New paper “IoT data qualification for a logistic chain traceability smart contract” in Sensors journal
Authors: Mohamed Ahmed, Chantal Taconet, Mohamed Ould, Sophie Chabridon, Amel Bouzeghoub
MDPI Sensors, 21 (6), 2021. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03219609
Abstract
In the logistic chain domain, the traceability of shipments in their entire delivery process from the shipper to the consignee involves many stakeholders. From the traceability data, contractual decisions may be taken such as incident detection, validation of the delivery or billing. The stakeholders require transparency in the whole process. The combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the blockchain paradigms helps in the development of automated and trusted systems. In this context, ensuring the quality of the IoT data is an absolute requirement for the adoption of those technologies. In this article, we propose an approach to assess the data quality (DQ) of IoT data sources using a logistic traceability smart contract developed on top of a blockchain. We select the quality dimensions relevant to our context, namely accuracy, completeness, consistency and currentness, with a proposition of their corresponding measurement methods. We also propose a data quality model specific to the logistic chain domain and a distributed traceability architecture. The evaluation of the proposal shows the capacity of the proposed method to assess the IoT data quality and ensure the user agreement on the data qualification rules. The proposed solution opens new opportunities in the development of automated logistic traceability systems.
New paper “A Transactional Approach to Enforce Resource Availabilities – Application to the Cloud” at RCIS’2021
Authors: Zakaria Maamar, Mohamed Sellami and Fatma Masmoudi
Abstract
This paper looks into the availability of resources, exemplified with the cloud, in an open and dynamic environment like the Internet. A growing number of users consume resources to complete their operations requiring a better way to manage these resources in order to avoid conflicts, for example. Resource availability is defined using a set of consumption properties (limited, limited-but-renewable, and non-shareable) and is enforced at run-time using a set of transactional properties (pivot, retriable, and compensatable). In this paper, a CloudSim-based system simulates how mixing consumption and transactional properties allows to capture users’ needs and requirements in terms of what cloud resources they need, for how long, and to what extent they tolerate the unavailability of these resources.
New paper “Privacy-Preserving Content-Based Publish/Subscribe with Encrypted Matching and Data Splitting” at SECRYPT’2020
Privacy-Preserving Content-Based Publish/Subscribe with Encrypted Matching and Data Splitting by N. Denis, P. Chaffardon, D. Conan, M. Laurent, S. Chabridon and J. Leneutre
Abstract The content-based publish/subscribe paradigm enables a loosely-coupled and expressive form of communication. However, privacy preservation remains a challenge for distributed event-based middleware especially since encrypted matching incurs significant computing overhead. This paper adapts an existing attribute-based encryption scheme and combines it with data splitting, a non-cryptographic method called for alleviating the cost of encrypted matching. Data splitting enables to form groups of attributes that are sent apart over several independent broker networks so that it prevents the identification of an end-user; and, only identifying attributes are encrypted to prevent data leakage. The goal is to achieve an acceptable privacy level at an affordable computing price by encrypting only the necessary attributes, whose selection is determined through a Privacy Impact Assessment.
New article “Real-Time Tracking and Mining of Users’ Actions over Social Media ” at Computer Science and Information Systems
Ejub Kajan, Noura Faci, Zakaria Maamar, Mohamed Sellami, Emir Ugljanin, et al.. Real-time tracking and mining of users’ actions over social media. Computer Science and Information Systems, ComSIS Consortium, In press, pp.2-2. ⟨10.2298/CSIS190822002K⟩. ⟨hal-02514060⟩
Abstract. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies and social media, companiesare actively looking for ways to know and understand what users think and say about their products and services. Indeed, it has become the practice that users go online using social media like Facebook to raise concerns, make comments, and share recommendations. All these actions can be tracked in real-time and then mined using advanced techniques like data analytics and sentiment analysis. This paper discusses such tracking and mining through a system called Social Miner that allows companies to make decisions about what, when, and how to respond to users’ actions over social media. Questions that Social Miner allows to answer include what actions were frequently executed and why certain actions were executed more than others.
New paper “Towards an Approach for Validating the Internet-of-Transactional-Things” at AINA’2020
Z. Maamar, M. Sellami, N.C. Narendra, I. Guidara, E. Ugljanin, and B. Banihashemi. Towards an Approach for Validating the Internet-of-Transactional-Things. In the 34-th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA-2020)
Abstract. This paper examines the impact of transactional properties, known as pivot, retriable, and compensatable, on Internet-of-Things (IoT). Despite the ever-growing number of things in today’s cyber-physical world, a limited number of studies examine this impact while considering things’ particularities in terms of reduced size, restricted connectivity, continuous mobility, limited energy, and constrained storage. To address this gap, this paper proceeds first, with exposing things’ duties, namely sensing, actuating, and communicating. Then, it examines the appropriateness of each transactional property for each duty. During the performance of transactional things, (semi)-atomicity criterion is adopted allowing to approve when these things’ duties could be either canceled or compensated. A system that runs a set of what-if experiments is presented in the paper allowing to demonstrate the technical doability of transactional things.
New paper “A Model based Toolchain for the Cosimulation of Cyber-physical Systems with FMI” at MODELSWARD’2020
A Model based Toolchain for the Cosimulation of Cyber-physical Systems with FMI by D. Oudart, J. Cantenot, F. Boulanger and S. Chabridon
Abstract Smart Grids are cyber-physical systems that interface power grids with information and communication technologies in order to monitor them, automate decision making and balance production and consumption. Cosimulation with the Functional Mock-up Interface standard allows the exploration of the behavior of such complex systems by coordinating simulation units that correspond to the grid part, the communication network and the information system. However, FMI has limitations when it comes to cyber-physical system simulation, particularly because discrete-event signals exchanged by cyber components are not well supported. In addition, industrial projects involve several teams with different skills and methods that work in parallel to produce all the models required by the simulation, which increases the risk of inconsistency between models. This article presents a way to exchange discrete-event signals between FMI artifacts, which complies with the current 2.0 version of the standard. We developed a DSL and a model-based toolchain to generate the artifacts that are necessary to run the cosimulation of the whole system, and to
detect potential inconsistencies between models. The approach is illustrated by the use case of an islanded grid implementing diesel and renewable sources, battery storage and intelligent control of the production.
