Enabling IoT ecosystems through platform interoperability

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprises vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and adapt to the platform-specific API and information models. Having to perform these actions for each platform often outweighs the possible gains from adapting applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. The BIG IoT (Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the IoT) project aims to ignite an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platforms Initiative. As part of the project, researchers have devised an IoT ecosystem architecture. It employs five interoperability patterns that enable cross-platform interoperability and can help establish successful IoT ecosystems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City

Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change, pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure - which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many objectives of the Smart City vision. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated, end-to-end IoT sensor application.Comment: 6 page

The Interoperability of Things: Interoperable solutions as an enabler for IoT and Web 3.0

This paper presents an overview of the interoperability concepts along with the challenges for the IoT domain and the upcoming Web 3.0. We identify four levels of interoperability and the relevant solutions for accomplishing vertical and horizontal compatibility between the various layers of a modern IoT ecosystem, referred to as: technological, syntactic, semantic, and organizational interoperability. The goal is to achieve cross-domain interaction and facilitate the proper usage and management of the provided IoT services and applications. An interoperability framework is also proposed where the involved system components can cooperate and offer the seamless operation from the device to the backend framework. This by-design end-to-end interoperation enables the interplay of several complex service composition settings and the management of the system via patterns. The overall proposal is adopted by the EU funded project SEMIoTICS as an enabler towards the IoT and Web 3.0, even when products from different vendors are utilized

Towards NFC payments using a lightweight architecture for the Web of Things

The Web (and Internet) of Things has seen the rapid emergence of new protocols and standards, which provide for innovative models of interaction for applications. One such model fostered by the Web of Things (WoT) ecosystem is that of contactless interaction between devices. Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is one such enabler of contactless interactions. Contactless technology for the WoT requires all parties to agree one common definition and implementation and, in this paper, we propose a new lightweight architecture for the WoT, based on RESTful approaches. We show how the proposed architecture supports the concept of a mobile wallet, enabling users to make secure payments employing NFC technology with their mobile devices. In so doing, we argue that the vision of the WoT is brought a step closer to fruition

Fostering IoT service replicability in interoperable urban ecosystems

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase specially focused on sustainability and improving citizen's quality of life. However, such objectives are hard to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not performed following a common approach. Under the paradigm of smart city, different Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been deployed over urban environments to enable such digital transformation. However, actual implementations differ from one city to another, and even between services within the same city. As a consequence, the deployment of urban services is hindered, since they need to be tailored to each city. In addition, the isolation of urban services obstructs its optimization, since it cannot harness contextual information coming from other services. All in all, it is necessary to implement tools and mechanisms that allow us to ensure that city solutions and their vertical services are interoperable. In order to tackle this issue, different initiatives have proposed architectures that homogenize the interaction with smart cities from different angles. However, so far the compliance with such architectures has not been assessed. Having this in mind, in this work we present a validation framework, developed under the umbrella of the SynchroniCity project, which aims to verify that interfaces and data exposed by cities are aligned with the adopted standards and data models. In this regard, the validation framework presented here is the technical enabler for the creation of an interoperability certi cate for smart cities. To assess the bene ts of the validation framework, we have used it to check the interoperability of 21 smart city deployments worldwide that adhered the SynchroniCity guidelines. Afterwards, during an open call a total number of 37 services have been deployed over such SynchroniCity instances, thus con rming the goodness of uniform and validated smart cities to foster service replicability.This work was supported in part by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme [SynchroniCity (Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond)] under Grant 732240, and in part by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, MINECO-FEDER) through the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs under Grant RTI2018-093475-AI00

A Concurrence Study on Interoperability Issues in IoT and Decision Making Based Model on Data and Services being used during Inter-Operability

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has become an important topic among researchers owing to its potential to change the way we live and use smart devices. In recent years, many research work found in the world are interrelated and convey via the existing web structure which makes a worldwide system called IoT. This study focused on the significant improvement of answers for a wider scope of gadgets and the Internet of Things IoT stages in recent years. In any case, each arrangement gives its very own IoT framework, gadgets, APIs, and information configurations promoting interoperability issues. These issues are the outcome of numerous basic issues, difficulty to create IoT application uncovering cross-stage, and additionally cross-space, trouble in connecting non-interoperable IoT gadgets to various IoT stages, what's more, eventually averts the development of IoT innovation at an enormous scale. To authorize consistent data sharing between various IoT vendors, endeavors by a few academia, industrial, and institutional groups have accelerated to support IoT interoperability. This paper plays out a far-reaching study on the cutting-edge answers for encouraging interoperability between various IoT stages. Likewise, the key difficulties in this theme are introduced

Advancing IoT Platforms Interoperability

The IoT European Platforms Initiative (IoT-EPI) projects are addressing the topic of Internet of Things and Platforms for Connected Smart Objects and aim to deliver an IoT extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects that supports smart environments, businesses, services and persons with dynamic and adaptive configuration capabilities. The specific areas of focus of the research activities are architectures and semantic interoperability, which reliably cover multiple use cases. The goal is to deliver dynamically-configured infrastructure and integration platforms for connected smart objects covering multiple technologies and multiple intelligent artefacts. The IoT-EPI ecosystem has been created with the objective of increasing the impact of the IoT-related European research and innovation, including seven European promising projects on IoT platforms: AGILE, BIG IoT, INTER-IoT, VICINITY, SymbIoTe, bIoTope, and TagItSmart.This white paper provides an insight regarding interoperability in the IoT platforms and ecosystems created and used by IoT-EPI. The scope of this document covers the interoperability aspects, challenges and approaches that cope with interoperability in the current existing IoT platforms and presents some insights regarding the future of interoperability in this context. It presents possible solutions, and a possible IoT interoperability platform architecture

Uso de X-Road para implementar datos abiertos en sistemas eléctricos y promover la integración con estrategias de ciudad inteligente y gobierno abierto

The electrical industry is undergoing a deep digital transformation towards the consolidation of smart grids, which requires a high demand of data and information systems involved in the processes. Open data initiatives, which have been focused on open governance to a great extent, generate positive impacts on society and the economy in terms of easy access to public resources, agility, and transparency. These initiatives can also be adopted in the electrical industry (i.e., power, electrical, and energy systems) for customer engagement, collaboration with other industries, and reaching consensus. This study proposes the implementation of an open data solution for the electrical industry through the deployment of a data hub that offers digital services for smart city applications and the integration of the X-Road system to improve the security and interoperability of open data. This initiative aims to promote a wider adoption of open data in the electrical industry and prepare the latter for fully connected and collaborative digital ecosystems in smart cities, industries, and governments. This study also proposes an open data architecture for the interoperability of the electrical industry with other digital industries (through a Smart City Hub and the adoption of 5G technology), and it reports some relevant results and major findings in this regard. This paper highlights the benefits of promoting open data and technological strategies for digitized electrical systems while considering humans an essential factor. Finally, it discusses the pros and cons of the integration of X-Road with the electrical industry under the concept of smart grids for data exchange and potential applications.La industria eléctrica está experimentando una profunda transformación digital hacia la consolidación de redes inteligentes, que necesita una alta demanda de datos y sistemas de información involucrados en los procesos. Las iniciativas de datos abiertos, que en mayor medida han sido empleadas para iniciativas de gobierno abierto, generan impactos positivos en la sociedad y la economía en cuanto al fácil acceso a los recursos públicos, la agilidad y la transparencia. Estas iniciativas también se pueden adoptar en la industria eléctrica para sistemas de potencia, eléctricos y de energía para su uso en la participación de los clientes, la colaboración y la mejora de consenso en industrias. Esta investigación propone la implementación de una solución de datos abiertos para la industria eléctrica mediante el despliegue de un Hub que ofrece servicios digitales para aplicaciones de ciudad inteligente y la integración del sistema X-Road para mejorar la seguridad e interoperabilidad de los datos abiertos. Esta iniciativa pretende una adopción más amplia de datos abiertos en la industria eléctrica y su preparación para ecosistemas digitales totalmente conectados y colaborativos en ciudades inteligentes, industrias y gobierno. Se muestran algunos resultados relevantes y hallazgos importantes de este trabajo acerca de una arquitectura de datos abiertos para la interoperabilidad del sector eléctrico con otras industrias digitales a través de un Smart City Hub y la adopción tecnológica de 5G, exponiendo los beneficios de promover los datos abiertos y estrategias tecnológicas para sistemas eléctricos digitalizados mientras se considera el humano como factor esencial. Se discuten los pros y los contras de la integración de X-Road con la industria eléctrica dentro del concepto de redes inteligentes para el intercambio de datos y aplicaciones potenciales