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Section: New Results
Context-aware dynamic Smart Home Platform
Participants : Andrey Boytsov, Aurélien Richez, Yoann Maurel, Frédéric Weis [contact] .
Tacoma group is focussed on the conception and implementation of innovative services for the Smart Home. The range of considered services is broad : from "optimizing the energy consumption" to "helping users to find their way in a building". To provide such services, automation based on pre-set scenarios is ineffective: human behavior is hardly predictable and application should be able to adapt their behavior at runtime depending on the context. We focused on recognizing user's activities to adapt applications behaviours.
Building efficient and accurate context awareness was and is still a great challenge but we proved, through the use of dedicated algorithms and a layered architecture that it is achievable when the targeted Home is known - due to the specific and non automated calibration process we used. Among all the available theories, we decided to use the Belief Function Theory (BFT) [8] [9] as it allows to express uncertainty and imprecision. Although these results are very promising, great challenges still lied in (i) the support of the dynamic reconfiguration to face evolving hardware or software conditions and (ii) the deployment and the configuration of the layered architecture and sensors to allow the use of our approach in unknown environments.
One of our goals is to build a pervasive platform with constrained performance and cost [7] . The cost is particularly critical for sensors and actuators: we choose to limit our scope to inexpensive and non-invasive sensors i.e. no video camera. This past months, Tacoma has been working on the conception and implementation of a Smart Home Platform based on earlier prototypes inherited from ACES team. The prototypes were implemented as an hard-to-maintain monolithic code. The code also suffered from a lot of redundancy. More importantly the platform hardly supported dynamism and provided no support for reconfiguration and adaptation at runtime. With this in mind, during the re-writing of the platform the emphasis has been placed on the following aspects:
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enabling the dynamic deployment of applications at runtime ;
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enabling context-awareness by providing contextual information to these applications;
Our goal is to design and build a platform that is:
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evolutive: the Home environment is ever-changing and thus it is important to allow users to add new sensors or new services dynamically at runtime. It is also mandatory to recalibrate the sensors to face the change in the Home. This is mainly why we based our platform on OSGi;
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maintainable and administrable: we raised the maintainability by using a modular approach using C-modules or iPOJO components; the platform is itself modular to achieve a good separation of concerns (e.g., communication, module loading, discovery). We also built in-production monitoring interfaces that provides information on the belief functions that are used, the fusion process and the sensors values;
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easy to configure: alleviating the complexity of the platform configuration and maintenance is a prerequisite for the adoption of Smart-Home environments by consumers. Currently the BFT theories requires a huge calibration process. We focussed our efforts on the semi-automated building of mass functions, required by the theory, that have to be provided by each sensor.
Towards dynamism using OSGI
The development of our initial platform in C proved to be costly and hard to maintain. The dynamism is hard to achieved with a low-level language and requires an heavy development process. This led the team to investigate the use of OSGi as a based for our execution platform. OSGi is the specification of an execution framework developed on top of Java. It relies on the Java's dynamic features (dynamic and on demand class loading through class loaders) to provide a coarse-grained level of modularity. This choice was reinforced by our collaboration with the Adele team (LIG Laboratory in Grenoble). This team is using OSGi as a core for building Smart Home applications. Using OSGi would ease collaboration and code sharing.
One main concerns regarding the use of Java was the limited performances of the targeted hardware (raspberry pi). The Belief Function Theory (BFT) requires heavy computations and the embedded CPU could have been the bottleneck. Moreover, the JVM supported by the raspberry pi is limited compared to standard JVM. As a preliminary study, we choose to implement the core of the BFT library in Java and to compare the performances with the C implementation. Unexpectedly the Java implementation performed better than the C implementation in most of the case. This can be explained by three factors. First, the BFT theory is tedious to implement in low-level language. The C-implementation could probably be optimized but this will lower the readability of the source code and impact the maintainability. Second and conversely, using Java raised the code readability and allowed us to performed some optimization. Third, the JIT (Just In Time) compiler provided by the VM have been improved these past years and the optimization performed by the VM are sufficient to bring on par performances with the C implementation. As, the performances of the C platform were largely sufficient, this preliminary phase validated our decision to switch to OSGi.
Automated configuration of sensors
A previous defended in the group in december 2013 has shown promising results applying the BFT theory to the Smart Home Domain. It is currently possible to collect sensor values and extract belief functions from them. The platform can then extract a context from the belief functions and offer services to the user depending on what is happening. For instance, the user may be notified of an open window when he leaves the house.
The transition between a raw sensor value and a belief function is made through the use of a belief model which maps a sensor value to a belief function. The belief model is provided to the platform by us and a component is in charge of transforming a sensor value in a belief function. The fine tuning of a model can be a tedious task. It must be done by a specialist who understands the belief function theory and knows the behavior of the sensors. The model is often built iteratively by experimenting. This may take several hours or days.
Ideally, the calibration of the model should be as automatic as possible (few interaction with the user during calibration). The person setting up the sensors should not have to understand the belief function theory. The group is currently studying the possible use of clustering and classifications algorithm in order to ease the calibration of sensors. Yoann Maurel and Frédéric Weis supervised a project with a group of ENS student on this subject. The goal is to generate our belief model from a training set of sensor data. We mainly focus on two algorithms: k-nearest neighbors (KNN) and overlapping k-mean (OKM). A first experimentation with KNN and motion sensors showed that this algorithm is promising. We used a training data set to compute the presence belief model. We acquired a first set of data with someone present in the experimentation room and a second data set with nobody in the room, which gives us a labelled data set.