The use of electronics connected to local networks and the Internet is growingall the time. Nowadays you can control your electronics in your house even when away from home, which opens up for potential security threats. The purpose of this report is to point out the potential risks with connecting home electronics to the Internet and to shed light on what security mechanisms that are needed in these kinds of systems. This report contains a theoretical part in which relevant material has been summarized. This material includes the smart home solution Tellstick Net and the wireless technologies ZigBee and Z-Wave, which are commonly used in home automation. The Tellstick Net system was mapped out and a risk analysis with attack trees was performed. After the analysis of the system, the implementation of two potential security threats were attempted. The two attempted attacks were replay attack and cross-site request forgery. The replay attack was unsuccessful due to the way the system communicates and keeps connections alive. However, the cross-site request forgery was discovered to be successful in some cases. It depended on if the browser of the target supported cross-origin resource sharing, as that property protects against cross-site request forgery. Finally, the report discusses what impact the found security deficiencies have, what they entail and how they reflect on the need for security in smart technologies for the home.

The purpose of this research was to compare the design of Dose Error Reduction Software (DERS) between smart pumps to determine which features affect the ability of nurses to safely and efficiently program intravenous medications. A high-fidelity usability experiment was conducted. Twenty-four Registered Nurses completed a series of infusion tasks, in a simulated clinical environment, using three smart pumps (Cardinal Alaris System, BBraun Infusomat, and Hospira Symbiq). Results found significant differences in nursing performance across the smart pumps. Nurses were more likely to override clinically inappropriate soft limit alerts when using BBraun Infusomat, than when using Hospira Symbiq or Cardinal Alaris System. Furthermore, when asked to program an infusion over a specific duration, nurses were found to make significantly more parameter entry errors when using Hospira Symbiq than when using Cardinal Alaris System. Results from this study will help set DERS design principles, and assist hospitals during their procurement processes.

The purpose of this research was to compare the design of Dose Error Reduction Software (DERS) between smart pumps to determine which features affect the ability of nurses to safely and efficiently program intravenous medications. A high-fidelity usability experiment was conducted. Twenty-four Registered Nurses completed a series of infusion tasks, in a simulated clinical environment, using three smart pumps (Cardinal Alaris System, BBraun Infusomat, and Hospira Symbiq). Results found significant differences in nursing performance across the smart pumps. Nurses were more likely to override clinically inappropriate soft limit alerts when using BBraun Infusomat, than when using Hospira Symbiq or Cardinal Alaris System. Furthermore, when asked to program an infusion over a specific duration, nurses were found to make significantly more parameter entry errors when using Hospira Symbiq than when using Cardinal Alaris System. Results from this study will help set DERS design principles, and assist hospitals during their procurement processes.

Affective haptic research is a rapidly growing field. Today, more smart haptic clothes are being studied and implemented which are aimed to effect its users emotionally. However, they have some limitations. This research intends to improve the existing literature and contribute by involving consumers directly in the design of a smart haptic jacket by adding heat, vibration actuators, and by enhancing portability. In this thesis, we are interested in six basic emotions: love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear. An online survey was designed and conducted on 92 respondents that gave feedback of what it is expected from an affective haptic jacket. The results of this survey assisted in the general design, and the feedback helped to build a prototype. 86% of the respondents expressed interest in the system and are willing to try it when it is ready. A detailed design architecture is provided along with details on the hardware and software used for the implementation. Finally, the prototype was evaluated on 14 participants using the actual prototype haptic jacket based on a QoE comparison between the absence and the presence of haptic actuation. The proposed system showed improvement over a similar system that is designed for the same purpose.

This thesis addresses the future of sustainable energy distribution and transportation in the United States. Predictions of future energy and transportation demands promote localized energy as the most likely situation. Existing proposals outlining the benefits of decentralized energy production fail to engage architecture. Cities will require new architectural typologies that can integrate new energy infrastructure in the city. Los Angeles, the archetype of the decentralized American city, is introduced as a case study. The city is examined at multiple scales for the integration of a decentralized electricity network and an efficient transportation infrastructure. Siting the proposed facilities capitalizes on new and existing transportation infrastructures and local energy resources. The new electricity-transportation infrastructure is adapted to a decentralized network functioning on principles of ecosystems and energy economics at an urban scale. Energy storage is paired with multi-modal transportation to develop new architectural and urban typologies. This enables the decentralized urban proposal to function as a network exhibiting mutually beneficial characteristics.

In recent years, there has been significant pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to achieve higher efficiency and to integrate greater amounts of renewable energy resources in energy system. Governments at all levels have recognized the environmental impacts of the energy sector, as well as the ways in which this sector is closely-linked to a range of economic issues (e.g., industrial development, inflationary prices and local economic development). In general, every effort has been made to cope with the challenges in providing a sustainable energy solution for achieving the goals. Even though the concept of “Smart Grid” has recently been highlighted in the electricity sector to improve efficiency of energy use and to reduce greenhouse gases to achieve business goals, the driving initiatives for generating a Smart Grid are straightforward and its scope and functions differ from a Smart Energy Network (SEN) which has a broader boundary and more components. A comprehensive concept of SEN beyond Smart Grid is presented to effectively integrate energy systems which can not only cover available energy resources but also address sustainability issues. The availability of new technologies for utilizing the renewable energy such as solar, wind and biomass, and reducing the carbon footprint of fossil fuels by including natural gas within an integrated energy network provides a base for better conservation of energy usage and providing a cleaner environment. Moreover, the new energy carriers such as hydrogen and sustainable natural gas integrated into cogeneration systems should be taken into account when such a network is developed. A cogeneration system is a promising solution for effectively supplying energy to district consumers for high density urban environment. In this thesis, a new community-scale cogeneration system is modeled using TRNSYS (Transient System Simulation) software, which enables analysis of transient characteristics of cogeneration and to investigate critical factors which should be considered for successful integration into a SEN. This thesis focuses on defining what a Smart Energy Network is, its functions and the critical criteria of demonstrating and validating this concept, and developing a model for cogeneration system according to the concept of Smart Energy Network.

With the great potential smart distribution systems have to cause a paradigm shift in conventional distribution systems, many areas need investigation. Throughout the past few decades, many distribution systems reliability indices have been developed. Varying in their calculation techniques, burden, and purpose of calculation, these indices covered wide range of reliability issues that face both utilities and regulators. The major purpose of the continuous development of reliability indices is to capture a comprehensive idea of systems performance. While systems are evolving to a much more smarter and robust ones, so do the assessment tools need to be improved. The lack of consensus among utilities and regulators on which indices should be used complicate the problem more. Furthermore, regulators still come short when it comes to standard implementation because no final standard have been developed. However, regulators tend to advice or impose certain numbers on utilities based on historic performances. Because of the inevitable comparisons made by regulators on the routinely practiced process of utilities’ reporting of some of their indices, adequate and fair process needs to be implemented. The variation in utilities perspective on the advice or imposed indices cause an additional burden to achieving fair and adequate designs, upgrade requirements, and public goodwill. Some utilities consider these regulators recommendations guidelines; others treat them as strict standards, and yet others consider them goals. In this work, a development of a unified reliability index, which can yield proper performance assessment, fair comparisons, and reflection of all the knowledge imbedded within all current indices, will be developed. The developed unified index provides several benefits, among which is adequate standards design, improved tools for planning and design optimization, and less technical burden on operators. In addition, the development of a unified reliability index required the development of a standard normalization methodology.

The few past years have witnessed a huge leap in the field of the smart grid communication networks in which many theories are being developed, and many applications are being evolved to accommodate the implementation of the smart grid concepts. Distribution power systems are considered to be one of the first leading fields having the strong desire of applying the smart grid concepts; resulting in the emersion of the smart distribution power systems, which are the future visualization of the distribution systems having both the ability of smart acting, and the capabilities of automation, self-healing, and decentralized control. For the sake of the real implementation of the smart distribution power systems, the main functions performed by the traditional systems have to be performed by the new smart systems as well, taking into account the new features and properties of those smart systems. One of those main functions is the ability of power networks optimal reconfiguration to minimize the system’s power loss while preserving the system radial topology. The proposed reconfiguration methodology targets the utilization of a hybrid genetic algorithm with two fuzzy controllers that could converge to the global optimal network configuration with the fastest convergence rate consuming the least computational time. The first fuzzy controller is designed to reject any infeasible system configurations that might show up in the population of the genetic algorithm and violate the system radial topology, while the second fuzzy controller is designed to adapt the mutation rate of the genetic algorithm. Consequently, a novel multi-agent system is proposed and designed to perform the reconfiguration application in smart distribution power systems employing the concepts of distributed processing and decentralized control demanded by those systems. A multi-agent system employs a group of intelligent agents that have the capabilities of autonomy, reactivity, pro-activity, and sociality. Those agents cooperate with each other in order to perform a certain function through their powerful abilities to communicate, socialize, and make a common decision in a decentralized fashion based on the information retrieved from the surrounding environment and compiles with their ultimate objective.

In recent years, significant advances have been achieved in communication networks and electric power systems. Communication networks are developed to provide services within not only well-connected network environments such as wireless local area networks, but also challenged network environments where continuous end-to-end connections can hardly be established between information sources and destinations. Delay tolerant network (DTN) is proposed to achieve this objective by utilizing a store-carry-and-forward routing scheme. However, as the network connections in DTNs are intermittent in nature, the management of network resources such as communication bandwidth and buffer storage becomes a challenging issue. On the other hand, the smart grid is to explore information and communication technologies in electric power grids to achieve electricity delivery in a more efficient and reliable way. A high penetration level of electric vehicles and renewable power generation is expected in the future smart grid. However, the randomness of electric vehicle mobility and the intermittency of renewable power generation bring new challenges to the resources management in the smart grid, such as electric power, energy storage, and communication bandwidth management. This thesis consists of two parts. In part I, we focus on the resource management in DTNs. Specifically, we investigate data dissemination and on-demand data delivery which are two of the major data services in DTNs. Two kinds of mobile nodes are considered for the two types of services which correspond to the pedestrians and high-speed train passengers, respectively. For pedestrian nodes, the roadside wireless local area networks are used as an auxiliary communication infrastructure for data service delivery. We consider a cooperative data dissemination approach with a packet pre-downloading mechanism and propose a double-loop receiver-initiated medium access control scheme to resolve the channel contention among multiple direct/relay links and exploit the predictable traffic characteristics as a result of packet pre-downloading. For high-speed train nodes, we investigate on-demand data service delivery via a cellular/infostation integrated network. The optimal resource allocation problem is formulated by taking account of the intermittent network connectivity and multi-service demands. In order to achieve efficient resource allocation with low computational complexity, the original problem is transformed into a single-machine preemptive scheduling problem and an online resource allocation algorithm is proposed. If the link from the backbone network to an infostation is a bottleneck, a service pre-downloading algorithm is also proposed to facilitate the resource allocation. In part II, we focus on resource management in the smart grid. We first investigate the optimal energy delivery for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles via vehicle-to-grid systems. A dynamic programming formulation is established by considering the bidirectional energy flow, non-stationary energy demand, battery characteristics, and time-of-use electricity price. We prove the optimality of a state-dependent double-threshold policy based on the stochastic inventory theory. A modified backward iteration algorithm is devised for practical applications, where an exponentially weighted moving average algorithm is used to estimate the statistics of vehicle mobility and energy demand. Then, we propose a decentralized economic dispatch approach for microgrids such that the optimal decision on power generation is made by each distributed generation unit locally via multiagent coordination. To avoid a slow convergence speed of multiagent coordination, we propose a heterogeneous wireless network architecture for microgrids. Two multiagent coordination schemes are proposed for the single-stage and hierarchical operation modes, respectively. The optimal number of activated cellular communication devices is obtained based on the tradeoff between communication and generation costs.

Power grids in today's developed societies are designed to meet consumer demands in a highly reliable manner. In order to guarantee reliability to consumers, the grid is required to be sized for infrequently occurring demand peaks. The cost of maintaining generation sources that make up the relatively unused capacity of the grid can be extremely high. In addition to high costs, environmental impacts of these sources are also of great concern. In order to serve highly fluctuating peak demands, energy sources such as coal, gas and bio-gas are commissioned by utilities. These sources have a high carbon footprint. In order to prevent wasting extensive amounts of money in maintaining infrequently used grid capacity and causing an adverse environmental impact, a comprehensive study on how elasticity of domestic appliances can be used to reduce the impact of these issues is made. A thorough analysis of appliances in four distinct regions is presented. Significant reduction of peak demands is shown quantitatively for all of the four regions. Based on these positive results, an elasticity based scheme that takes into account user discomfort is proposed for reducing monetary and environmental issues faced by today's utilities.