Mapping Cloud-Edge-IoT opportunities and challenges in Europe

While current data processing predominantly occurs in centralized facilities, with a minor portion handled by smart objects, a shift is anticipated, with a surge in data originating from smart devices. This evolution necessitates reconfiguring the infrastructure, emphasising computing capabilities at the cloud's "edge" closer to data sources. This change symbolises the merging of cloud, edge, and IoT technologies into a unified network infrastructure - a Computing Continuum - poised to redefine tech interactions, offering novel prospects across diverse sectors. The computing continuum is emerging as a cornerstone of tech advancement in the contemporary digital era. This paper provides an in-depth exploration of the computing continuum, highlighting its potential, practical implications, and the adjustments required to tackle existing challenges. It emphasises the continuum's real-world applications, market trends, and its significance in shaping Europe's tech future

White Spots in Business and IT: An Explorative Study for E-Mobility Services

E-mobility services are important enablers for the success of electric vehicles. In contrast to conventional mobility, where an ecosystem consisting of the vehicle and complementary services has been built up and has improved over decades, the ecosystem for e-mobility is far less advanced and still in its infancy. In order to get on the sustainable path to success in the steadily growing e-mobility market, innovative ideas are necessary which are not covered by existing service offerings. This paper therefore describes a study that explored opportunities for innovative e-mobility service business models through a systematic analysis. Furthermore, each e-mobility service depends on information technology (IT) support. Therefore, IT standardization is an important issue to consider in order to build up more complex services on top of basic services and further advance the e-mobility ecosystem. Consequently, this paper presents results from a survey conducted with 27 e-mobility experts from Germany to help identify necessary standardization gaps in the context of e-mobility services. The paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by proposing a structured, repeatable method for identifying innovative business models and by offering insights into study results. In addition, gaps in the standardization of IT infrastructure that are important for the provision of existing e-mobility services are illustrated

Impact of Interdisciplinary Research on Planning, Running, and Managing Electromobility as a Smart Grid Extension

The smart grid is concerned with energy efficiency and with the environment, being a countermeasure against the territory devastations that may originate by the fossil fuel mining industry feeding the conventional power grids. This paper deals with the integration between the electromobility and the urban power distribution network in a smart grid framework, i.e., a multi-stakeholder and multi-Internet ecosystem (Internet of Information, Internet of Energy, and Internet of Things) with edge computing capabilities supported by cloud-level services and with clean mapping between the logical and physical entities involved and their stakeholders. In particular, this paper presents some of the results obtained by us in several European projects that refer to the development of a traffic and power network co-simulation tool for electro mobility planning, platforms for recharging services, and communication and service management architectures supporting interoperability and other qualities required for the implementation of the smart grid framework. For each contribution, this paper describes the inter-disciplinary characteristics of the proposed approaches

How "smart cities" will change supply chain management

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of smart city initiatives and big data on supply chain management (SCM). More specifically, the connections between smart cities, big data and supply network characteristics (supply network structure and governance mechanisms) are investigated. Design/methodology/approach - An integrative framework is proposed, grounded on a literature review on smart cities, big data and supply networks. Then, the relationships between these constructs are analyzed, using the proposed integrative framework. Findings - Smart cities have different implications to network structure (complexity, density and centralization) and governance mechanisms (formal vs informal). Moreover, this work highlights and discusses the future research directions relating to smart cities and SCM. Research limitations/implications - The relationships between smart cities, big data and supply networks cannot be described simply by using a linear, cause-and-effect framework. Accordingly, an integrative framework that can be used in future empirical studies to analyze smart cities and big data implications on SCM has been proposed. Practical implications - Smart cities and big data alone have limited capacity of improving SCM processes, but combined they can support improvement initiatives. Nevertheless, smart cities and big data can also suppose some novel obstacles to effective SCM. Originality/value - Several studies have analyzed information technology innovation adoption in supply chains, but, to the best of our knowledge, no study has focused on smart cities