Crafting an IoT-Ecosystem – A Three-Phased Approach

The Internet of Things acts as a seed for enterprises to collaborate and create new value. This value creation is often concentrated in big enterprises that command large amounts of resources. The craft sector’s small and medium sized enterprises struggle to adopt such new technologies. Lacking resources and in-house capabilities, they increasingly rely on services provided by large enterprises. Collaboration among equals can offer an alternative path for these small and medium sized enterprises. Combining their strengths in an IoT-ecosystem is one way to overcome these limitations. We conducted a case study in the electrical engineering craft to build such an IoT-ecosystem. Participating organizations planned how to develop the existing ecosystem into an IoT-ecosystem. This process was observed to be structured into a status quo and three sequential phases. Our research shows, that sharing data can act as the initial phase to unlock new value in an existing ecosystem. Every enterprise can then work on connecting its clients’ systems to enable an eventual opening to join the IoT-ecosystem. This three-phased approach offers enterprises a tool to work towards an IoT-ecosystem. Researchers can apply the three-phased approach as an analytic tool to reason about progress towards an IoT-ecosystem

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