Energy management in buildings is vital for reducing electricity costs and maximizing the comfort of occupants. Excess solar generation can be used by combining a battery storage system and a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system so that occupants feel comfortable. Despite several studies on the scheduling of appliances, batteries, and HVAC, comprehensive and time scalable approaches are required that integrate such predictive information as renewable generation and thermal comfort. In this paper, we propose an thermal-comfort aware online co-scheduling framework that incorporates optimal energy scheduling and a prediction model of PV generation and thermal comfort with the model predictive control (MPC) approach. We introduce a photovoltaic (PV) energy nowcasting and thermal-comfort-estimation model that provides useful information for optimization. The energy management problem is formulated as three coordinated optimization problems that cover fast and slow time-scales by considering predicted information. This approach reduces the time complexity without a significant negative impact on the result's global nature and its quality. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves optimal energy management that takes into account the trade-off between electricity expenses and thermal comfort. Our sensitivity analysis indicates that introducing a battery significantly improves the trade-off relationship.

Design of distributed energy management systems composed of several agents such as factories and buildings is important for realizing smart cities. In addition, demand response for saving the power consumption is also important. In this paper, we propose a design method of distributed energy management systems with real-time demand response, in which both electrical energy and thermal energy are considered. Here, we use ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers), which is well known as one of the powerful methods in distributed optimization. In the proposed method, demand response is performed in real-time, based on the difference between the planned demand and the actual value. Furthermore, utilizing a blockchain is also discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is presented by a numerical example. The importance of introducing a blockchain is pointed out by presenting the adverse effect of tampering the actual value.

The unit commitment problem (UCP) is the problem of deciding up/down and generation-level patterns of energy production units. Due to the expansion of distributed energy resources and the liberalization of energy trading in recent years, solving the distributed UCP (DUCP) is attracting the attention of researchers. Once an up/down pattern is determined, the generation-level pattern can be decided distributively using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). However, ADMM does not guarantee convergence when deciding both up/down and generation-level patterns. In this paper, we propose a method to solve the DUCP using ADMM and constraint optimization programming. Numerical experiments show the efficacy of the proposed method.

To achieve highly efficient spectrum usage, dynamic sharing of scarce spectrum resources has recently become the subject of intense discussion. The technologies of dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) have already been adopted or are scheduled to be adopted in a number of countries, and Japan is no exception. The authors and organizations collaborating in the research and development project being undertaken in Japan have studied a novel DSS system positioned between the fifth-generation mobile communication system (5G system) and different incumbent radio systems. Our DSS system has three characteristics. (1) It detects dynamically unused sharable spectrums (USSs) of incumbent radio systems for the space axis by using novel propagation models and estimation of the transmitting location with radio sensor information. (2) It manages USSs for the time axis by interference calculation with propagation parameters, fair assignment and future usage of USSs. (3) It utilizes USSs for the spectrum axis by using methods that decrease interference for lower separation distances. In this paper, we present an overview and the technologies of our DSS system and its applications in Japan.

In this letter we analyze the economic worth of GPU on analytical processing of GPU-accelerated database management systems (DBMSes). To this end, we conducted rigorous experiments with TPC-H across three popular GPU DBMSes. Consequently, we show that co-processing with CPU and GPU in the GPU DBMSes was cost-effective despite exposed concerns.

Group signatures are signatures providing signer anonymity where signers can produce signatures on behalf of the group that they belong to. Although such anonymity is quite attractive considering privacy issues, it is not trivial to check whether a signer has been revoked or not. Thus, how to revoke the rights of signers is one of the major topics in the research on group signatures. In particular, scalability, where the signing and verification costs and the signature size are constant in terms of the number of signers N, and other costs regarding signers are at most logarithmic in N, is quite important. In this paper, we propose a revocable group signature scheme which is currently more efficient compared to previous all scalable schemes. Moreover, our revocable group signature scheme is secure under simple assumptions (in the random oracle model), whereas all scalable schemes are secure under q-type assumptions. We implemented our scheme by employing a Barreto-Lynn-Scott curve of embedding degree 12 over a 455-bit prime field (BLS-12-455), and a Barreto-Naehrig curve of embedding degree 12 over a 382-bit prime field (BN-12-382), respectively, by using the RELIC library. We showed that the online running times of our signing algorithm were approximately 14msec (BLS-12-455) and 11msec (BN-12-382), and those of our verification algorithm were approximately 20msec (BLS-12-455) and 16msec (BN-12-382), respectively. Finally, we showed that our scheme (with a slight extension) is applied to an identity management system proposed by Isshiki et al.

We address a BEMS (Building Energy Management System) to guarantee reliability of electric-power supply in dynamic uncertain environments. The building microgrid as the target of BEMS has multiple distributed power sources including a photo-voltaic power system and Electric-Vehicle (EV). EV is regarded as an autonomously-moving battery due to the original means of transportation and is hence a cause of dynamic uncertainty of the building microgrid. The main objective of synthesis of BEMS in this paper is to guarantee the continuous supply of power to the most critical load in a building microgrid and to realize the power supply to the other loads according to a ranking of load importance. We synthesize the BEMS as a reactive control system that monitors changes of dynamic uncertain environment of the microgrid including departure and arrival of an EV, and determines a route of power supply to the most critical load. Also, we conduct numerical experiments of the reactive BEMS using models of power flows in the building and of charging states of the batteries. The experiments are incorporated with data measured in a practical office building and demonstration project of EMS at Osaka, Japan. We show that the BEMS works for extending the time duration of continuous power supply to the most critical load.

In this letter, an underground facility management system for effective underground facility management is suggested. The present underground facility management system uses a wired and wireless duplex communication method to enable seamless communication, and rapid responses to any failures encountered. In this letter, the architecture and components of underground facility management system supporting heterogeneous duplex communication is suggested, and relevant work flow is presented.

Due to the recent network service market trends, network infrastructure providers must make their network infrastructures tolerant of network service complexity and swift at providing new network services. To achieve this, we first make a design decision for the single domain network infrastructure in which we use network virtualization and separate the network service control and management from the network infrastructure and leave the resource connectivity control and management in the network infrastructure so that the infrastructure can maintain simplicity and the network service can become complex and be quickly provided. Along with the decision, we construct an architecture of the network infrastructure and a network management model. The management model defines a slice as being determined by abstracted resource requirements and restructures the roles and planes from the viewpoint of network infrastructure usability so that network service requesters can manage network resources freely and swiftly in an abstract manner within the authorities the network infrastructure operator provides. We give the details of our design and implementation for a network virtualization management system along with the model. We deployed and evaluated our designed and implemented management system on the Japan national R&E testbed (JGN-X) to confirm the feasibility of our management system design and discuss room for improvement in terms of response time and scalability towards practical use. We also investigated certain cases of sophisticated network functions to confirm that the infrastructure can accept these functions without having to be modified.

In conventional networks, service control function and network control function work independently. Therefore, stereotypical services are provided via fixed routes or selected routes in advance. Recently, advanced network services have been provided by assortment of distributed components at low cost. Furthermore, service platform, which unifies componentized network control and service control in order to provide advanced services with flexibility and stability, has attracted attention. In near future, network management system (NMS) is promising, which replies an answer quickly for such advanced service platforms when route setting is requested with some parameters: quality of service (QoS), source and destination addresses, cost (money) and so on. In addition, the NMS is required to provide routes exploiting functions such as path computation element (PCE) actually. This paper proposes scalable network architecture that can quickly reply an answer by pre-computing candidate routes when route setting is requested to a control unit like an Autonomous System (AS). Proposed architecture can manage network resources scalably, and answer the availability of the requested QoS-aware path settings instantaneously for the forthcoming service platform that finds an adequate combination of a server and a route. In the proposed method, hierarchical databases are established to manage the information related to optical network solution and their data are updated at fewer times by discretized states and their boundaries with some margin. Moreover, with multiple and overlapped overlay, it pre-computes multiple candidate routes with different characteristics like available bandwidth and the number of hops, latency, BER (bit error rate), before route set-up request comes. We present simulation results to verify the benefits of our proposed system. Then, we implement its prototype using OpenFlow, and evaluate its effectiveness in the experimental environment.

Information Security Management Systems (ISMSs) play important roles in helping organizations to manage their information securely. However, establishing, managing, and maintaining ISMSs is not an easy task for most organizations because an ISMS has many participants and tasks, and requires many kinds of documents. Therefore, organizations with ISMSs demand tools that can support them to perform all tasks in ISMS lifecycle processes consistently and continuously. To realize such support tools, a database system that manages ISO/IEC 27000 series, which are international standards for ISMSs, and ISMS documents, which are the products of tasks in ISMS lifecycle processes, is indispensable. The database system should manage data of the standards and documents for all available versions and translations, relationship among the standards and documents, authorization to access the standards and documents, and metadata of the standards and documents. No such database system has existed until now. This paper presents an information security management database system (ISMDS) that manages ISO/IEC 27000 series and ISMS documents. ISMDS is a meta-database system that manages several databases of standards and documents. ISMDS is used by participants in ISMS as well as tools supporting the participants to perform tasks in ISMS lifecycle processes. The users or tools can retrieve data from all versions and translations of the standards and documents. The paper also presents some use cases to show the effectiveness of ISMDS.

Recently, Trust has been recognized as an important factor for Grid computing security. In this paper, we propose a trust model in Grid system. It consists of Application Domain (AD), Client Domain (CD), Resource Domain (RD), and Trust Manager (TM). TM controls the relationship between RD and CD depending on the trust level value of each client and classification of each resource. Performance criteria are makespan and utilization. We evaluated our trust model in six scheduling algorithms in nine scenarios. The simulation results show that the proposed trust model improves the performance in all scheduling algorithms.

Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) is widely used in Emergency Management System(EMS) to assure high safety. Real-timely transmitting emergency information in dynamically changing environment should be assured in mission critical district. Conventional methods based on static situations and centralized approaches can not satisfy this requirement. In this paper, to assure real-time property, autonomous community construction technology is proposed to set special area called community which includes a special passage composed of several routers for emergency information's transmission and routers around this passage in one hop range. Emergency information's transmission is protected by routers around this passage from interference of other sensing information's transmission in and outside community. Moreover, autonomous community reconstruction technology is proposed to guarantee real-time property at failure conditions. In this technology, community members autonomously cooperate and coordinate with each other to setup a bypass in community for transmitting emergency information if fault happens. Evaluation results indicate effectiveness of proposed technology.

Web APIs are offered in many Web sites for Ajax and mashup, but they have been developed independently since no reusable database component has been specifically created for Web applications. In this paper, we propose WAPDB, a distributed database management system for the rapid development of Web applications. WAPDB is designed on Atom, a set of Web API standards, and provides several of the key features required for Web applications, including efficient access control, an easy extension mechanism, and search and statistics capabilities. By introducing WAPDB, developers are freed from the need to implement these features as well as Web API processing. In addition, its design totally follows the REST architectural style, which gives uniformity and scalability to applications. We develop a proof-of-concept application with WAPDB, and find that it offers great cost effectiveness with no significant impact on performance; in our experiments, the development cost is reduced to less than half with the overhead (in use) of response times of just a few msec.

This paper proposes a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) based hierarchical service management system. Traditionally, general management systems deployed in some service providers control MPLS Label Switched Paths (LSPs) (e.g., RSVP-TE and LDP) and services (e.g., L2VPN, L3VPN and IP) separately. In order for dedicated management systems for MPLS LSPs and services to cooperate with each other automatically, a hierarchical service management system has been proposed with the main focus on point-to-point (P2P) TE LSPs in MPLS path management. In the case where P2MP TE LSPs and services are deployed in MPLS networks, the dedicated management systems for P2MP TE LSPs and services must work together automatically. Therefore, this paper proposes a new algorithm that uses a correlation between P2MP TE LSPs and multicast VPN services based on a P2MP MPLS-based hierarchical service management architecture. Also, the capacity and performance of the proposed algorithm are evaluated by simulations, which are actually based on certain real MPLS production networks, and are compared to that of the algorithm for P2P TE LSPs. Results show this system is very scalable within real MPLS production networks. This system, with the automatic correlation, appears to be deployable in real MPLS production networks.

The proposed quasi-resonant (QR) zero current switching (ZCS) switched-capacitor (SC) converter is a new type of bidirectional power flow control conversion scheme. The proposed converter is able to provide voltage conversion ratios from -3/- (triple-mode/ trisection-mode) to -n/- (-n-mode/--mode) by adding a different number of switched-capacitors and power MOSFET switches with a small series connected resonant inductor for forward and reverse power flow control schemes. It possesses the advantages of low switching losses and current stress in this QR ZCS SC converter. The principle of operation, theoretical analysis of the proposed triple-mode/ trisection-mode bidirectional power conversion scheme is described in detail with circuit model analysis. Simulation and experimental studies are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed inverting type ZCS SC QR bidirectional converter. The proposed converters can be applied to battery equalization for battery management system (BMS).

This paper proposes a hierarchical service management system for MPLS network services. Traditionally, general management systems which have been deployed in some service providers control MPLS LSPs (e.g. RSVP-TE, LDP) and services (e.g. L2VPN, L3VPN and IP) separately. If a fault occurs in an MPLS network, the dedicated management system for MPLS LSPs can detect the fault and recognize the state of MPLS LSPs. However, it cannot detect the extent of the impact due to the fault in each service. Furthermore, its own inability to identify the affected customer means it takes some time to identify the affected customers, cooperating manually with the dedicated management system for services. Therefore, this paper proposes a new automatic correlation between MPLS LSPs and each service. In particular, this paper proposes a new algorithm for a correlation between RSVP-TE LSPs and L3VPN services. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the capacity on a correlation table and the performance searching on a correlation table, and results show this system is very scalable within real MPLS production networks. This system, with the automatic correlation, could be sufficiently deployed in real MPLS production networks.

This paper proposes a coordinator for workflow management systems (WFMSs). It is a basic module for developing WFMSs. It is also a coordinator to coordinate multiple WFMSs. The coordinator provides functions to facilitate executing workflows and to ensure secure access of workflow information. Facilitating workflow execution is well-known, but ensuring secure access of workflow information is identified as important only recently. Although many models ensure secure workflow information access, they fail to offer the features we need. We thus developed a new model for the control. This paper presents the coordinator its access control model.

The cost-effective provision of IP services requires multi-layered traffic engineering to obtain dynamic cooperation between IP and photonic layers. The effective control and management of generalized multi-protocol label-switching (GMPLS) networks is an essential part of this. Huge photonic capacities and the number of IP and photonic networks make it likely that enormous amounts of GMPLS network-related data will have to be managed in the near future. At the same time, routing burdens on individual GMPLS routers are critical because of the strong need for per-path quality of service (QoS). To solve these problems, we propose a hierarchically distributed network-management system (NMS) in which we flexibly allocate a GMPLS subnetwork to each sub-NMS and at the same time conduct QoS routing. The distributed nature of our architecture reduces the burden on the NMS as a whole and also lets us remove the routing-burden from GMPLS routers with minimum effect on management processes.

Secure distribution of digital goods is now a significantly important issue for protecting publishers' copyrights. In this paper, we study a useful primitive for constructing a secure and efficient digital rights management system (DRM) where a server which encrypts digital content and one which issues the corresponding decryption key works independently, and existing schemes lack this property. We first argue the desired property necessary of an encryption scheme for constructing an efficient DRM, and formally define an encryption scheme as split encryption scheme containing such property. Also, we show that an efficient split encryption scheme can be constructed from any identity-based scheme. More precisely, we show an equivalence result implying that a split encryption scheme for some system parameter setting and an identity-based encryption scheme have the same primitives but for different uses. Since currently there is no identity-based encryption scheme which is based on well-known computational assumption and/or provably secure in the standard model (i.e. without the random oracle model), by reasonably tuning the system parameter, we show another construction of split encryption which is secure against chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard model assuming that decision Diffie-Hellman problem is hard to solve.