Project Coordinator: Dr. Eng. Radu Marius BONCEA – Scientific Researcher III

General objectives of the project

1. Identifying the critical issues in the adoption of IoT technology and the implementation of complex IoT systems.
2. The development of solutions that address complex problems in IoT-type systems such as the storage and pre-processing of large volumes of data generated by IoT systems, the accommodation of multiple communication standards and various semantic standards, the optimal placement of sensors, the selection of IoT sensors/devices/technologies/platforms, increasing network resilience, analyzing the behavior of IoT devices.
3. Implementation of an IoT platform, by extending the functionality and adapting a SIOC-type platform developed by ICI in the previous core program, having as high-level requirements a distributed architecture in order to accommodate large volumes of data, high fault tolerance by scaling to cluster level, message broker integration with support for common communication protocols and multi-tenant support.
4. Development of stationary and mobile IoT devices that collect data from the ambient environment and follow with the requirements of solutions that solve location problems, NP-hard in increasing network resilience, operational optimization (e.g. energy constraint) and profile analysis of IoT devices.
5. Demonstration of the solutions, methods and concepts developed within the project by integrating them into the IoT platform and developing a use-case with high potential impact on the quality of human life. One such use-case can be, but not limited to, air quality monitoring.
6. Increasing the institutional prestige in the field of advanced research and technologies specific to complex IoT-type systems by disseminating the results in specialized magazines and ISI/BDI indexed conferences. Achieving this goal facilitates increased European and international collaboration.
7. Gaining new skills and strengthening knowledge in the areas of smart specialization of the researchers involved, areas such as networks of the future, IoT, artificial intelligence systems, eco-technologies. In particular, the aim is to strengthen the innovation laboratories in the field of IoT and AI, laboratories that ICI implemented within the project "Innovation laboratories for the purpose of increasing institutional performance and developing skills in the field of emerging and disruptive technologies (ICI INNOLAB)".

Project description

The project aims to identify outstanding issues in the adoption and integration of IoT systems and provide advanced solutions in terms of efficiency, reliability, scalability, interoperability and security.

The issues that will be addressed, with the aim of being resolved by the project team, are presented below:

• placement of IoT devices within sensor networks;
• profile behavior of IoT sensors and actuators;
• selection of IoT sensors/devices/technologies/platforms/applications and operational optimization in IoT systems;
• increasing the resilience of sensor networks;
• storing, processing and analyzing large volumes of data and transforming them into actionable information;
• the integration of equipment in IoT platforms, data safety and security.

We propose to experimentally demonstrate the solutions obtained to the problems described above by integrating them into an IoT as Service platform, a platform that we will develop by expanding an already existing SIOC (Smart Integrated Operation and Control https://www.ici.ro/ro/ici-sioc/), implemented by ICI within the project PN19370401 "New solutions for complex problems in current ICT research fields based on modeling and optimization", Nucleu Program 2019-2022. The ICI-SIOC platform was developed to monitor IT infrastructures, especially cloud infrastructures and the services and applications associated with these infrastructures. Thus, to demonstrate the proposed solutions, the project team proposes to expand and adapt ICI-SIOC to meet the requirements associated with the IoT platform as a service, requirements such as: IoT device management capabilities, support for final IoT processes (actuating processes), support for various IoT-specific communication protocols, layered data persistence (short-term and historical data consolidation), statistical analysis, correlation and transformation of data into actionable insights.

The extension of ICI-SIOC will consider:

• Adopting a distributed architecture to accommodate large volumes of data with multiple tags, specific to the Internet of Things.
• High fault tolerance by scaling at the cluster level.
• Robustness and efficiency, with each node in the system able to manage thousands, even tens of thousands of IoT devices.
• Integration of message brokers used by IoT systems and support for application-level communication protocols such as: CoAP, MQTT, AMQP.
• Adapting the solution to a multi-tenant environment with the aim of facilitating the further development of support for digital services by the platform (Platform as a Service).

To summarize, the goal of the project is to develop advanced solutions for a set of complex problems that industry and the economic environment encounter in the adoption and implementation at industrial scale of an IoT system and to demonstrate these solutions using an IoT platform developed entirely within ICI, having as final result a prototype. The developed solutions, which can be models, methods, algorithms (MMA) or applications that integrate MMA, do not depend on the IoT platform, they can be integrated as services and/or supporting software tools in other platforms, although this integration will involve a high degree of software development. Thus, it is not within the scope of the project to develop general interfaces or integration methods with other IoT platforms.

We propose that the demonstration of solutions with the help of the IoT platform is done through a scenario or use case (use case), such as increasing the quality of human life by monitoring air quality using data collected from sensor networks. Thus, we aim to develop devices that constantly collect metrological data localized in time and space about the environment, such as temperature, humidity, concentrations of component gases or major pollutants, concentrations of dust particles or anthropogenic aerosols. This collection can be based on data obtained from stationary or mobile sensors and, from a scientific point of view, it is of particular interest to see to what extent data collected in the two ways can be correlated or aligned, bearing in mind that the data collected from mobile sensors should show anomalies or deviations from stationary sensors depending on additional parameters such as velocity and relative position.

Estimated results

We estimate that the implementation of the project will materialize through the following results:

• Studies:
  • Study on current and complex issues in IoT-type systems;
  • Study on Open Reference Architectures for IoT Platforms;
  • Study on methods and models of metric data analysis;
  • Study on data processing methods with the aim of obtaining actionable information;
  • Study on the data collected by the system from stationary and mobile IoT devices
• Methods, models, algorithms, software:
  • High-level architecture model for an IoT platform solution;
  • Methods and models for complex problems in IoT systems based on graph theory and machine learning;
  • Methods and models for complex problems in IoT systems based on multicriteria analysis and behavioral models
  • Model for a stationary environmental data collection device;
  • Model for a mobile environmental data collection device;
  • Methods and models for processing data generated by IoT systems;
  • Optimization methods, models and algorithms for IoT problems;
  • Algorithms and software for IoT systems based on graph theory and automatic learning.
• Prototype solutions, concepts:
  • Stationary IoT prototype device that collects data from the ambient environment;
  • Mobile IoT prototype device that collects data from the ambient environment;
  • Prototype multi-tenant, high-availability IoT Platform;
• Patents, industrial designs
  • Patenting or registration as an industrial model of the stationary/mobile IoT device that collects data from the ambient environment.
• Documentation regarding the technological integration with a view to the further development as a product/service and the operationalization of the IoT platform as a concept;
• Publication of at least 10 scientific articles indexed by ISI in journals or in specialized conferences.
• Organization of a workshop towards the end of the project, with the invitation of interested parties and stakeholders (companies active in the field, researchers)