Special Sessions

Wireless Communications and Applications in Embedded Systems and Machine-to-Machine [+]
Marine Robotics [+]
Control using Wireless Sensors and Actuator Networks [+]
Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments [+]

And also an Invited Session, 'Coordinated Control of Water Delivery Canals' [+], below.

Wireless Communications and Applications in Embedded Systems and Machine-to-Machine

Organizers: Jose A. Fonseca (IT/UA) and Francisco Vasques (FEUP)

Wireless communications are becoming pervasive in the support of the control, automation and data acquisition in a wide range of applications such as factory automation, building automation and management, vehicular, health and others. A strong tendency is to support these applications in standards such as Wi-Max, Wi-Fi, 802.15.4 and related protocols, Bluetooth and other. Also, the use of mobile networks to M2M (machine-to-machine) is raising namely due to the availability of low-cost options to profit from previous generation technologies.

For this invited session we are seeking for papers reporting achievements in this field, either in what concerns, architectures, protocols, technologies, integration solutions, etc., or final applications in any domain where the added value of wireless communications contributes to achieve cost-effective solutions or to solve problems more efficiently than with cabled based communications. We are also seeking for papers that evaluate those technologies in several properties such as dependability, scalability, timeliness or to propose solutions to enable the deployment of safety and security critical systems in open environments where different wireless networks can coexist. Academic as well as industrial papers are very welcome.

Marine Robotics

Organizers: A. Pedro Aguiar (ISR/IST) and António M. Pascoal (ISR/IST)

Prompted by the advent of small embedded processors and sensors, advanced communication systems, and the miniaturization of electro-mechanical devices, considerable effort is now being devoted to the deployment of autonomous marine vehicles cooperating in a number of challenging scenarios.

This special session is motivated by new theoretical and practical developments in the area, especially those related to control and navigation of single and multiple autonomous marine robotic vehicles.

Control using Wireless Sensors and Actuator Networks

Organizers: Jorge Sá Silva (DEI/UC), Luiz Correia (UL/Brasil) and Lina Brito (UMa)

Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) have experienced an explosive growth in the last few years especially because they offer great potential for applications in various scenarios and environments, ranging from applications such as target detection and tracking, environmental monitoring, industrial process monitoring, health, surveillance (e.g., intrusion detection), aviation, traffic monitoring, home, disaster monitoring, agriculture, structural monitoring, to its application to military systems, just to name a few.

The aim of this Special Session is to provide a platform for practitioners, academia and researchers to disseminate and discuss current research findings and also to explore recent development and future trends in WSAN, with emphasis in the following topics:
- Planning and deployment;
- Monitoring systems;
- Networked control systems;
- Performance, simulation, and modeling of WSNs;
- Architectures, protocols and algorithms for WSNs;
- Testbeds, prototypes and applications.

Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments

Organizers: Fernando J. Velez (UBI/IT), Karolina Baras (UMa) and Lina Brito (UMa)

Smart environments (SEs) and ambient intelligence aim at providing the right service in a timely, unobtrusive and friendly manner. Recently, there has been a shift in the design of such systems that tries to include the user in the loop of decision making. In the conception of smart systems it is essential to gather the appropriate information to provide the required service. This implies taking advantage of both physical and virtual sensors that happen to be in the environment and make part of everyone’s daily life.

SEs, like the human body, energy efficient buildings, vehicular or urban environments, are therefore populated by many devices connected by wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). These environments are defined with a variety of different characteristics based on the applications they serve, their interaction models with humans and machines, the practical system design aspects that would enable them to operate seamlessly, unobtrusively and securely.

This special session will focus on both the technical and application aspects of SEs, ambient intelligence and WSANs, giving emphasis but not limited to the following topics:

Ambient intelligence for smart home environments;
- Ambient wireless networks;
- Applications and real life user experience with deployed systems and prototypes;
- Applications in health care, smart homes and smart buildings;
- Automatic configuration of applications for smart environments and end-user support;
- Coexistence of WSANs with other wireless technologies;
- Cognitive radio aspects;
- Communication systems and infrastructure for ambient intelligence;
- Context and social-aware applications;
- Context models;
- Context awareness, sensing, and inference for ambient intelligence;
- Energy Harvesting for WSANs;
- Human-centered interfaces, intelligent agents, multimodal interaction and the social interactions of objects in environments;
- Mobile and pervasive computing in smart environments;
- Mobile/wearable intelligence;
- Modeling and simulation in WSANs;
- Modeling environments (homes, hospitals, transportation, roads, offices, classrooms, museums, etc.);
- Protocols and algorithms for the PHY, MAC and Network Layer;
- Recent standardization activities;
- Regulatory issues;
- Robotics applied to smart environments;
- Sensor data fusion and collaboration in multi-sensor systems and networks;
- Sensors and networks;
- Use of mobile, wireless, visual, and multi-modal sensor networks in intelligent systems;
- Ubiquitous and ambient display environments.

Invited Session

Coordinated Control of Water Delivery Canals

Organizers: João M. Lemos (IST), Miguel Ayala Botto (IST), Rui Neves-Silva (UNL)

Coordinated control of large scale systems is a topic that is receiving an increasing attention, both due to the scientific questions that it raises and to its socio-economic implications. Water delivery, energy distribution and communication networks provide examples of important application areas that motivate research on the topic.

This invited session includes 6 papers covering various aspects of coordinated control for water delivery canals, including modeling for simulation and control, control tolerant to faults in sensors and actuators, reconfigurable control and distributed LQG, MPC and agent based control. Therefore, the subjects treated will attract the interest of researchers from different areas, but sharing common problems. The work reported in these papers has been performed in the framework of the research project AQUANET – Decentralized and reconfigurable control for water delivery multipurpose control systems, supported by FCT (Portugal).

Organized by:

Sponsors: