UNIT V

APPLICATIONS

IOT APPLICATIONS - IoT applications for industry: Future Factory Concepts,

Brownfield IoT, Smart Objects, Smart Applications. Study of existing IoT platforms
/middleware, IoT- A, Hydra etc.

Introduction

•Within the context of industrial production IoT projects and applications are developing in
manufacturing, supply chain, supervision and servicing.

IoT Applications for Industry —Value Creation and Challenges

•IoT Applications :IoT applications are solutions using IoT technologies capable to improve and
easy adapt industrial manufacturing processes, enable new and efficient ways to do operate and
interact in production plants, create new service or supervision means for industrial installations,
offer an optimized infrastructure, reduce operational cost and energy consumption or improve
human safety in industrial areas.

•Value, Benefits: Value can be generated and may show up as a result of a combination of IoT
applications with other systems or processes, or can originate in new human behaviour new
interactions. Asset utilization, productivity, logistics efficiency, innovation have strong
connections with IoT applications in industry.

“values” each contributing to the total benefit such as:

•Value from visibility identification, location tracking

•Value from IoT-supported safety in hard industrial environments
•Value from right information providing or collecting
•Value from improved industrial operation and flows in industry
•Value from reduced production losses
•Value from reduced energy consumption
•Value from new type of processes made possible by IoT applications
•Value from new type of maintenance and lifetime approaches
•Value enabled by smart objects, connected aspects
•Value from sustainability
IOT applications requirement and capabilities

• Reliability. Reliable IoT devices and systems should allow a continuous operation of industrial
processes and perform on-site activities.

• Robustness. The IoT application and devices should be robust and adapted to the task and hard
working conditions.

• Reasonable cost. Cost aspects are essential and should be fully justifiable and adapted to the
benefit. It is basically about the right balance between cost and benefit rather than low cost.

• Security and safety. Security requirements are related to the cyber security threats and have to
be part of the entire security strategy of the company. Safety is mainly related to the device
construction and the area of use.

• Optimal and adaptive set of features. The IoT application should allow to perform desired
task with the sufficient, not-richerthen-necessary, set of features

• Low/No maintenance. Maintenance free or reduced maintenance IoT applications and devices
over operational life would be ideal. Maintenance over lifetime is an important aspect impacting
the life cycle costs of IoT based solutions.

• Standardization. IoT devices and applications should be using a set of standards to support
interoperability of IoT devices, easy exchange and multivendor possibilities.

• Integration capabilities Easy integration in the IT and automation and process landscape of
the industrial plant are required and may decide if a IoT solution will be used.

• Reach sensing and data capabilities IoT applications will relay more and more on complex
sensing allowing distributed supervision and data collection and data capabilities.

Challenges faced by IoT industry applications:

divided in 4 groups:

•IoT device technical challenges

•Lifetime and energy challenge

•Data and information challenge

•Humans and business (lake of business models)

Future Factory Concepts

•Smart Factory production facility

•Digital product memories in open-loop processes

•Smart products

•Smart equipment and smart infrastructure

•The augmented operator

Brownfield IoT: Technologies for Retrofitting

The Internet of Things aims to be a disruptive technology in many ways and may change
how future industry will work. However, enabling technologies like RFID orWireless Sensor
Networks are in place, it is often hindered by the fact that huge investments are needed and the
local value is considered too low for adoption. The creation of a global network of various
ubiquitous networks is one of the driving technological vision behind the Internet of Things. The
economical vision of creating domain-and network-wide business fields and usage scenarios by
pervasive information networking uses the “Internet” both as a technical and economical
analogon. On one hand, as the global IP-based network that connects over 5 billion devices of
different networks, and on the other the resulting economic growth and business cases. Industrial
infrastructures are often older that the networks that formed the initial Internet. They can by no
means be considered a green field, but consists of a large installed base with machinery that has
lifetimes of up to 40 years. Thus many of the applications of IoT technology that we consider to
have high potential value involve retrofittingindustrial systems with IoT systems. These
“brownfield” use cases are all targeted towards optimizing existing processes by decreasing the
gap between the realworld and the virtualworld. They are thus examples for an evolutionary
approach towards an “Industry 4.0” that builds upon IoT Technology
Cost-effective Technical Integration of IoT Devices

A developer of IoT technology has to take various technical requirements into account
such as energy, communication bandwidth, communication topology or processing resources of
different IoT systems. Additionally the interoperability is crucial to the value of the system.
Assuming that in the future the service technician interconnects with a whole range of different
types of wireless measurement systems and smart machines of different manufacturers, the
analysis application must be aware of the semantics of all interfaces. Furthermore, the ability of
the system which consists of heterogeneous components to integrate in the field, to configure and
calibrate crucial for the application of adhoc networked sensor system in the maintenance
scenario. Loosely coupled, document-based Web services provide a well-defined path to
configuration and measurement data from wireless ad hoc systems and automation systems,
however, have the disadvantage of a very high runtime overhead

Cost-effective Process Integration of IoT Devices

Not only the integration but also the IoT enabled processes needs to be costeffective by
design and well integrated. Our approach is evolving around existing processes and scaling with
the human information consumer, rather than solely relying on big data analytics and total
connectivity.

1. Opportunistic data collection through local infrastructures and adhoc mobile access

2. Context-aware interlinking of heterogeneous data starting from existing processes

3. Human agility and expertise supported by a human-centered information design

Global interoperability in contrast to global connectivity and the use of mobile devices
can enable the user to access IoT services ad-hoc. Users are informed in-situ by distributed
sensing system, heterogeneous linked data sources and social media paradigms. Building a
sensing enterprise from existing technology will require a considerable jump forward in terms of
sensing system deployment and configuration, reasoning on linked data, humancomputer
interaction and adaptable work flows. New approaches are needed for context-aware annotation,
synchronization, visualization and triggers on local and remote data.
•High value use cases for IoT retrofitting

•These “brownfield” use cases are all targeted towards optimizing existing processes by
decreasing the gap between the real world and the virtual world.

•They are thus examples for an evolutionary approach towards an “Industry 4.0” that builds upon
IoT Technology.

•Iot supported interactions as part of a complex Cyber-Physical-System

•As depicted in Figure so called cyber-physical-systems in an industrial environment are by
definition heavily interconnected.

•They reflect their physical interdependencies also by communication link and data exchange.

•Technologies like sensor networks and RFID often builds the missing link in such an
environment. IoT technology delivers “smartness” and context awareness to otherwise “dumb”
objects and environments.

Brownfield IoT: Technologies for Retrofitting

Cost-effective Technical Integration of IoT Devices:

•A developer of IoT technology has to take various technical requirements into account such as
energy, communication bandwidth, communication topology, or processing resources of
different IoT systems.

•Additionally the interoperability is crucial to the value of the system.

Cost-effective Process Integration of IoT Devices:

•Opportunistic data collection through local infrastructures and adhocmobile access.

•Context-aware interlinking of heterogeneous datastarting from existing processes.

•Human agility and expertise supported by a human-centeredinformation design.

Smart Objects, Smart Applications

•Smart Object is a bi-directional communicating object which-observes its environment and-is

able to make decisions depending on the application and based on the information extracted from
the physical world.

•One approach to Smart Objects is based on the technology of wireless sensor networks, as they
already provide the communication platform and the sensors.

•The ISO/IEC JTC1/WG7 Working Group on Sensor Networks has designed reference
architecture Figure, which separates the sensor node functionality into three layers:-
Communication Layer: describes the communication protocol for the interaction of a smart
object with other smart objects, an infrastructure or backbone networks.

Service Layer: represents a set of functions commonly required, such as sensor information
gathering, filtering by various policies and rules, data comparison and analysis, data mining etc.-
Application Layer: realizes the use case of a smart object by a set of functions to users to meet
defined requirements.

•Figure: Architecture overview of interconnected smart objects.

•From the users prospect the smartness of a smart object is realized within the service and the
application layers.

•Smart objects are designed as miniaturized, low power microelectronic systems based on micro
controllers, transceivers, sensors and energy supply.

•As these microelectronic systems provide very limited resources (i.e., processing power,
memory) reconfigurable software implementations for smart objects become a challenge.

Especially when reconfiguration requires:

-easy programming

-minimum code size

•Reconfiguration is done by adding or changing components or by changing the functionality

behind the interfaces.This is done by code programming of the components and by software
update on the smart object.
•Code Programming and data-intensive software update can be avoided by the new approach of
smart applications.Service oriented approach vs Smart applications approach (consist of software
components).

•Service oriented approach —left and Smart application approach —right.

•Smart applications workflow —from a jigsaw puzzle to the application on the node
Internet of Things-‐Architecture (IoT-‐A)

Defines it as “The idea of a globally interconnected continuum of devices, objects and things in
general emerged with the RFID technology, and this concept has considerably been extended to
the current vision that envisages a plethora of heterogeneous objects interacting with the
physical environment.”

Layered Architecture of the Internet of Things

Edge Technology layer

This is a hardware layer that consists of embedded systems, RFID tags, sensor networks and all
of the other sensors in different forms. This hardware layer can perform several functions, such
as collecting information from a system or an environment, processing information and
supporting communication.

Access Gateway layer

This layer is concerned with data handling, and is responsible for publishing and subscribing the
services that are provided by the Things, message routing, and hovelling the communication
between platforms.
Middleware layer

This layer has some critical functionalities, such as aggregating and filtering the received data
from the hardware devices, performing information discovery and providing access control to the
devices for applications.

Application layer

This layer is responsible for delivering various application services. These services are provided
through the middleware layer to different applications and users in IoT- based systems. The
application services can be used in different industries such as, logistics, retail, healthcare, etc.

Functional components of a middleware for IoT-‐based systems

1. Interface protocols

This component is in charge of providing technical interoperability. Interoperability in the

context of Interface protocols means: the ability of two systems to interoperate by using the same
communication protocols.

According to ETSI (EuropeanTelecommunications Standards Institute) technical interoperability

is defined as the association of hardware or software components, systems and plaEorms that
enable machine-‐to-‐machine communication to take place. This kind of interoperability is often
centered on (communication) protocols and the infrastructure needed for those protocols to
operate.
2. Device Abstraction (DA)

This component is responsible for providing an abstract format to facilitate the interaction of the
application components with devices. This abstraction provides syntactic and semantic
interoperability,

• Syntactic interoperability is associated with data formats. The messages transferred by

communication protocols must have a well-‐defined syntax and encoding format, which can
be represented by using high-‐level transfer syntaxes such as, HTML and XML.

• Semantic interoperability is usually associated with the meaning of the content of

message which is understandable for human. Thus, interoperability on this level means that there
is a common understanding among people on the meaning of the content (information) being
exchanged among them.

3. Central control, Context detection &Management (CCM)

• Context characterizes the situation of an entity, which can be a place, a person or an

object that is relevant to the user, applications and their interactions.

• The CCM functional component is responsible to support context-‐ aware computation

that is a computational style that take to account the context of the entities that interact with the
system. A middleware for IoT-‐based systems must be context-‐aware to work in smart
environments.

Context-‐awareness includes two functionalities:

1) Context detection, which consists of collecting data from resources, and selecting the
information that can have an impact on the computation.

2) Context processing, to use the gathered information to perform a task or make a decision

4. Application Abstraction

• This functional component provides an interface for both high-‐level applications and end
users to interact with devices.

• For instance, this interface can be a RESTful interface or can be implemented with some
query-‐based language.
Typical IoT Middleware

• HYDRA it is the most popular and well documented middleware in comparer to the
mentioned middleware.

• AURA is middleware focus on elaboration and manipulation of the gathered data from
devices. Its aim is to provide ease of configuration and deployment for end user and developer.
Since to meet this goal, we require to facilitate the gathered data manipulation, AURA that was
the only middleware among that considered the data manipulation.

• TinyDB focus on gathering data from devices. Since in an IoT-‐based system we need to
gather data from environment through different devices, TinyDB that is a popular middleware.

• WiseMID is the only middleware among the reviewed middleware that is specific for
energy saving purpose. As saving the energy of devices is important issue.

HYDRA

Hydra [24] is a well-known middleware framework for IoT-based system This middleware
covers almost all the functional components discussed in Chapter 3. To provide the ease of
deployment and configuration, we are looking for a Service Oriented Architecture that interacts
with devices in a loosely couple way. The reason is, a loosely couple IoT-based system can
support better system maintainability and extendibility in case of handling changes in the type an
number of devices. As Hydra is a SOA-based middleware, and supports many required
functionalities to support an IoT-based system, we consider it as our related work,

This project was developed for three application domains, namely building automation,
healthcare, and agriculture scenarios [30]. Hydra middleware is intelligent software that is placed
between applications and the operating system to handle various tasks in a cost-efficient way.
This middleware provides a web service interface to interact with any physical devices,
actuators, sensors or subsystems, irrespective of their network interface technologies, e.g.
Bluetooth, RF, ZigBee, RFID, WiFi, etc.

This middleware has been designed to facilitate the interaction with devices by abstracting from
the detailed information about these devices and their networks. Hydra considers each device as
a service, and uses ontology languages, e.g. OWL, OWL-s and SAWSDL, to define semantic
descriptions of these devices. Moreover, it provides an intelligent service layer that allows end-
users to interact with these devices without dealing with the communication technology that is
supported by the devices.