Permissioned Blockchain Frameworks in the Industry: A Comparison

in ICT Express (2020)

Permissioned and private blockchain platforms are increasingly used in today’s industry. This paper provides a comprehensive and comparative study of the 5 major frameworks (Fabric, Ethereum, Quorum ... [more ▼]

Permissioned and private blockchain platforms are increasingly used in today’s industry. This paper provides a comprehensive and comparative study of the 5 major frameworks (Fabric, Ethereum, Quorum, MultiChain and R3 Corda) with regard to the community activities, performance, scalability, privacy and adoption criteria. Based on a literature review, this study shows that even if Fabric is promising, the final selection of a framework for a specific case-study is always a trade-off. Finally, lessons learnt are given for industrial practitioners and researchers. [less ▲]

IoTEF: A Federated Edge-Cloud Architecture for Fault-Tolerant IoT Applications

in Journal of Grid Computing (2020)

The evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has led to an increased emphasis on edge computing for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), in which applications rely on processing data closer to the data ... [more ▼]

The evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has led to an increased emphasis on edge computing for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), in which applications rely on processing data closer to the data sources, and sharing the results across heterogeneous clusters. This has simplified the data exchanges between IoT/CPS systems, the cloud, and the edge for managing low latency, minimal band- width, and fault-tolerant applications. Nonetheless, many of these applications administer data collec- tion on the edge and offer data analytic and storagecapabilities in the cloud. This raises the problem of separate software stacks between the edge and the cloud with no unified fault-tolerant management, hin- dering dynamic relocation of data processing. In such systems, the data must also be preserved from being corrupted or duplicated in the case of intermittent long-distance network connectivity issues, malicious harming of edge devices, or other hostile environ- ments. Within this context, the contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) to propose a new Internet of Things Edge-Cloud Federation (IoTEF) architec- ture for multi-cluster IoT applications by adapting our earlier Cloud and Edge Fault-Tolerant IoT (CEFIoT) layered design. We address the fault tolerance issue by employing the Apache Kafka publish/subscribe platform as the unified data replication solution. We also deploy Kubernetes for fault-tolerant manage- ment, combined with the federated scheme, offering a single management interface and allowing automatic reconfiguration of the data processing pipeline, (ii) to formulate functional and non-functional requirements of our proposed solution by comparing several IoT architectures, and (iii) to implement a smart build- ings use case of the ongoing Otaniemi3D project as proof-of-concept for assessing IoTEF capabilities. The experimental results conclude that the architecture minimizes latency, saves network bandwidth, and handles both hardware and network connectivity based failures [less ▲]

TRIDENT: A Three-Steps Strategy to Digitise an Industrial System for Stepping into Industry 4.0

in Proceedings of 45th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (2019)

A Replicable Comparison Study of NER Software: StanfordNLP, NLTK, OpenNLP, SpaCy, Gate

in International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (2019)

Data Exchange Interoperability in IoT Ecosystem for Smart Parking and EV Charging

in Sensors (2018)

Many domains are trying to integrate with the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, such as public administrations starting smart city initiatives all over the world. Cities are becoming smart in many ways ... [more ▼]

Many domains are trying to integrate with the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, such as public administrations starting smart city initiatives all over the world. Cities are becoming smart in many ways: smart mobility, smart buildings, smart environment and so on. However, the problem of non-interoperability in the IoT hinders the seamless communication between all kinds of IoT devices. Different domain specific IoT applications use different interoperability standards. These standards are usually not interoperable with each other. IoT applications and ecosystems therefore tend to use a vertical communication model that does not allow data sharing horizontally across different IoT ecosystems. In 2014, The Open Group published two domain-independent IoT messaging standards, O-MI and O-DF, aiming to solve the interoperability problem. In this article we describe the practical use of O-MI/O-DF standards for reaching interoperability in a mobile application for the smart city context, in particular for the Smart Mobility domain, electric vehicle (EV) charging case study. The proof-of-concept of the smart EV charging ecosystem with mobile application user interface was developed as a part of an EU (Horizon 2020) Project bIoTope. [less ▲]

O-MI/O-DF vs. MQTT: a performance analysis

in O-MI/O-DF vs. MQTT: a performance analysis (2018, June 21)

Over the past decade, a flourishing number of concepts and architectural shifts appeared such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Industrial CPS or even Industry 4.0. Unfortunately, today’s IoT as ... [more ▼]

Over the past decade, a flourishing number of concepts and architectural shifts appeared such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Industrial CPS or even Industry 4.0. Unfortunately, today’s IoT as well as Industry 4.0 environments, look more like a collection of isolated “Intranets of Things”, also referred to as “vertical silos”, rather than a federated infrastructure. Breaking down these silos is a key challenge in both the IoT and Industry 4.0 communities. This paper is intended to present and discuss two open and standardised mes- saging protocols designed for IoT applications, namely: MQTT and O-MI/O-DF. First, a traffic load’s analytical model derived from the MQTT standard specifications is presented. Second, a comparison study between MQTT and O-MI/O-DF standards is carried out based on a real-life industrial implementation. This study brings a deep understanding of the extent to which these protocols are performant (from a traffic load perspective) and how they can impact on future architectural designs. [less ▲]

Combined Use of Lifecycle Management and IoT in Smart Cities

in Combined Use of Lifecycle Management and IoT in Smart Cities (2017, December)

Knowledge-based Consistency Index for Fuzzy Pairwise Comparison Matrices

in Knowledge-based Consistency Index for Fuzzy Pairwise Comparison Matrices (2017, July 10)

Abstract—Fuzzy AHP is today one of the most used Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques. The main argument to introduce fuzzy set theory within AHP lies in its ability to handle uncertainty ... [more ▼]

Abstract—Fuzzy AHP is today one of the most used Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques. The main argument to introduce fuzzy set theory within AHP lies in its ability to handle uncertainty and vagueness arising from decision makers (when performing pairwise comparisons between a set of criteria/alternatives). As humans usually reason with granular information rather than precise one, such pairwise comparisons may contain some degree of inconsistency that needs to be properly tackled to guarantee the relevance of the result/ranking. Over the last decades, several consistency indexes designed for fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices (FPCMs) were proposed, as will be discussed in this article. However, for some decision theory specialists, it appears that most of these indexes fail to be properly “axiomatically” founded, thus leading to misleading results. To overcome this, a new index, referred to as KCI (Knowledge-based Consistency Index) is introduced in this paper, and later compared with an existing index that is axiomatically well founded. The comparison results show that (i) both indexes perform similarly from a consistency measurement perspective, but (ii) KCI contributes to significantly reduce the computation time, which can save expert’s time in some MCDM problems. [less ▲]

Towards Semantic Interoperability in an Open IoT Ecosystem for Connected Vehicle Services

in 2017 IEEE Global Internet of Things Summit (GIoTS) Proceedings (2017, July)

A present challenge in today’s Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is to enable interoperability across hetero- geneous systems and service providers. Restricted access to data sources and services limits ... [more ▼]

A present challenge in today’s Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is to enable interoperability across hetero- geneous systems and service providers. Restricted access to data sources and services limits the capabilities of a smart city to improve social, environmental and economic aspects. Interoperability in the IoT is concerned with both, messaging interfaces and semantic understanding of heterogeneous data. In this paper, the first building blocks of an emerging open IoT ecosystem developed at the EU level are presented. Se- mantic web technologies are applied to the existing messaging components to support and improve semantic interoperability. The approach is demonstrated with a proof-of-concept for connected vehicle services in a smart city setting. [less ▲]

Open IoT Ecosystem for Sporting Event Management

in IEEE Access (2017), 5(1), 7064-7079

By connecting devices, people, vehicles, and infrastructures everywhere in a city, governments and their partners can improve community well-being and other economic and financial aspects (e.g., cost and ... [more ▼]

By connecting devices, people, vehicles, and infrastructures everywhere in a city, governments and their partners can improve community well-being and other economic and financial aspects (e.g., cost and energy savings). Nonetheless, smart cities are complex ecosystems that comprise many different stakeholders (network operators, managed service providers, logistic centers, and so on), who must work together to provide the best services and unlock the commercial potential of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). This is one of the major challenges that faces today’s smart city movement, and the emerging "API economy." Indeed, while new smart connected objects hit the market every day, they mostly feed "vertical silos" (e.g., vertical apps, siloed apps, and so on) that are closed to the rest of the IoT, thus hampering developers to produce new added value across multiple platforms and/or application domains. Within this context, the contribution of this paper is twofold: 1) present the strategic vision and ambition of the EU to overcome this critical vertical silos’ issue and 2) introduce the first building blocks underlying an open IoT ecosystem developed as part of an EU (Horizon 2020) Project and a joint project initiative (IoT-EPI). The practicability of this ecosystem, along with a performance analysis, is carried out considering a proof-of-concept for enhanced sporting event management in the context of the forthcoming FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. [less ▲]