Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potential for new business. To fully realize this potential, there is a need for a common way to abstract the heterogeneity of devices so that their functionality can be represented as a virtual computing platform. To this end, we present novel semantic level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and IoTs. There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with semantic web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a semantic information broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a resolution infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios. In addition, to validate that the proposed architecture conforms to the common IoT-A architecture reference model (ARM), we map the central components of the architecture to the IoT-ARM.

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At present, battery charging operations constitute one of the most critical obstacles toward a large-scale uptake of Electric Mobility (EM), due to performance issues and implementation complexities. Although several solutions based on the utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and on mobile applications have been investigated to assist the Electric Vehicles (EVs) drivers and to coordinate the charging operations, there is still the problem of how to evaluate and validate such solutions on realistic scenarios, due to the lack of accurate simulators integrating vehicular mobility, wireless communication and battery charging/discharging models. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap, by proposing a novel EV simulation platform that can assist the pre-deployment of charging infrastructures and services on realistic, large-scale EM scenarios. The simulation platform, realized within the ARTEMIS EU project "Internet of Energy for Electric Mobility" (IoE), supports two utilization modes, i.e. evaluation of EM scenarios and immersive emulation of EM-related mobile applications, thanks to a semantic architecture through which virtual and real components can be integrated in a seamless way. We provide three major contributions with respect to the state of the art. First, we extend the existing co-simulation platform composed by SUMO (vehicular traffic simulator) and OMNET++ (network simulator) with realistic models of EVs, EVSEs and ontology-based communication protocols that enable the deployment of city-wide mobile services (e.g. charging reservation). Second, we validate the battery model against the consumptions data of target EVs, and we evaluate the operations of EVs on a large-scale scenario (the city of Bologna), by analyzing the effectiveness of the charging reservation process and the resulting impact to the smart grid. Finally, we introduce the Mobile Application Zoo (MAZ), a sandbox through which EM-related mobile applications can be seamlessly integrated within the simulation platform in order to be validated on virtual environments before their deployment on real scenarios, and we describe the implementation of an Android app for battery monitoring and charging reservation. , IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 2 mechanical transmissions, etc). Similarly, battery models have been extensively investigated to compute the discharging of the battery over time, and to reproduce EV dynamics in an accurate way [15][16] [17]. However, none of these tools can be used to study complex dynamics of EM scenarios (like the impact of EVs to the smart grid, or the effectiveness of charging reservation policies), where it is required to model several interacting entities characterized by different time-scale behaviors (i.e. EVs, EVSEs, the electrical grid, the communication network). To this aim, the most pioneering works are [22][23] [24]. The main contribution of this paper is the design and implementation of an integrated framework to perform large-scale simulations of Electric Mobility...

The Internet of Energy (IoE) for Electric Mobility is an European research project that aims at deploying a communication infrastructure to facilitate and support the operations of Electric Vehicles (EVs). In this paper, we present three research contributions of IoE. First, we describe a software architecture to support the deployment of mobile and smart services over an Electric Mobility (EM) scenario. The proposed architecture relies on an ontology-based data representation, on a shared repository of information (Service Information Broker), and on software modules (called Knowledge Processors -KPs) for standardized data access/management. As a result, information sharing among the different stakeholders of the EM scenario (i.e. EVs, EVSEs, City Services, etc) is enabled, and the interoperability of smart services offered by heterogeneous providers is guaranteed by the common ontology. Second, we rely on the proposed architecture to develop a remote charging reservation system, that runs on top of mobile smarthphones, and allows drivers to monitor the current state-of-charge of their EV, and to reserve a charging slot at a specific EVSE. Finally, we validate our architecture through a benchmark framework, that supports the embedding of mobile EV applications and of real KPs into a simulated vehicular scenario, including realistic traffic, wireless communication and battery models. Evaluation results confirm the scalability of our architecture, and the ability to support EVs charging operations on a large-scale scenario (i.e. the downtown of Bologna).

Smart-M3 is an open source middleware solution originally released by Nokia as a prototype reference infrastructure to support context-aware ontology-driven smart applications. This paper proposes a renewedSmart-M3Semantic Information Broker implementation with increased performance and usability levels. In the proposed solution many features have been added or modified, preserving compatibility with the previous release. The major changes are related to the subscription mechanism, the RDF store and the supported encodings for information representation and query. SPARQL query language replaces Wilbur. This paper enlightens the analysis carried out on the original implementation and discusses the choices made to increase its maturity level. The work done is a step forward towards a stable and efficient open interoperability platform for the emerging market of smart space based services.