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

Novel Architecture of OneM2M-Based Convergence Platform for Mixed Reality and IoT

There have been numerous works proposed to merge augmented reality/mixed reality (AR/MR) and Internet of Things (IoT) in various ways. However, they have focused on their specific target applications and have limitations on interoperability or reusability when utilizing them to different domains or adding other devices to the system. This paper proposes a novel architecture of a convergence platform for AR/MR and IoT systems and services. The proposed architecture adopts the oneM2M IoT standard as the basic framework that converges AR/MR and IoT systems and enables the development of application services used in general-purpose environments without being subordinate to specific systems, domains, and device manufacturers. We implement the proposed architecture utilizing the open-source oneM2M-based IoT server and device platforms released by the open alliance for IoT standards (OCEAN) and Microsoft HoloLens as an MR device platform. We also suggest and demonstrate the practical use cases and discuss the advantages of the proposed architecture

Towards Semantic Interoperability Standards based on Ontologies

The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces semantic interoperability and its benefits; Section 3 provides industry requirements for semantic interoperability practice; Section 4 describes various initiatives for ontology-driven interoperability; Section 5 explains the various life cycles for ontology-driven interoperability; and finally, Section 6 provides recommendations on ontology-based semantic interoperability.This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No.732240 (SynchroniCity) and No. 688467 (VICINITY); from ETSI under Specialist Task Forces 534, 556, and 566. This work is partially funded by Hazards SEES NSF Award EAR 1520870, and KHealth NIH 1 R01 HD087132-01

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

IoT Data Processing for Smart City and Semantic Web Applications

The world has been experiencing rapid urbanization over the last few decades, putting a strain on existing city infrastructure such as waste management, water supply management, public transport and electricity consumption. We are also seeing increasing pollution levels in cities threatening the environment, natural resources and health conditions. However, we must realize that the real growth lies in urbanization as it provides many opportunities to individuals for better employment, healthcare and better education. However, it is imperative to limit the ill effects of rapid urbanization through integrated action plans to enable the development of growing cities. This gave rise to the concept of a smart city in which all available information associated with a city will be utilized systematically for better city management. The proposed system architecture is divided in subsystems and is discussed in individual chapters. The first chapter introduces and gives overview to the reader of the complete system architecture. The second chapter discusses the data monitoring system and data lake system based on the oneM2M standards. DMS employs oneM2M as a middleware layer to achieve interoperability, and DLS uses a multi-tenant architecture with multiple logical databases, enabling efficient and reliable data management. The third chapter discusses energy monitoring and electric vehicle charging systems developed to illustrate the applicability of the oneM2M standards. The fourth chapter discusses the Data Exchange System based on the Indian Urban Data Exchange framework. DES uses IUDX standard data schema and open APIs to avoid data silos and enable secure data sharing. The fifth chapter discusses the 5D-IoT framework that provides uniform data quality assessment of sensor data with meaningful data descriptions

Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches

A Semantic Interoperability Model Based on the IEEE 1451 Family of Standards Applied to the Industry 4.0

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing recently. It is a concept for connecting billions of smart devices through the Internet in different scenarios. One area being developed inside the IoT in industrial automation, which covers Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and industrial communications with an automatic process, emerging the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) concept. Inside the IIoT is developing the concept of Industry 4.0 (I4.0). That represents the fourth industrial revolution and addresses the use of Internet technologies to improve the production efficiency of intelligent services in smart factories. I4.0 is composed of a combination of objects from the physical world and the digital world that offers dedicated functionality and flexibility inside and outside of an I4.0 network. The I4.0 is composed mainly of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The CPS is the integration of the physical world and its digital world, i.e., the Digital Twin (DT). It is responsible for realising the intelligent cross-link application, which operates in a self-organised and decentralised manner, used by smart factories for value creation. An area where the CPS can be implemented in manufacturing production is developing the Cyber-Physical Production System (CPPS) concept. CPPS is the implementation of Industry 4.0 and CPS in manufacturing and production, crossing all levels of production between the autonomous and cooperative elements and sub-systems. It is responsible for connecting the virtual space with the physical world, allowing the smart factories to be more intelligent, resulting in better and smart production conditions, increasing productivity, production efficiency, and product quality. The big issue is connecting smart devices with different standards and protocols. About 40% of the benefits of the IoT cannot be achieved without interoperability. This thesis is focused on promoting the interoperability of smart devices (sensors and actuators) inside the IIoT under the I4.0 context. The IEEE 1451 is a family of standards developed to manage transducers. This standard reaches the syntactic level of interoperability inside Industry 4.0. However, Industry 4.0 requires a semantic level of communication not to exchange data ambiguously. A new semantic layer is proposed in this thesis allowing the IEEE 1451 standard to be a complete framework for communication inside the Industry 4.0 to provide an interoperable network interface with users and applications to collect and share the data from the industry field.A Internet das Coisas tem vindo a crescer recentemente. É um conceito que permite conectar bilhões de dispositivos inteligentes através da Internet em diferentes cenários. Uma área que está sendo desenvolvida dentro da Internet das Coisas é a automação industrial, que abrange a comunicação máquina com máquina no processo industrial de forma automática. Essa interligação, representa o conceito da Internet das Coisas Industrial. Dentro da Internet das Coisas Industrial está a desenvolver o conceito de Indústria 4.0 (I4.0). Isso representa a quarta revolução industrial que aborda o uso de tecnologias utilizadas na Internet para melhorar a eficiência da produção de serviços em fábricas inteligentes. A Indústria 4.0 é composta por uma combinação de objetos do mundo físico e do mundo da digital que oferece funcionalidade dedicada e flexibilidade dentro e fora de uma rede da Indústria 4.0. O I4.0 é composto principalmente por Sistemas Ciberfísicos. Os Sistemas Ciberfísicos permitem a integração do mundo físico com seu representante no mundo digital, por meio do Gémeo Digital. Sistemas Ciberfísicos são responsáveis por realizar a aplicação inteligente da ligação cruzada, que opera de forma auto-organizada e descentralizada, utilizada por fábricas inteligentes para criação de valor. Uma área em que o Sistema Ciberfísicos pode ser implementado na produção manufatureira, isso representa o desenvolvimento do conceito Sistemas de Produção Ciberfísicos. Esse sistema é a implementação da Indústria 4.0 e Sistema Ciberfísicos na fabricação e produção. A cruzar todos os níveis desde a produção entre os elementos e subsistemas autónomos e cooperativos. Ele é responsável por conectar o espaço virtual com o mundo físico, permitindo que as fábricas inteligentes sejam mais inteligentes, resultando em condições de produção melhores e inteligentes, aumentando a produtividade, a eficiência da produção e a qualidade do produto. A grande questão é como conectar dispositivos inteligentes com diferentes normas e protocolos. Cerca de 40% dos benefícios da Internet das Coisas não podem ser alcançados sem interoperabilidade. Esta tese está focada em promover a interoperabilidade de dispositivos inteligentes (sensores e atuadores) dentro da Internet das Coisas Industrial no contexto da Indústria 4.0. O IEEE 1451 é uma família de normas desenvolvidos para gerenciar transdutores. Esta norma alcança o nível sintático de interoperabilidade dentro de uma indústria 4.0. No entanto, a Indústria 4.0 requer um nível semântico de comunicação para não haver a trocar dados de forma ambígua. Uma nova camada semântica é proposta nesta tese permitindo que a família de normas IEEE 1451 seja um framework completo para comunicação dentro da Indústria 4.0. Permitindo fornecer uma interface de rede interoperável com utilizadores e aplicações para recolher e compartilhar os dados dentro de um ambiente industrial.This thesis was developed at the Measurement and Instrumentation Laboratory (IML) in the University of Beira Interior and supported by the portuguese project INDTECH 4.0 – Novas tecnologias para fabricação, que tem como objetivo geral a conceção e desenvolvimento de tecnologias inovadoras no contexto da Indústria 4.0/Factories of the Future (FoF), under the number POCI-01-0247-FEDER-026653

Internet of Things Cloud: Architecture and Implementation

The Internet of Things (IoT), which enables common objects to be intelligent and interactive, is considered the next evolution of the Internet. Its pervasiveness and abilities to collect and analyze data which can be converted into information have motivated a plethora of IoT applications. For the successful deployment and management of these applications, cloud computing techniques are indispensable since they provide high computational capabilities as well as large storage capacity. This paper aims at providing insights about the architecture, implementation and performance of the IoT cloud. Several potential application scenarios of IoT cloud are studied, and an architecture is discussed regarding the functionality of each component. Moreover, the implementation details of the IoT cloud are presented along with the services that it offers. The main contributions of this paper lie in the combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) servers to offer IoT services in the architecture of the IoT cloud with various techniques to guarantee high performance. Finally, experimental results are given in order to demonstrate the service capabilities of the IoT cloud under certain conditions.Comment: 19pages, 4figures, IEEE Communications Magazin

A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain

Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of Thing