Jérémy Robert

Open IoT Ecosystem for Sporting Event Management

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.

Open IoT Ecosystem for Enhanced Interoperability in Smart Cities—Example of Métropole De Lyon

The Internet of Things (IoT) has promised a future where everything gets connected. Unfortunately, building a single global ecosystem of Things that communicate with each other seamlessly is virtually impossible today. The reason is that the IoT is essentially a collection of isolated “Intranets of Things”, also referred to as “vertical silos”, which cannot easily and efficiently interact with each other. Smart cities are perhaps the most striking examples of this problem since they comprise a wide range of stakeholders and service providers who must work together, including urban planners, financial organisations, public and private service providers, telecommunication providers, industries, citizens, and so forth. Within this context, the contribution of this paper is threefold: (i) discuss business and technological implications as well as challenges of creating successful open innovation ecosystems, (ii) present the technological building blocks underlying an IoT ecosystem developed in the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 programme, (iii) present a smart city pilot (Heat Wave Mitigation in Métropole de Lyon) for which the proposed ecosystem significantly contributes to improving interoperability between a number of system components, and reducing regulatory barriers for joint service co-creation practices.

Open Data Portal Quality Comparison using AHP

During recent years, more and more Open Data becomes available and used as part of the Open Data movement. However, there are reported issues with the quality of the metadata in data portals and the data itself. This is a serious risk that could disrupt the Open Data project, as well as e-government initiatives since the data quality needs to be managed to guarantee the reliability of e-government to the public. First quality assessment frameworks emerge to evaluate the quality for a given dataset or portal along various dimensions (e.g., information completeness). Nonetheless, a common problem with such frameworks is to provide meaningful ranking mechanisms that are able to integrate several quality dimensions and user preferences (e.g., a portal provider is likely to have different quality preferences than a portal consumer). To address this multi-criteria decision making problem, our research work applies AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), which compares 146 active Open Data portals across 44 countries, powered by the CKAN software.

Micro-billing Framework for IoT: Research a Technological Foundations

In traditional product companies, creating value meant identifying enduring customer needs and manufacturing well-engineered solutions. Two hundred and fifty years after the start of the Industrial Revolution, this pattern of activity plays out every day in a connected world where products are no longer one-and-done. Making money is not anymore limited to physical product sales, other downstream revenue streams become possible (e.g., service-based information, Apps). Nonetheless, it is still challenging to stimulate the IoT market by enabling IoT stakeholders (from organizations to an individual persons) to make money out of the information that surrounds them. Generally speaking, there is a lack of micro-billing frameworks and platforms that enable IoT stakeholders to publish/discover, and potentially sell/buy relevant and useful IoT information items. This paper discusses important aspects that need to be considered when investigating and developing such a framework/platform. A high-level requirement analysis is then carried out to identify key technological and scientific building blocks for laying the foundation of an innovative micro-billing framework named IoTBnB (IoT puBlication aNd Billing).

Lifecycle Management in the Smart City Context: Smart Parking Use-Case

Lifecycle management enables enterprises to manage their products, services and product-service bundles. IoT and CPS have made products and services smarter by closing the loop of data across different phases of lifecycle. Similarly, CPS and IoT empower cities with real-time data streams from heterogeneous objects. Yet, cities are smarter and more powerful when relevant data can be exchanged between different systems across different domains. From engineering perspective, smart city can be seen as a System of Systems composed of interrelated/interdependent smart systems and objects. To better integrate people, processes, and systems in the smart city ecosystem, this paper discusses the use of Lifecycle Management in the smart city context. Considering the differences between ordinary and smart service systems, this paper seeks better understanding of lifecycle aspects in the smart city context. For better understanding, some of the discussed lifecycle aspects are demonstrated in a smart parking use-case.

Towards semantic interoperability in an open IoT ecosystem for connected vehicle services

A present challenge in todays Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is to enable interoperability across heterogeneous 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. Semantic 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.

Knowledge-based consistency index for fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices

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 experts time in some MCDM problems.

Building Lifecycle Management System for Enhanced Closed Loop Collaboration

In the past few years, the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry has carried out efforts to develop BIM (Building Information Modelling) facilitating tools and standards for enhanced collaborative working and information sharing. Lessons learnt from other industries and tools such as PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) – established tool in manufacturing to manage the engineering change process – revealed interesting potential to manage more efficiently the building design and construction processes. Nonetheless, one of the remaining challenges consists in closing the information loop between multiple building lifecycle phases, e.g. by capturing information from middle-of-life processes (i.e., use and maintenance) to re-use it in end-of-life processes (e.g., to guide disposal decision making). Our research addresses this lack of closed-loop system in the AEC industry by proposing an open and interoperable Web-based building lifecycle management system. This paper gives (i) an overview of the requirement engineering process that has been set up to integrate efforts, standards and directives of both the AEC and PLM industries, and (ii) first proofs-of-concept of our system implemented on two distinct campus.

Reasoning over Knowledge-Based Generation of Situations in Context Spaces to Reduce Food Waste

Situation awareness is a key feature of pervasive computing and requires external knowledge to interpret data. Ontology-based reasoning approaches allow for the reuse of predefined knowledge, but do not provide the best reasoning capabilities. To overcome this problem, a hybrid model for situation awareness is developed and presented in this paper, which integrates the Situation Theory Ontology into Context Space Theory for inference. Furthermore, in an effort to rely as much as possible on open IoT messaging standards, a domain-independent framework using the O-MI/O-DF standards for sensor data acquisition is developed. This framework is applied to a smart neighborhood use case to reduce food waste at the consumption stage.

PROFICIENT: Productivity Tool for Semantic Interoperability in an Open IoT Ecosystem

The Internet of Things (IoT) is promising to open up opportunities for businesses to offer new services to uncover untapped needs. However, before taking advantage of such opportunities, there are still challenges ahead, one of which is the development of strategies to abstract from the heterogeneity of APIs that shape todays IoT. It is becoming increasingly complex for developers and smart connected objects to efficiently discover, parse, aggregate and process data from disparate information systems, as different protocols, data models, and serializations for APIs exist on the market. Standards play an indisputable role in reducing such a complexity, but will not solve all problems related to interoperability. For example, it will remain a permanent need to help and guide data/service providers to efficiently describe the data/services they would like to expose to the IoT. This paper presents PROFICIENT, a productivity tool that fulfills this need, which is showcased and evaluated considering recent open messaging standards and a smart parking scenario.