The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What are the Implications?

Despite wide concern about cyberattacks, outages and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years, tying machines to machines and linking people to valuable resources, services and opportunities

Challenges and opportunities to develop a smart city: A case study of Gold Coast, Australia

With the rapid growth of information and communication technologies, there is a growing interest in developing smart cities with a focus on the knowledge economy, use of sensors and mobile technologies to plan and manage cities. The proponents argue that these emerging technologies have potential application in efficiently managing the environment and infrastructure, promoting economic development and actively engaging the public, thus contributing to building safe, healthy, sustainable and resilient cities. However, are there other important elements in addition to technologies which can contribute to the creation of smart cities? What are some of the challenges and opportunities for developing a smart city? This paper aims to answer these questions by developing a conceptual framework for smart cities. The framework is then applied to the city of Gold Coast to identify challenges and opportunities for developing the city into a ‘smart city’. Gold Coast is a popular tourist city of about 600,000 populations in South East Queensland, Australia, at the southern end of the 240km long coastal conurbation that is centred by Brisbane. Recently, IBM has nominated Gold Coast as one of the three cities in Australia for its Smarter Cities Challenge Grant. The grant will provide the Gold Coast City Council with the opportunity to collaborate with a group of experts from IBM to develop strategies for enhancing its ICT arrangements for disaster response capabilities. Gold Coast, meanwhile, has potential to diversify its economy from being centred on tourism to a knowledge economy with focus on its educational institutions, investments in cultural precincts and high quality lifestyle amenities. These provide a unique opportunity for building Gold Coast as an important smart city in the region. As part of the research methodology, the paper will review relevant policies of the council. Finally, lessons will be drawn from the case study for other cities which seek to establish themselves as smart cities

State of the Industry 4.0 in the Andalusian food sector

The food industry is a key issue in the economic structure of Andalusia, due to both the weight and position of this industry in the economy and its advantages and potentials. The term Industry 4.0 carries many meanings. It seeks to describe the intelligent factory, with all the processes interconnected by Internet of things (IOT). Early advances in this field have involved the incorporation of greater flexibility and individualization of the manufacturing processes. The implementation of the framework proposed by Industry 4.0. is a need for the industry in general, and for Andalusian food industry in particular, and should be seen as a great opportunity of progress for the sector. It is expected that, along with others, the food and beverage industry will be pioneer in the adoption of flexible and individualized manufacturing processes. This work constitutes the state of the art, through bibliographic review, of the application of the proposed paradigm by the Industry 4.0. to the food industry.Telefónica, through the “Cátedra de Telefónica Inteligencia en la Red”Paloma Luna Garrid

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

Process of designing robust, dependable, safe and secure software for medical devices: Point of care testing device as a case study

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Copyright © 2013 Sivanesan Tulasidas et al. This paper presents a holistic methodology for the design of medical device software, which encompasses of a new way of eliciting requirements, system design process, security design guideline, cloud architecture design, combinatorial testing process and agile project management. The paper uses point of care diagnostics as a case study where the software and hardware must be robust, reliable to provide accurate diagnosis of diseases. As software and software intensive systems are becoming increasingly complex, the impact of failures can lead to significant property damage, or damage to the environment. Within the medical diagnostic device software domain such failures can result in misdiagnosis leading to clinical complications and in some cases death. Software faults can arise due to the interaction among the software, the hardware, third party software and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes and latent coding errors lead to operation faults despite of the fact that usually a significant effort has been expended in the design, verification and validation of the software system. It is becoming increasingly more apparent that one needs to adopt different approaches, which will guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements, in addition to complying with standards such as IEC 62304. There are many initiatives taken to develop safety and security critical systems, at different development phases and in different contexts, ranging from infrastructure design to device design. Different approaches are implemented to design error free software for safety critical systems. By adopting the strategies and processes presented in this paper one can overcome the challenges in developing error free software for medical devices (or safety critical systems).Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Managing ubiquitous eco cities: the role of urban telecommunication infrastructure networks and convergence technologies

A successful urban management system for a Ubiquitous Eco City requires an integrated approach. This integration includes bringing together economic, socio-cultural and urban development with a well orchestrated, transparent and open decision making mechanism and necessary infrastructure and technologies. Rapidly developing information and telecommunication technologies and their platforms in the late 20th Century improves urban management and enhances the quality of life and place. Telecommunication technologies provide an important base for monitoring and managing activities over wired, wireless or fibre-optic networks. Particularly technology convergence creates new ways in which the information and telecommunication technologies are used. The 21st Century is an era where information has converged, in which people are able to access a variety of services, including internet and location based services, through multi-functional devices such as mobile phones and provides opportunities in the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities. This paper discusses the recent developments in telecommunication networks and trends in convergence technologies and their implications on the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities and how this technological shift is likely to be beneficial in improving the quality of life and place. The paper also introduces recent approaches on urban management systems, such as intelligent urban management systems, that are suitable for Ubiquitous Eco Cities