Autonomously Optimizing Service-Based Application Dependability in Smart Building

Title:

Autonomously Optimizing Service-Based Application Dependability in Smart Building

Subject:

Today, smart buildings are gaining more and more attention from the scientific and industry communities. These new living spaces promise new life experiences while minimizing our energy consumption and improving our daily comfort. Unfortunately, building applications in these environments remains very complex and raises various scientific challenges. One of the most challenging is the capacity of these applications to dynamically adapt at runtime to their execution environment (including user behaviour, habits, other applications activities, resources availability …). In such dynamic environment, the dependability of applications is very hard to ensure, while being a crucial requirement for end users.

The Autonomic Computing [1] is a recent trend which aims at studying solutions to build self-manageable applications through autonomic managers. An autonomic application is typically able of dynamically adapting its behaviour to the execution context. Unfortunately, most solutions provided in this computing field are very problem-specific and do not suit our particular needs. Some research efforts [2, 3] have been made in the direction of building frameworks for autonomic applications but are limited in their ability to handle dependability issues.

The goal of this master thesis is to study models which will be used by autonomic managers to continuously adapt smart building applications dependability. In a first part, the student will investigate these models to evaluate the dependability of an application and the whole system. In a second part, these data will be used both to suggest new hardware installations to a human administrator and to adynamically optimize the software dependability.
The lab has developed EnTiMid [4, 5], a software framework aiming to ease the production of smart building applications controlling real home equipments. EnTiMid provides a service-oriented component model used to build home applications. The goal of this work is to build a prototype which will be plugged on real EnTiMid applications. Experimentations will be made on the smart building lab equipped with real devices (KNX, Delta Dore, X10, Legrand, Crestron …) [6].

Contact :

INRIA / TRISKELL
Jean-Marc JEZEQUEL (jezequel@irisa.fr)
Johann BOURCIER (johann.bourcier@irisa.fr)

References :

[1] J. Kephart and D. Chess, "The Vision of Autonomic Computing" Computer, vol. 36, pp. 41-50, 2003.
[2] J. Bourcier, A.Diaconescu, P. Lalanda, J.A. McCann, "AutoHome: an Autonomic Management Framework for Pervasive Home applications", ACM Transactions on
Autonomous and Adaptive Systems – Special Issue on Adaptive Services Discovery and Composition – 2010
[3] M. Parashar, H. Liu, Z. Li, V. Matossian, C. Schmidt, G. Zhang, and S. Hariri, "AutoMate: Enabling Autonomic Grid Applications," Cluster Computing: The Journal of Networks, Software Tools, and Applications, Special Issue on Autonomic Computing, vol. 9, p. 14, 2006.
[4] Brice Morin, Olivier Barais, Gregory Nain, Jean-Marc Jezequel, "Taming Dynamically Adaptive Systems with Models and Aspects", ICSE’09, Vancouver, Canada
[5] Gregory Nain, "Software Engineering for Internet of Thing", http://www.irisa.fr/triskell/members/gnain/posters/poster_match_ss_09/view
[6] Smart Building Lab, http://ens.univ-rennes1.fr/dess-dri/site/pro/index.php?lien=laboratoire