Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Agency in the Internet of Things

This report summarises and extends the work done for the task force on IoT terminated in 2012. In response to DG CNECT request, the JRC studied this emergent technology following the methodologies pertaining to the Science and Technology Studies field. The aim of this document is therefore to present and to explore, on the basis of present day conceptions of relevant values, rights and norms, some of the “ethical issues” arising from the research, development and deployment of IoT, focusing on agency, autonomy and social justice. We start by exploring the types of imaginaries that seem to be entrenched and inspiring the developments of IoT and how they become portrayed in “normal” communication from corporations and promoters to the ordinary citizen (chapter 2). We report the empirical work we have conducted, namely the JRC contribution to the limited public debate initiated by the European Commission via the Your Voice portal during the Spring of 2012 (chapter 3) and an empirical exercise involving participants of two IoT conferences (chapter 4). This latter exercise sought to illustrate how our notions of goodness, trust, relationships, agency and autonomy are negotiated through the appropriation of unnoticed ordinary objects; this contributes to the discussion about ethical issues at stake with the emerging IoT vision beyond the right to privacy, data protection and security. Furthermore, based on literature review the report reflects on two of the main ethical issues that arise with the IoT vision: agency (and autonomy) and social justice (chapter 5), examining eventually governance alternatives of the challenged ethical issues (chapter 6).JRC.G.7-Digital Citizen Securit

Regulatory Imperatives for the Future of SADC’s “Digital Complexity Ecosystem”

This article uses a “digital complexity ecosystem” framing to delineate the challenges facing regulation of the digital economy in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. The digital complexity ecosystem approach, grounded in the field of complexity science – and in particular the study of complex adaptive systems (CASs) – is used to illuminate the sources of uncertainty, unpredictability and discontinuity currently present in the SADC digital sphere. Drawing on examples from three regulatory areas, namely mobile financial services, Internet of Things (IoT) network and services markets, and e-health services, the article argues that SADC regulatory bodies will themselves need to adopt highly adaptive, nonlinear approaches if they are to successfully regulate activities in the digital ecosystem moving forward. Based on the findings, recommendations are made on SADC regional regulatory agendas and, at national levels, matters of concurrent jurisdiction.CA201

An ontological model for fire evacuation route recommendation in buildings

Guiding the occupants of a building to a safe place is an area of research that deserves the attention of researchers. Finding solutions for the problem of guiding the building occupants requires a perfect knowledge of the fire building evacuation domain. The use of ontologies to model the knowledge of a domain allows a common and shared understanding of that domain. This paper presents an ontology that has the purpose to deepen the understanding of that domain and help develop building evacuation solutions and systems capable of guiding the occupants during a building evacuation process. The proposed ontology considers the different variables and actors involved in the fire building evacuation process. The ontology development followed the Methontology methodology, and for implementation, the Protégé tool was used. The ontological model was successfully submitted to a thorough evaluation process and is publicly available on the Web.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds

The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition. Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops. A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology

Rights management to enable a true Internet of Things

2016 IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI).In this paper, we differentiate between a true ‘Internet of things’ and its component parts. We argue that the determining aspect of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is the accessibility of ‘things’ on the global Internet, as opposed to a simple interconnection of networked ‘things’. We observe that most reported applications of the ‘Internet of Things’ would be more accurately described as ‘Intranets of Things’. In large part, this is because the owners and operators of AIDC (Automatic identification and data capture) systems and sensor networks that in the main make up the IoT have understandable concerns about the security of their assets and therefore will limit access to that which serves their own purposes. In the wider field of the Internet ‘in the large’, the open mining of the Web for information has become the mainstay of many genres of research, allowing the assembly of huge corpora, enabling analytical techniques that can reveal far more information than previous limited studies. It is argued that part of the expected dividend for the IoT is to enable use on a similar scale of sensor and AIDC data, and that the results will be availability of information fusion on a huge scale, which will allow significant new knowledge to be generated. We give an example of how in one project, the RFID from Farm to Fork traceability project, this prospect has been validated to an extent on the basis that data owners voluntarily made their data available on the Web for specific purposes. Extrapolating to a more general case, we suggest that there are two services that need to be provided in order for the generalized information mining that occurs on the Internet-at-large to occur in the Internet of Things. The first is a means of cataloguing available data, which is already being addressed by services such as HyperCAT. The second is an automatic rights management service (IoT-RM), which would manage the rights and permissions and allow data owners to determine in advance to whom their data should be released, for what purposes, subject to which restrictions (such as, for instance, anonymisation) and whether any remuneration should be involved. We make some concrete proposals about the form that such an IoT-RM should take