Computer Platform for Development and Deployment of Sensor Data Based Applications and Services

• US 20140359552A1
• Filed: 09/18/2012
• Published: 12/04/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 09/19/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: TATA Consultancy Services Limited (Tata Sons Pvt Ltd.)
• Original Assignee: TATA Consultancy Services Limited (Tata Sons Pvt Ltd.)
• Inventors: Misra, Prateep, Pal, Arpan, Purushothaman, Balamuralidhar, Bhaumik, Chirabrata, Naskar, Soumitra, Swamy, Deepak, Subrahmanian, Venkatramanan Siva, Kar, Debnarayan, Ghosh, Sumanta, Adak, Suman
• Granted Patent: US 10,216,485 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 717/100
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3668 Software testing software testing in telephone exchanges H04M3/242, testing of hardware G06F11/22
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/00 Arrangements for software engineering testing or debugging G06F11/36; administrative, planning or organisation aspects of software project management G06Q10/06
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/36 Software reuse
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/60 Software deployment
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/00 Arrangements for maintenance, administration or management of data switching networks, e.g. of packet switching networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/04 Network management architectures or arrangements
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5096 wherein the managed service relates to distributed or central networked applications
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/00 Arrangements for monitoring or testing data switching networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/10 in which an application is distributed across nodes in the network software deployment G06F8/60; multiprogramming arrangements G06F9/46
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/12 specially adapted for proprietary or special-purpose networking environments, e.g. medical networks, sensor networks, networks in vehicles or remote metering networks

Abstract

A method and system for real-time analytics of sensor-based data is disclosed. Also disclosed is a Cloud-based Paltform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering for sensor driven applications with services and features for their complete life-cycle management including prompt development, testing, deployment and so forth. The method of the present disclosure enables real-time tracking of various physical parameters and attributes related to smart-spaces using sensor devices implemented in the premises of the smart-space environment and using crowd-sourced user input data. Further, the parameters obtained are sent to the cloud-computing server, wherein the analytics are performed in real-time based on the obtained parameters.

Claims

1. A system for providing an infrastructure platform in a smart-space environment that facilitates quick and easy development, and deployment and management of sensor driven applications, said system comprising:

a) a suite of infrastructure services integrated to the infrastructure platform and configured to acquire, store and analyze sensor data received from a plurality of sensor devices;

b) a plurality of application program interfaces (APIs), a plurality of programming language specific libraries and a plurality of software development kits (SDKs) provided to at least one application developer to utilize said suite of infrastructure services to develop, test, deploy and manage a plurality of sensor-based applications;

c) a presentation module comprising a plurality of web-based portals adapted to monitor, manage and control said suite of infrastructure services, the sensor-based applications and software and hardware infrastructure; and

d) a suite of infrastructure applications configured to transmit and receive sensor data to and from the infrastructure platform.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the suite of infrastructure services comprise at least one of:

device integration and management services, analytics, messaging and event distribution services, data storage and query services, sensor management services, application support services, user interface and visualization and security services, and access control and privacy policy services.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the device integration and management services are enabled using a set of devices, wherein the set of devices further comprises at least one of:

device sensor adapters, device management adapters, sensor integration adapters, and a web-service interface.

4. The system of claim 2, wherein said device integration and management services are configured to do at least one of:

interface varied sensor devices, facilitate support for networking protocols enabling data communication, monitor a health and status of said varied sensor devices, and deploy software on the varied sensor devices from the infrastructure platform.

5. The system of claim 2, wherein said messaging and event distribution services are adapted for passing of messages and events across the suite of infrastructure services and the suite of infrastructure applications.

6. The system of claim 2, wherein said data storage and query services are configured to enable distributed sensor data storage and query said distributed sensor data storage.

7. The system of claim 2, wherein said sensor management services are configured to enable at least one of:

sensor discovery, description of sensor and sensor data observations, feature descriptions, inserting observations, and querying observations.

8. The system of claim 2, wherein said application support services are configured to provide support for a service integration and an orchestration of the service integration.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein said presentation module comprises:

an application developer portal adapted to enable a plurality of application developers to register with the infrastructure platform, register applications of the plurality of application developers, and create databases;

an administrator developer portal adapted to enable a plurality of administrators to monitor, manage and control a usage of an underlying software and hardware infrastructure and platform services by a plurality of tenants; and

a subscriber portal adapted to enable a plurality of subscribers to download apps, subscribe and unsubscribe to the plurality of apps, control a privacy setting, and view a usage history and billing information.

11. The system of claim 1, wherein said suite of infrastructure applications includes a software infrastructure comprising a plurality of application servers configured to host end-user executing applications, analytics servers, relational and document databases to store the sensor data and documents related to said suite of infrastructure applications.

12. The system of claim 1, wherein said suite of infrastructure applications includes a data center infrastructure comprising:

a computer, network and disk storage resources as an underlying hardware/virtual hardware infrastructure, file servers providing file storage services and firewalls configured to create secure zones based on policies to separate at least one of different platform users and different sensor-based applications from each other.

9. (canceled)

13-17. -17. (canceled)

18. A method for providing infrastructure platforms in a smart-space environment characterized in facilitating quick and easy development, and deployment and management of sensor driven applications, the method comprising steps of:

a) configuring an infrastructure platform for execution of computational activities for facilitating dynamic development, deployment and administration of a plurality of sensor driven application;

b) integrating a plurality of software components, a plurality of libraries, a plurality of infrastructure services, and a plurality of software developments tools to said infrastructure platform to pre-process and store data captured from a plurality of sensors and to disseminate analyzed data to a plurality of subscribers;

c) providing a plurality of application program interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) for a plurality of application developers to develop, test, deploy and manage at least one sensor driven application in said infrastructure platform;

d) configuring a service orchestration to each of the plurality of subscribers and at least a portion of the plurality of application developers with said infrastructure platform using a user specific access and permissions, and implementing orchestration logic using a standard web service orchestration engine; and

e) configuring the infrastructure platform to monitor, manage and control a utilization of service infrastructure, hardware and software infrastructure, and sensor applications by a plurality of different categories of a plurality of users.

19. The method of claim 18, wherein the plurality of infrastructure services comprise:

device integration and management services, analytics services, messaging services, sensor management services, application support services, user interface and visualization services, and security, access control and privacy policy services.

20. The method of claim 18, wherein the device integration and management services comprise services for interfacing gateway devices, sensors, mobile devices and corresponding network addresses thereof using device-specific software modules including at least one of:

device sensor adapters, device management adapters and sensor integration management adapters.

21. The method of claim 18, wherein said plurality of sensors is dynamically coupled with the infrastructure platform and is seamlessly integrated for ad-hoc data gathering.

22. The method of claim 21, wherein a plurality of categories of the plurality of sensors is integrated with the infrastructure platform, the plurality of categories of the plurality of sensors comprising soft sensors, physical sensors, and virtual sensors, wherein each of the plurality of sensors is scalable at an instance using dynamic addition of servers capable of processing sensor data depending on a load on servers handling the sensor data.

23. The method of claim 18, wherein the infrastructure platform is configured to receive data from each of a plurality of integrated sensors that are each pre-registered and authenticated with the infrastructure platform, wherein an extent of data usage and dissemination is dynamically governed by an owner thereof, and wherein the data is received by at least one of continuously, intermittently, and upon request.

24. The method of claim 23, wherein observation data from the plurality of integrated sensors is accessed through at least one of synchronous polling based mode and asynchronous notification based mode, and filtered by at least one of temporal, spatial, spatio-temporal, and value based filtering criteria.

25. The method of claim 18, wherein said development and management of the at least one sensor driven application includes at least one of creating, testing, initiating, stopping, restarting, upgrading, modifying, deleting, deploying, and un-deploying the at least one sensor driven application.

26. The method of claim 18, wherein said infrastructure platform creates smart space applications and services in diverse sectors, wherein the diverse sectors comprise at least one of energy sectors, government sectors, transportation sectors, healthcare sectors, and education.

27. (canceled)