A Semantic Situation Awareness Framework for Indoor Cyber-Physical Systems

Recently, the domain of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) has emerged as a successor to the traditional embedded systems and the wireless sensor networks. The relatively new cyber-physical domain offers tight integration of control, communication and computation components to develop advanced web based application in various heterogeneous domains such as health care, disaster management, automation and environment monitoring. The applications of indoor CPSs include remote patient monitoring, smart home, etc. with focus on situation awareness via event identification from context information. The principal challenges associated with the development of situation awareness applications include uncertainty in contextual data, incomplete domain knowledge, interoperability between interconnected systems and effective utilization of spatial information. This dissertation addresses these challenges by providing a comprehensive situation awareness framework for event comprehension utilizing raw sensor data and spatial information. Semantic web based annotation and mapping techniques are used to provide interoperability. The framework contains contextual situation awareness and location awareness stages towards achieving effective event assessment. The contextual situation awareness stage provides fuzzy abductive reasoning based architecture to transform raw physical sensor data to low-level fuzzy abstraction. These abstractions are used for event assessment with associated degree of certainty. The location awareness stage includes methodologies to hierarchically map indoor objects and define the object-event relationship in ontology, which is further exploited for event discrimination. This dissertation also presents a fusion based indoor positioning algorithm to provide accurate spatial information to assist location awareness. The algorithm uses extensive training of received signal strength (RSS) and time difference of arrival (TDoA) signals to estimate distance and position. The comprehensive framework is evaluated through an implementation of simulated indoor fire in a controlled environment