Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

A Cognitive Framework to Secure Smart Cities

The advancement in technology has transformed Cyber Physical Systems and their interface with IoT into a more sophisticated and challenging paradigm. As a result, vulnerabilities and potential attacks manifest themselves considerably more than before, forcing researchers to rethink the conventional strategies that are currently in place to secure such physical systems. This manuscript studies the complex interweaving of sensor networks and physical systems and suggests a foundational innovation in the field. In sharp contrast with the existing IDS and IPS solutions, in this paper, a preventive and proactive method is employed to stay ahead of attacks by constantly monitoring network data patterns and identifying threats that are imminent. Here, by capitalizing on the significant progress in processing power (e.g. petascale computing) and storage capacity of computer systems, we propose a deep learning approach to predict and identify various security breaches that are about to occur. The learning process takes place by collecting a large number of files of different types and running tests on them to classify them as benign or malicious. The prediction model obtained as such can then be used to identify attacks. Our project articulates a new framework for interactions between physical systems and sensor networks, where malicious packets are repeatedly learned over time while the system continually operates with respect to imperfect security mechanisms

A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms

We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet. To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users, among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players, rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem, and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis, we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges and solution