Moving towards Smart Cities: A Selection of Middleware for Fog-to-Cloud Services

Bangui, Hind; Rakrak, Said; Raghay, Said; Bühnová, Barbora

doi:10.3390/app8112220

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Fuzzy TOPSIS was proposed by Chen [ 76 ] from a modification to the diffuse medium of the technique developed by Hwang and Yoon [ 77 ]. Fuzzy TOPSIS has been successfully applied in many real cases [ 61 ], such as to support outsourcing of logistics services [ 78 ], to choose locations for shopping malls in Turkey [ 79 ], or the relief gate for a dam in Greece [ 80 ], to assess health vulnerability caused by climate and air pollution in South Korea [ 81 ], to choose the best equipment maintenance service supplier [ 82 ], to assess the performance of human resources in technology and science in Asian countries [ 83 ], to carry out safety risk assessment procedures in sustainable engineering projects [ 84 ], to measure environmental conflicts in mining in Vietnam [ 85 ], to facilitate the selection of services in the cloud [ 86 ], etc.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimisation of maintenance in delivery systems for cytostatic medicines

Carnero

Gómez

2021

BMC Health Serv Res

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Background The real-world application of maintenance in organisations brings together a number of maintenance policies in order to achieve the desired availability, efficiency and profitability. However, the literature mostly chooses a single maintenance policy, and so the decision process is not suited to the real conditions in the company to which it is applied. Our study takes a combination of maintenance policies as alternatives, and so conforms to the actual practice of maintenance in organisations. Furthermore, it introduces the possibility of including extra spare parts, or outsourcing maintenance policies. Although the selection of maintenance policies has been applied to many kinds of business and of machine, there is almost no instance of its application to hospitals, and it has never been applied to delivery systems for cytostatic drugs. Methods The model uses the fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), which is recognised as being highly suitable for solving group decision-making problems in a fuzzy environment. Fuzzy set theory is also considered to be more proficient than crisp numbers for handling the ambiguity, imprecisions, data scarcity, and uncertainty inherent in decisions made by human beings. The judgements required were obtained from a decision group comprising the heads of facilities maintenance, maintenance of medical equipment, health and safety at work, environment, and programming-admission. The group also included care staff; specifically, the heads of the main clinical services, and the medical supervisors. The model includes original criteria, such as Quality of health care, which measures impact on care as a function of mean availability of each alternative. It also considers Impact on hospital management via the criteria: Working environment in the organisation and Impact on health care; the former criterion measures equality among care services in the hospital, while the latter assesses the effect on regional health cover. The model was built using real data obtained from a state hospital in Spain. The model can also be easily applied to other national and international healthcare organisations, providing weights specific to the criteria. These are produced by a decision group from each healthcare organisation and the alternatives are updated in accordance with what is considered important in each hospital. Results The results obtained from the model recommend changing the alternative that is currently in use, Corrective and Preventive Maintenance, to Corrective and Preventive Maintenance plus two spare hoods. This alternative would lead to an availability of 1 (the highest possible) in the systems for preparing personalised cytotoxic drugs, and so the quality of service is therefore very high. Additionally, it could offer services to all the users of the hospital, and also offer cover in the preparation of cytotoxic medicines to other hospitals in the catchment area. Conclusions The results suggest the possibility that improvements to the support and logistical systems, which include maintenance, traditionally held to have no effect on quality of care, may be key to improving care quality, but also in reducing risk to patients, care and non-care staff, and the environment.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimisation of maintenance in delivery systems for cytostatic medicines

Carnero

Gómez

2021

BMC Health Serv Res

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“…Edge servers at the access network provide compute and cache services to latency-sensitive applications whereas edge servers at the core network are for delay-tolerant applications. A design of a simple middleware platform for a fog and cloud environment is described in [51]. The proposed middleware addresses the services selection problem by applying fuzzy similarity and TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) methods.…”

Section: Middleware Platforms For Distributed Computing Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of a Machine Learning-Based Intelligent Middleware Platform for a Heterogeneous Private Edge Cloud System

Shah

2021

Sensors

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Recent advances in mobile technologies have facilitated the development of a new class of smart city and fifth-generation (5G) network applications. These applications have diverse requirements, such as low latencies, high data rates, significant amounts of computing and storage resources, and access to sensors and actuators. A heterogeneous private edge cloud system was proposed to address the requirements of these applications. The proposed heterogeneous private edge cloud system is characterized by a complex and dynamic multilayer network and computing infrastructure. Efficient management and utilization of this infrastructure may increase data rates and reduce data latency, data privacy risks, and traffic to the core Internet network. A novel intelligent middleware platform is proposed in the current study to manage and utilize heterogeneous private edge cloud infrastructure efficiently. The proposed platform aims to provide computing, data collection, and data storage services to support emerging resource-intensive and non-resource-intensive smart city and 5G network applications. It aims to leverage regression analysis and reinforcement learning methods to solve the problem of efficiently allocating heterogeneous resources to application tasks. This platform adopts parallel transmission techniques, dynamic interface allocation techniques, and machine learning-based algorithms in a dynamic multilayer network infrastructure to improve network and application performance. Moreover, it uses container and device virtualization technologies to address problems related to heterogeneous hardware and execution environments.

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“…Moreover, fog computing is a paradigm utilized by specialists in smart environments in order to design efficient information processing data. For instance, in sustainable smart cities where the aim is to integrate various IoT technologies by providing many opportunities for management, development, and governance of user services, fog computing techniques are used to manage resource consumption, reduce costs, improve performance of the system, and connect the IoT devices more effectively (Bangui, Rakrak, Raghay, & Buhnova, 2018). Similarly, fog computing was utilized for sustainable smart cities as an efficient framework in Perera et al (2017) and Naranjo, Pooranian, Shojafar, Conti, & Buyya (2019) to reduce delays and save energy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%