 jobs per min) and individual job submission response time (down to under 1 s). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

部分可观测下基于RGMAAC算法的多智能体协同

多智能体深度强化学习(MADRL)将深度强化学习的思想和算法应用到多智能体系统的学习和控制中,是开发具有群智能体的多智能体系统的重要方法.现有的MADRL研究主要基于环境完全可观测或通信资源不受限的假设展开算法设计,然而部分可观测性是多智能体系统实际应用中客观存在的问题,例如智能体的观测范围通常是有限的,可观测的范围外不包括完整的环境信息,从而对多智能体间协同造成困难.鉴于此,针对实际场景中的部分可观测问题,基于集中式训练分布式执行的范式,将深度强化学习算法Actor-Critic扩展到多智能体系统,并增加智能体间的通信信道和门控机制,提出recurrent gated multi-agent Actor-Critic算法(RGMAAC).智能体可以基于历史动作观测记忆序列进行高效的通信交流,最终利用局部观测、历史观测记忆序列以及通过通信信道显式地由其他智能体共享的观察进行行为决策;同时,基于多智能体粒子环境设计多智能体同步且快速到达目标点任务,并分别设计2种奖励值函数和任务场景.实验结果表明,当任务场景中明确出现部分可观测问题时,RGMAAC算法训练后的智能体具有很好的表现,在稳定性...     

A design-and-play approach to accessible user interface development in Ambient Intelligence environments

User interface development in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments is anticipated to be a particularly complex and programming intensive endeavor. Additionally, AmI environments should ensure accessibility and usability of interactive technologies by users with different characteristics and requirements in a mainstream fashion. Therefore, appropriate user interface development methods and tools are required, capable of both reducing development efforts and ‘injecting’ accessibility issues into AmI applications from the early design stages. This paper introduces two tools, named AmIDesigner and AmIPlayer, which have been specifically developed to address the above challenges through automatic generation of accessible Graphical User Interfaces in AmI environments. The combination of these two tools offers a simple and rapid design-and-play approach, and the running user interfaces produced integrate non-visual feedback and a scanning mechanism to support accessibility. AmIDesigner and AmIPlayer have been evaluated to assess their usability by designers, and have been put to practice in the redevelopment of a light control application in a smart environment as a case study demonstrating the viability of the design-and-play approach. The results confirm the usefulness and usability of the tools themselves. Overall, the proposed approach has the potential to contribute significantly to the development, up-take and user acceptance of AmI technologies in the home environment.     

Designing for augmented attention: Towards a framework for attentive user interfaces

Attentive user interfaces are user interfaces that aim to support the user’s attentional capacities. By sensing the users’ attention for objects and people in their everyday environment, and by treating user attention as a limited resource, these interfaces avoid today’s ubiquitous patterns of interruption. Focusing upon attention as a central interaction channel allows development of more sociable methods of communication and repair with ubiquitous devices. Our methods are analogous to human turn taking in group communication. Turn taking improves the user’s ability to conduct foreground processing of conversations. Attentive user interfaces bridge the gap between the foreground and periphery of user activity in a similar fashion, allowing users to move smoothly in between.We present a framework for augmenting user attention through attentive user interfaces. We propose five key properties of attentive systems: (i) to sense attention; (ii) to reason about attention; (iii) to regulate interactions; (iv) to communicate attention and (v) to augment attention.     

Intelligent Agents for ATM Network Control and Resource Management: Experiences and Results from an Implementation on a Network Testbed

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a distributed multi-agent system designed to provide flexible control and efficient resource management of a communications network. The system architecture enables different service providers and the network provider to use different control algorithms on the same logically partitioned physical infrastructure. All the mechanisms have been implemented and successfully tested on real experimental telecommunications networks. The system components are first described and then results from experiments and performance issues are discussed. The problem of interfacing a multi-agent system to network devices is then discussed. Interfacing agents with the network requires some form of programmable interface, since it is necessary, for example, to override conventional ATM signaling. At the moment programmable network device interfaces are not always available, particularly in commercially available devices and, thus, generic operations using management protocols have to be used. A generic architecture for embedding custom network control functionality into ATM networks is described.     

An Effective Model and Management Scheme of Personal Space for Ubiquitous Computing Applications

In ubiquitous computing, the computing environment for a user is no longer a fixed computer, but a space that includes multiple heterogeneous devices that can change dynamically according to the user's situation. Managing the space is an essential part of ubiquitous computing because application services in this environment need to be adaptive to the users' current situation. However, previous approaches oversimplified the model of personal space and demonstrated some limitations in developing user-centric adaptive services. In this paper, we propose an effective personal space model, defined as virtual personal world (VPW), and a sophisticated method to manage personal spaces. The VPW represents a personal space by using a set of stateful elements and their relationships, which are denoted as virtual objects, services, and neighbors. The VPW provides expressive and accurate information for a particular user, thereby helping application services adapt their operations for the user dynamically. Our conceptual model is designed as personal operating middleware software that manages the user's VPW and provides application services. Experimental results show that the prototype system based on VPW has reasonable performance in running application services and managing personal spaces. We also found that the VPW model can increase the average user satisfaction rate by up to 40% compared to other models in our simulation environment.      

Providing universally accessible interactive services through TV sets: implementation and validation with elderly users

One of the challenges that Ambient Intelligence (AmI) faces is the provision of a usable interaction concept to its users, especially for those with a weak technical background. In this paper, we describe a new approach to integrate interactive services provided by an AmI environment with the television set, which is one of the most widely used interaction client in the home environment. The approach supports the integration of different TV set configurations, guaranteeing the possibility to develop universally accessible solutions. An implementation of this approach has been carried out as a multimodal/multi-purpose natural human computer interface for elderly people, by creating adapted graphical user interfaces and navigation menus together with multimodal interaction (simplified TV remote control and voice interaction). In addition, this user interface can also be suited to other user groups. We have tested a prototype that adapts the videoconference and the information service with a group of 83 users. The results from the user tests show that the group found the prototype to be both satisfactory and efficient to use.     

基于J2EE开发平台的统一用户接口系统

为了使企业应用程序能够支持多种Internet设备的用户接口，给出了一个统一用户接口模型．文章选用J2EE作为开发平台，并采用了MVC(Model—View—Controller)编程模型实现。     

Learning in an Ambient Intelligent World: Enabling Technologies and Practices

The rapid evolution of information and communication technology opens a wide spectrum of opportunities to change our surroundings into an Ambient Intelligent (AmI) world. AmI is a vision of future information society, where people are surrounded by a digital environment that is sensitive to their needs, personalized to their requirements, anticipatory of their behavior, and responsive to their presence. It emphasizes on greater user friendliness, user empowerment, and more effective service support, with an aim to bring information and communication technology to everyone, every home, every business, and every school, thus improving the quality of human life. AmI unprecedentedly enhances learning experiences by endowing the users with the opportunities of learning in context, a breakthrough from the traditional education settings. In this survey paper, we examine some major characteristics of an AmI learning environment. To deliver a feasible and effective solution to ambient learning, we overview a few latest developed enabling technologies in context awareness and interactive learning. Associated practices are meanwhile reported. We also describe our experience in designing and implementing a smart class prototype, which allows teachers to simultaneously instruct both local and remote students in a context-aware and natural way.     

Seamless User-Level Handoff in Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery

Advancing mobile computing technologies are enabling ubiquitous personal computing environment. In this paper, we focus on an important problem in such environment: user mobility. In the case of user mobility, a user is free to access his/her personalized service at anytime, anywhere, through any possible mobile/fixed devices. Providing mobility support in this scenario poses a series of challenges. The most essential problem is to preserve the user's access to the same service despite changes of the accessing host or service provider. Existing system-level mobility solutions are insufficient to address this issue since it is not aware of the application semantics. On the other hand, making each application to be mobility-aware will greatly increase the development overhead. We argue that the middleware layer is the best place to address this problem. On one hand, it is aware of application semantics. On the other hand, by building application-neutral mobility functions in the middleware layer, we eliminate the need to make each application mobility-aware. In this paper, we design a middleware framework to support user mobility in the ubiquitous computing environment. Its major mobility functions include user-level handoff management and service instantiation across heterogeneous computing platforms. We validate the major mobility functions using our prototype middleware system, and test them on two multimedia applications (Mobile Video Player and Mobile Audio Player). To maximally approximate the real-world user-mobility scenario, we have conducted experiments on a variety of computing platforms and communication paradigms, ranging from T1-connected high-end PC to handheld devices with wireless networks. The results show that our middleware framework is able to provide efficient user mobility support in the heterogeneous computing environment.     

基于Jini技术的RFID中间件平台

随着社会生产力的发展,科学技术的不断进步,射频识别（Radio Frequency Identification,RFID）技术近年来由于其显著的优点得到了广泛的应用,为了让作为RFID系统神经中枢的RFID中间件可以更好、更快地得到应用,使其能适应更多的应用需求,对现有的RFID中间件进行改进与优化是十分必要的,本文研究基于Java的分布式系统—Jini,给出基于Jini的RFID中间件平台的总体架构,利用RMI通信方式,实现RFID设备（虚拟的设备）在Jini环境下的自动识别、RFID中间件在Jini环境下的自动配置和管理以及RFID设备的＂即插即用＂的功能,同时对RFID中间件在Jini环境下的管理进一步地进行优化,使得基于EPCglobal标准的RFID中间件的设备配置与管理能在分布式环境下高效地运行。最后在实验中验证RFID中间件在Jini平台中的＂即插即用＂性。本文为RFID中间件与现代技术的结合提供思路和方法参考。     

基于PBS的机群任务调度管理中间件的设计与实现

介绍了基于PBS的机群任务调度管理中间件，是基于现在比较流行的调度系统PBS进行开发和封装，对上层提供了统一的接口．同时在该中间件中还封装了用户管理模块、配置模块和任务调度模块，采用基于XML的通信协议．该中间件具有很强的扩展性，可以扩展应用于LSF等多种流行的机群任务调度系统．最后，在该中间件之上，使用Java开发了前台图形界面，实现了一整套完备的具有实时监控和远程管理能力的机群任务管理系统．     

一种新型多点分布式远程桥梁监测系统研究

近年来提出的一些桥梁监测系统,如基于无线传感网络的桥梁监测系统,基于多点轮询的零散状态桥梁监测系统等,适用于采用同种技术构建零散状态下的大型监测系统,但对于不同的桥梁监测技术或与现有桥梁监测系统的兼容性仍有很大问题,可操作性较弱。在桥梁监测系统中引入软通信平台,利用软通信平台提供现有各种桥梁监测现场系统的不同技术接口和统一的通信平台,可实现各种不同桥梁监测现场子系统的分布式接入和远程集中监控,是一种可行的技术途径。