The Internet of Things, fog and cloud continuum: Integration and challenges

The Internet of Things needs for computing power and storage are expected to remain on the rise in the next decade. Consequently, the amount of data generated by devices at the edge of the network will also grow. While cloud computing has been an established and effective way of acquiring computation and storage as a service to many applications, it may not be suitable to handle the myriad of data from IoT devices and fulfill largely heterogeneous application requirements. Fog computing has been developed to lie between IoT and the cloud, providing a hierarchy of computing power that can collect, aggregate, and process data from/to IoT devices. Combining fog and cloud may reduce data transfers and communication bottlenecks to the cloud and also contribute to reduced latencies, as fog computing resources exist closer to the edge. This paper examines this IoT-Fog-Cloud ecosystem and provides a literature review from different facets of it: how it can be organized, how management is being addressed, and how applications can benefit from it. Lastly, we present challenging issues yet to be addressed in IoT-Fog-Cloud infrastructures

Industry 4.0 Technology: A Cross-Industry View of Adoption, Usage and COVID-19 Effects

Industry 4.0 technology (I4.0) is inescapable. It transforms the way businesses and customers interact and revolutionizes how organizations produce goods and services (SAP Insights, 2020). It requires a level of agility that many organizations do not possess. Defending against disruptive business models is no longer enough. Organizations must be nimble to optimize assets and resources in response to adversity. In March 2020, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic ushered a devastating blow to the U.S. economy and job market with pervasive shocks that continue to be a business threat. In response, many organizations are accelerating automation, digitization, and communication capabilities to close the gap and connect with customers. This dissertation examined the cross-industry adoption of the nine most common Industry 4.0 technologies: big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the internet of things, cybersecurity, 3-D printing, autonomous technology, augmented reality, and blockchain. This descriptive study explored factors of I4.0 adoption across industries and organizational sizes during a national pandemic. The study sought to reveal “what” factors contributed to the adoption of Industry 4.0, “what” industry patterns exist, “what” effect COVID-19 had on these concepts. A quantitative method was used to examine the relationship between factors. An online survey was administered to a Qualtrics panel of 520 business owners and executives to capture perceptions, knowledge, and insights. A binary logistic regression analysis was performed. The results of this study inform a cross-industry framework of I4.0 technology adoption, which includes contributing factors. The findings also showed COVID-19 was less an accelerant of adoption but rather, the industry sector was a greater influencer

Data Science and Knowledge Discovery

Data Science (DS) is gaining significant importance in the decision process due to a mix of various areas, including Computer Science, Machine Learning, Math and Statistics, domain/business knowledge, software development, and traditional research. In the business field, DS's application allows using scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data to support the decision process. After collecting the data, it is crucial to discover the knowledge. In this step, Knowledge Discovery (KD) tasks are used to create knowledge from structured and unstructured sources (e.g., text, data, and images). The output needs to be in a readable and interpretable format. It must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. KD is applied in several areas, such as education, health, accounting, energy, and public administration. This book includes fourteen excellent articles which discuss this trending topic and present innovative solutions to show the importance of Data Science and Knowledge Discovery to researchers, managers, industry, society, and other communities. The chapters address several topics like Data mining, Deep Learning, Data Visualization and Analytics, Semantic data, Geospatial and Spatio-Temporal Data, Data Augmentation and Text Mining

Intelligent Energy Management for Microgrids with Renewable Energy, Storage Systems, and Electric Vehicles

The evolution of smart grid or smart microgrids represents a significant paradigm shift for future electrical power systems. Recent trends in microgrid systems include the integration of renewable energy sources (RES), energy storage systems (ESS), and plug-in electrical vehicles (PEV or EV). However, these integration trends bring with then new challenges for the design of intelligent control and management system. Traditional generation scheduling paradigms rely on the perfect prediction of future electricity supply and demand. They can no longer apply to a microgrid with intermittent renewable energy sources. To mitigate these problems, a massive and expensive energy storage can be deployed, which also need vast land area and sophisticated control and management. Electrical vehicles can be exploited as the alternative to the large and expensive storage. On the other hand, the use of electrical vehicles introduces new challenges due to their unpredictable presence in the microgrid. Furthermore, the utility and ancillary industries gradually adding sensors and power aware, intelligent functionality to home appliances for the efficient use of energy. Hence, the future smart microgrid stability and challenges are primarily dependent on the electricity consumption patterns of the home appliances, and EVs. Recently, demand side management (DSM) has emerged as a useful method to control or manipulate the user demand for balancing the generation and consumption. Unfortunately, most of the existing DSM systems solve the problem partially either using ESS to store RES energy or RES and ESS to charging and discharging of electrical vehicles. Hence, in this thesis, we propose a centralized energy management system which jointly optimizes the consumption scheduling of electrical vehicles and home appliances to reduce the peak-hour demand and use of energy produced from the RESs. In the proposed system, EVs store energy when generation is high or during off-peak periods, and release it when the demand is high compared to the generation. The centralized system, however, is an offline method and unable to produce a solution for a large-scale microgrid. Further, the real-time implementation of the centralized solution requires continuous change and adjustment of the energy generation as well as load forecast in each time slot. Thereby, we develop a game theoretic mechanism design to analyze and to get an optimal solution for the above problem. In this case, the game increases the social benefit of the whole community and conversely minimizes each household's total electricity price. Our system delivers power to each customer based on their real-time needs; it does not consider pre-planned generation, therefore the energy cost, uncertainty, and instability increase in the production plant. To address these issues, we propose a two-fold decentralized real-time demand side management (RDCDSM) which in the first phase (planning phase) allows each customer to process the day ahead raw predicted demand to reduce the anticipated electricity cost by generating a flat curve for its forecasted future demand. Then, in the second stage (i.e., allocation phase), customers play another repeated game with mixed strategy to mitigate the deviation between the immediate real-time consumption and the day-ahead predicted one. To achieve this, customers exploit renewable energy and energy storage systems and decide optimal strategies for their charging/discharging, taking into account their operational constraints. RDCDSM will help the microgrid operator better deals with uncertainties in the system through better planning its day-ahead electricity generation and purchase, thus increasing the quality of power delivery to the customer. Now, it is envisioned that the presence of hundreds of microgrids (forms a microgrid network) in the energy system will gradually change the paradigms of century-old monopolized market into open, unbundled, and competitive market which accepts new supplier and admits marginal costs prices for the electricity. To adapt this new market scenario, we formulate a mathematical model to share power among microgrids in a microgrid network and minimize the overall cost of the electricity which involves nonlinear, nonconvex marginal costs for generation and T&D expenses and losses for transporting electricity from a seller microgrid to a buyer microgrid