Earticle

Smart home is a relatively new technology. Originally, smart home technology was used to control environmental systems such as lighting and heating; but recently the use of smart technology has been developed so that almost any electrical component within the home can be included in the system. Complex smart home applications include three levels of control: local control, discrete-event control, and supervisory control. The local control, at the lower level, handles the operating conditions of the continuous time physical variables (e.g. temperature, light, level, etc.). The discrete-event control is meant by the asynchronous events and accordingly issues the corresponding discrete actions, based on the evolution specification. The supervisory control, at the upper level, takes care of the resources allocation, activities coordination, and deadlock avoidance. This paper proposes a technique that employs the Petri net tools to model, simulate, analyze, and control at the discrete-event level the smart home applications. Petri nets are proved to be suitable formal models that can be used to verify the operation of smart homes at the simulation level. Besides, it is very easy to get an executable version of the model for real-time implementation.

The performance of the sensors of a low cost Short Message System (SMS) based home security system equipped with motion sensor, smoke detector, temperature sensor, humidity sensor and light sensors has been studied. The sensors are controlled by a microprocessor PIC 18F4520 through the SMS having password. The operation of the home security has been tested on Vodafone- Fiji network for emergency and feedback responses for 25 samples. The GSM experiment showed that it takes about 8-10s for the security system to respond the occupant and relevant civil authorities in case of emergency. It takes about 18-22s for the occupant to switch and monitor lights and appliances and then get feedback from home depending upon the network traffic.

The last decade has witnessed an intense spread of computer networks that has been further accelerated with the introduction of wireless networks: this growth has increased significantly the problems of network management. Especially in small companies the management of such networks is often complex and faults have significant impacts on their businesses. A possible solution is the adoption of the Simple Network Management Network administrators can manage network performance, find and solve network problems, and plan for network growth by the use of the SNMP. Over the past years much efforts has been given to make more effective the Simple Network Management Protocol and new approaches has been developed. In particular a promising approach involves the use of Ontology. The ontology based network management has recently evolved from a theoretical proposal to a more mature technology and this is the starting point of this paper where a novel approach to the network management based on the use of the Slow Intelligence System methodologies and Ontology based techniques is proposed. The Slow Intelligence System is a general-purpose system characterized by being able to improve performance over time through a process involving various phases as enumeration, propagation, adaptation, elimination and concentration. Therefore, the proposed approach aims to develop a system able to acquire, according to the Simple Network Management Protocol, information from the various hosts that are in the managed networks and apply actions in order to solve problems. To check the feasibility of this approach and its performance an experimental campaign in a real scenario has been designed and the first experimental results in a real scenario are showed.

The issue of flu outbreak especially influenza H1N1 has been widely discussed nowadays. For those medical personnel who are exposing to measure temperature of a potential patient is recognized as a risky mission. Besides the medical personnel, firefighter also facing the similar risk related with temperature in their career. Heat injury is the major problem for the firefighter since they wear insulated clothing which is not able to shed the heat generated from physical exertion when they extinguish fire. Hence, a temperature sensing mobile robot via Bluetooth is proposed as an alternative solution for temperature measurement. In this project, a prototype mobile robot with simple locomotion mechanism and temperature sensor has been developed to measure human and environment temperature. This prototype includes KC-21 Bluetooth module as a platform to communicate with mobile Bluetooth, and LM35z temperature sensor to measure temperature. The mobile robot can move around and measure temperature according to the command or instruction of the user using mobile Bluetooth. The control range of this mobile robot is around 10m and it can measure temperature up to 150°C. A circuit controller board based on PIC16F877A is developed. Results show that, the temperature sensor has about 2.356% error when measuring human temperature while 0.88% error for measuring environment temperature.