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D7.1 Portfolio of Use-Case Concepts
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 779852
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Title: Document Version:
D7.1 Portfolio of Use-Case Concepts 1.0
Project Number:
Project
Acronym: Project Title:
779852 IoTCrawler IoTCrawler
Contractual Delivery Date: Actual Delivery Date: Deliverable Type* - Security**:
31/07/2019 31/07/2019 R - PU * Type: P - Prototype, R - Report, D - Demonstrator, O - Other
** Security Class: PU- Public, PP - Restricted to other programme participants (including the
Commission), RE - Restricted to a group defined by the consortium (including the Commission),
CO - Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission)
Responsible and Editor/Author: Organization: Contributing WP:
Sebastian Christophersen AAR (City of Aarhus) WP7
Authors (organizations):
Sebastian Christophersen (AAR), Marianne Krogbæk (AAR), Michail Beliatis (AU), Mirko Presser (AU)
Juan A. Martinez (OdinS), Pedro González Gil (UMU), Antonio Skarmeta (UMU), Mirko Ross (DW),
Narges Pourshahrokhi (UoS), Roonak Rezvani (UoS), Payam Barnaghi (UoS) Tom Collins (AU),
Andreas Fernbach (SIE), Martin Strohbach (AGT), Stefaniia Legostaieva (AGT)
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Abstract:
In workpackage 7 we move beyond technical demonstration and into creating prototypes that
can also showcase how an IoT search engine can create value in the domains we are addressing
in the IoTCrawler project. Seven testbeds have been identifying challenges and opportunities in
their respective domains through a user-centric process, where external stakeholders and end-
users have been engaged to create meaningful concepts. A baseline of design methods was
created and adapted to the individual testbeds. This deliverable is a portfolio of the concepts that
have come out of this process, which is presented through visual scenarios and mock-ups with
details about the challenges and opportunities being addressed. At least 5 of the presented
concepts will be developed into real hands-on prototypes in task 7.2 in workpackage 7.
Keywords:
Co-creation, prototypes, mock-ups, design process, story boards, scenarios, concepts, smart city,
smart home, smart healthcare, industry 4.0, smart campus, smart grids, mobility, experimentation,
Disclaimer:
The present report reflects only the authors’ view. The European Commission is not responsible for
any use that may be made of the information it contains.
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Abbreviations
AAR City of Aarhus (IoTCrawler partner)
AU Aarhus University (IoTCrawler partner)
IoT Internet of Things
UMU University of Murcia (IoTCrawler partner)
UoS University of Surrey (IoTCrawler partner)
DW Digital Worxx (IoTCrawler partner)
SIE Siemens Österreich (IoTCrawler partner)
MVP Minimum Viable Product
RPZ Regulated Parking Zone information
TTN The Things Network (LoRaWAN community)
GSM Global System for Mobile Communications
NBIoT Narrow-band Internet of Things
LoRaWAN Low Power Wide Area Network
NHS National Health Service (UK)
OCPP Open Charge Point Protocol
VPP Virtual Power Plant
OSCP Open Smart Charging Protocol
EV Electric Vehicle
CSP Charge Service Provider
DSO Distribution Service Provider
CEM Customer Energy Manager
EVSE Electrical Vehicle Supply Equipment
PV Photovoltaic
TGO Transmission Grid Operators
BAS Building Automation Systems
GUI Graphical User Interface
MQTT Message Queuing Telemetry Transport
UTI Urinary Tract Infection (UTI)
AIA Detection of Agitation, Irritation, Aggression
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Executive Summary
In workpackage 7 we move beyond technical demonstration and into creating prototypes
that can also showcase how an IoT search engine can create value in the domains we are
addressing in the IoTCrawler project. The IoTCrawler partners from seven testbeds have
been identifying challenges and opportunities in their respective domains through a user-
centric process, where external stakeholders and end-users have been engaged to create
meaningful concepts. A baseline of design methods was created and adapted to the
individual testbeds. This deliverable is a portfolio of the concepts that came out of this
process, which is presented through visual scenarios and mock-ups with details about the
challenges and opportunities being addressed. At least 5 of the concepts presented below
will be developed in real hands-on prototypes in task 7.2 in workpackage 7:
CompariSense (AAR): This concept is an IoT Product Validation platform that provides
reference data sets (real and virtual) by crawling all available IoT devices across a city. Using
the data from these IoT devices allows IoT startups and their customers to validate the data
being generated from their own solutions.
Pop-up Experimentation Space (AAR): This concept is an IoT experimentation platform
where flexible urban experimentation spaces in a city can be created by geo-fencing an area.
The experimentation space then automatically integrates any IoT devices being
implemented in the space from approved citizens or companies.
Smart Parking (UMU/OdinS/UoS): This concept is a parking app that crawls and searches
for Regulated Parking Zone information across the city of Murcia to find the best parking spot
for the citizens based on different parameters. This scenario will also develop a web portal
and associated web services to analyses the traffic flow in cities and gives high-level
information about traffic patterns (low, medium high), which can also be used to support a
smart parking scenario. The data from the City of Aarhus will be used for the latter.
SmartConnect (AGT): This concept is a solution that provides automatic integration of Smart
Home products across different vendors into Smart Home platforms. This provides value to
the end-user in the Smart Home and to the Smart Home platform developers who can easier
create platforms that handles different types of devices.
6
Room Booking (AU): This concept is a room booking monitoring system for students at a
campus that gives analytical insights about room and equipment availability by using
automatic sensor discovery.
Elderly Care (UoS): This concept is a healthcare platform that discovers and integrates health
related sensors at a home in order to save integration costs and to provide data that can be
analyzed to give a status of the wellbeing of an elderly person with dementia.
Machine Monitoring (DW): This concept will use IoTCrawler-enabled data search to add a
digital data layer on approved KAIZEN processes on the industrial shop floor to identify
anomalies.
Flexibility trading for small assets (SIE): In this concept, IoTCrawler scans IoT networks for
assets (EV, buildings, homes) that can be used for flexible energy trading of control power,
which will enable small energy prosumers to join the trading market via an aggregator.
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Disclaimer
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under grant agreement No 779852, but this document only reflects
the consortium’s view. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be
made of the information it contains.
8
Table of Contents
1 Introduction .............................................................................................................................................................. 10
1.1 Moving beyond technical demonstrators in workpackage 7 .................................... 10
2 User-Centric Approach ..................................................................................................................................... 11
3 Testbed overview ................................................................................................................................................ 15
4 Smart City Concepts: CompariSense & Pop-up experimentation space by Aarhus
Municipality ......................................................................................................................................................................... 19
4.1 Co-creation Process description ..................................................................................................... 20
4.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in the domain ........... 22
4.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current practices .................................. 22
4.4 Identified challenges and opportunities .................................................................................... 23
4.5 The Concept: CompariSense .............................................................................................................. 25
4.6 The Concept: Pop-up Experiment Space ................................................................................. 31
5 Smart City Concepts: Smart Parking by University of Murcia, Odins and University
of Surrey ................................................................................................................................................................................36
5.1 Co-creation Process description ..................................................................................................... 37
5.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in the domain ........... 39
5.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current practices .................................. 41
5.4 Identified challenges and opportunities .................................................................................... 41
5.5 The Concept .................................................................................................................................................... 41
6 Smart Home Concept: Smart Home Data Integration by AGT .......................................... 53
6.1 Co-creation Process description ..................................................................................................... 53
6.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in the domain ........... 55
6.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current practices ................................. 56
6.4 Identified challenges and opportunities ................................................................................... 56
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6.5 The Concept .................................................................................................................................................... 57
7 Smart Campus Concept: Room Booking by Aarhus University ....................................... 64
7.1 Co-creation Process description .................................................................................................... 64
7.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in the domain .......... 66
7.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current practices ................................. 68
7.4 Identified challenges and opportunities ................................................................................... 69
7.5 The Concept .................................................................................................................................................... 71
8 Smart Home Concept: Elderly Care by University of Surrey .............................................. 78
8.1 Co-Creation Process description .................................................................................................... 78
8.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in the domain .......... 80
8.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current practices .................................. 82
8.4 Identified challenges and opportunities .................................................................................... 83
8.5 The Concept ....................................................................................................................................................84
9 Industry 4.0 Concept: Machine monitoring by Digital Worx ................................................ 93
9.1 Co-Creation Process description .................................................................................................... 93
9.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in the domain ........... 95
9.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current practices ................................. 96
9.4 The Concept ................................................................................................................................................... 96
10 Smart Energy Concept: Flexibility trading for small assets by Siemens .................. 101
10.1 Co-Creation Process description ................................................................................................. 102
10.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in the domain .... 102
10.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current practices .......................... 104
10.4 Identified challenges and opportunities ............................................................................ 106
10.5 The Concept ............................................................................................................................................ 107
11 Next steps ................................................................................................................................................................ 119
12 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................................. 120
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1 Introduction
In the IoTCrawler project the goal is not solely to develop the IoT search engine
technology and demonstrate it, but the ambition is also to show how an IoT search
engine can deliver value within different domains of our society. This is the main
objective of workpackage 7, where we move beyond technical demonstrators and
into meaningful prototypes for real people and businesses. This objective is split up
into four individual objectives:
• Objective 7.1: Co-creation of use-cases with stakeholders from the industry and
cities to identify business opportunities based on the IoTCrawler technologies
in terms of new uses and adoption.
• Objective 7.2: Develop and deploy hands-on prototypes that can be used by
users in controlled environments such as a small-scale pilot, lab, exhibition or
other controlled location.
• Objective 7.3: Evaluation of user experiences and business opportunities to
identify the most promising prototypes for scaling within the project frame.
• Objective 7.4: Wider deployment of show cases and business development to
create a first case installation for the hosting organizations to demonstrate the
value proposition.
The first objective is central to this deliverable, which is a portfolio of concepts that
have been created and validated in a user-centric design process. The portfolio will
have a focus on real-world needs and opportunities identified in the domains and
contains visual representations of the concepts. Each concept will also include an
assessment of the expected impact, the development feasibility, and demonstration
value.
1.1 Moving beyond technical demonstrators in
workpackage 7
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The scenarios created in workpackage 2 and described in the deliverable “D2.1
Requirements and Design Templates For IoT Crawling” explore possible applications of
an IoT search engine to support the development of the core components and
enablers. These scenarios were therefore mostly based on internal assumptions
about the potential applications of IoTCrawler and had limited stakeholder
involvement. From a technical perspective these scenarios served as relevant
starting point, however the ambitions of the IoTCrawler project is also to demonstrate
how the search engine can provide value to real people and make an impact in
selected domains. This requires a deeper understanding of the challenges and
opportunities seen from the perspective of the stakeholders within these domains
and that they are engaged in the development of the concepts. This was the purpose
of the task 7.1 “Co-creation of Use-case Scenarios” in workpackage 7. The concepts
that has been generated in this user-centric design process will continue into task 7.2
“Development of prototypes - MVP”, where they will be developed into Minimum
Viable Products (MVP’s). In task 7.3 “Evaluation of User Experience and Business Model
Testing” the user experience of the MVP’s will be assessed, and the business
opportunities further explored, after which the 2-3 most promising MVP’s will be
scaled up for wider uptake in task 7.4 “Wider Deployment and Uptake of most
Promising Solutions”.
The user-centric approach in task 7.1, which was used to develop the concepts in this
deliverable will be described in the following chapter.
2 User-Centric Approach
The various domains the partners work with in the IoTCrawler project all represent
testbeds with very different contexts and stakeholders. Therefore, an adaptable set
of user-centric methods and formats for task 7.1 was selected and each testbed was
assigned to an experienced process designer to assist with adapting the methods
and guide the process.
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Why?
The IoTCrawler project is to a large degree a technical research and innovation-
oriented initiative, where the main focus is on the technology that is being
developed. Nevertheless, the user focus is relevant for all cases, in terms of creating
a holistic approach for creating the best overall results and to generate an impact.
The goal of the co-creation process was to identify real needs and challenges in the
domains that the IoTCrawler technology can be applied to. Visualising how the end
user will benefit from what it does, is an important step towards prioritizing and
understanding the functionalities of the applications and opens up the conversation
about what the IoTCrawler components will enable and possibly what components
might be missing for developing a specific application. The ambition was to land the
concepts for the MVP’s within the “sweet spot” of user needs, the exploitation
potential of the testbed organization, and the capabilities of the IoTCrawler
technology (see the figure above).
How?
Aarhus Municipality (Task 7.1 leader) and Aarhus University (Workpackage 7 leader)
have worked together on gathering suggestions for the methods used and to guide
the IoTCrawler partners from the testbeds through the steps presented in the
timeline presented:
13
Aarhus Municipality, Aarhus University, AGT, Digital Worxx, Siemens, University of
Surrey and University of Murcia together with OdinS was all presented to this user-
centric approach. Aarhus University and Aarhus Municipality offered guidance to the
other partners in deciding a course of action; which methods to use to gather user
insights to obtain empathy with the end users, and finally helping the partners
define the format and scope of the workshops.
What?
The methods proposed to the partners were:
• Cultural (Digital) probes: This is a method where users are prompted to share
data about their lives, values and thoughts within a specific domain through
digital or analogue tools.
• People Shadowing: Observing the behavior of people in a given
domain/context.
• Semi-structured interviews: Interviews that leaves room for the interviewee to
divert into meaningful paths of conversation.
• A workshop format: The format is centered around a mapping of assets,
actors, environments, moods, actions for a thorough analysis and
understanding of the context, challenges, and opportunities, which is then
used to create ideas for the concepts together with the participant in the
workshop.
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• SAP scenes: A set of ready-made visual material to be used to create
storyboards that can communicate concepts, value propositions and user
insights to external stakeholders.
The set of methods is based on an IoT Methodology Kit developed by C4IoT1,
Design Thinking2, Google Ventures Design Sprint3, U4IoT’s Co-creation kit4 and
supporting methods and tools to generate empathy. The workshop format was
subjected to some alterations, but with the mapping as a central element.
1 http://www.iotmethodology.com/ 2 http://designthinkingforlibraries.com/ (this version of Design Thinking the City of Aarhus has helped
made together with IDEO) 3 https://www.gv.com/sprint/ 4 https://u4iot.eu/
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Each individual case process was structured using a selection of the methods: e.g.
University of Murcia and OdinS decided with their Smart Parking case to learn about
their user needs through Cultural Probes, a finalizing 1,5 hour workshop and
describing the most important learnings in SAP scenes. SAP scenes were used by
all partners to present their cases. Storyboards provide an effective way to show the
value of ideas and product visions in their context of use. They make messages
more memorable and understandable and provided the project with a valuable
inside understanding of each other’s cases. The SAP Scenes are also used to
present the concepts in this deliverable.
Task 7.1 was finalized with a workshop with an invitation to all partners and
participants of IoT Week 2019, with the purpose of having each concept validated
by partners and external experts within the IoT community. Following this the
concepts were assessed during a partner meeting for the development activities in
task 7.2.
3 Testbed overview
In IoTCrawler we are working with seven testbeds operating within different domains,
which are presented below:
Aarhus Smart City Testbed by Aarhus Municipality
In Aarhus Municipality we have created Aarhus City Lab, which is an outdoor smart
city experimentation space located by the harbor in the city, but it is also a
recreational area. Citizens use the space for activities such as playing sports on the
basketball and football courts, fishing, cultural events or meeting with friends. Smart
City businesses are invited to demonstrate and test their technologies in this real
urban setting. There is a set of basic environmental sensors put up in this space that
connect to the municipality’s city-wide LoRaWAN, which transmits the data to the
Open Data DK portal, which also collects 155 other open data sets from the city. This
way citizens, businesses, knowledge institutions, and the city can use the data to gain
insights about the city and develop solutions together.
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Murcia Smart City Testbed by University of Murcia and Odins
Thanks to the collaboration with the City Council of Murcia, and the work carried out
during the Smart City project for the city, a FIWARE-based platform pilot has been
deployed. This platform contains heterogeneous information coming from different
sources such as public transport (bus, tramp, bicycle), solar panel information, traffic
information, private parking availability or Regulated Parking Zone (RPZ) information.
The platform exposes NGSIv2 API thanks to an instance of Orion Context Broker which
provides also a publish/subscribe pattern. In the scope of this project private parking
and RPZ is processed.
Smart Home Testbed by AGT
AGT is one of the partners in the GrowSmarter project (www.grow-smarter.eu) where
multiple smart solutions were implemented to make Europe smart and sustainable.
As part of the GrowSmarter project, AGT provided a web-based application for
device-level energy awareness in Smart Homes. The energy application was
deployed and tested with tenants from the city of Cologne. It supports the integration
of sensors via homee Smart Home gateway and targets in particular Smart Home
sensors that can measure energy consumption such as smart plugs. The energy
awareness dashboard provides statistics about energy consumption of individual
devices as well as historical overview.
We will use the GrowSmarter installation as a testbed to collect sensor metadata and
data beyond energy usage which will enable us to better validate the SmartConnect
MVP. For this we are currently investigating possibilities to scale up the testbed.
Smart Campus Testbed by Aarhus University
Aarhus university has developed a testbed including mixed sensors deployed inside
university and in industrial partners for didactic purpose and research. This testbed
1st is a room booking monitoring system that gives analytical insights about room and
equipment availability by using automatic sensor discovery and 2nd includes sensors
deployed in various industrial partners for monitoring the health conditioning of
manufacturing machineries.
17
Dementia Testbed by University of Surrey
TIHM (Technology Integrated Health Management) for dementia is a major new
research study funded and monitored by NHS England. It will test how cutting-edge
technology placed in people’s homes could be used to improve the lives of people
with dementia and their carers.
The three year ‘Internet of Things’ Test Bed is being led by Surrey and Borders
Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and has involved over 150 people with dementia
and their carers living in Surrey and North East Hampshire. Partners involved in the
project include: Alzheimer’s Society, University of Surrey, six local clinical
commissioning groups and a technology company. This testbed provides living lab
and adaptable environments for connected devices to develop scenarios for elderly
care and dementia care. The testbed currently offers an integrated system from living
lab environment (2 living labs) for monitoring physiological and environmental data in
home environment. The back-end system for the data collection and integration and
related information governance and security mechanisms are also developed in the
testbed. This flexible testbed environment allows test and development of new
scenario and data analysis methods for designing new care pathways and solutions
for various healthcare challenges. In IoTCrawler the focus is on developing secure
and privacy-aware data stream crawling solutions that can analyse patterns and
events in the home environment and designing machine learning methods that use
the results of the crawled patterns/event to design higher-level health and care
analysis solutions.
Industry 4.0 Testbed by Digital Worxx
Digital Transformation on the industrial shop floor (industry 4.0) is a key challenge to
straighten the European manufacturing industries. The industrial testbed is provided
together with WAFIOS AG machine building company. The testbed allows access to
process data pools connected to wire and tube bender machines. This allows to
search and analyze data on the manufacturing process of single machines and pools
of machines. The data is provided by MQTT standard and the testbed includes access
on reference data by virtual machines (digital twins) and live processing data of
machines in the WAFIOS technology center.
18
Smart Energy Testbed by Siemens
Siemens is very active in the field of energy management systems. In the recent past,
Siemens was involved as a system integrator in a project of smart buildings equipped
with state-of-the-art building automation systems, photovoltaics, battery systems,
heat pumps and electric vehicle charging stations. These IoT-enabled services
provide the ideal conditions to act as a testbed for the IoTCrawler Smart Energy use
case. Since the dimension of this testbed is still too limited to show the scalability (one
major requirement to the IoTCrawler discovery mechanisms) in a proper way, there
will be an additional testbed of virtual assets acting as a complement to the physical
one. This will be realized by means of simulating the behavior of the aforementioned
prosumers deployed in today’s smart buildings.
In the next chapters the concepts that have been developed in the testbeds will be
presented.
19
4 Smart City Concepts: CompariSense & Pop-up
experimentation space by Aarhus Municipality
Aarhus is a city with 345.000 citizens and has a strong profile as an innovative smart
city. One of the more recent initiatives to support the smart city-related activities is
the establishment of Aarhus City Lab. The City Lab is an outdoor area by the harbor
planned to be an open experimentation space, where smart city solutions can be
demonstrated and tested in a real urban setting together with citizens, start-ups,
academia and public institutions. Aarhus City Lab is also a recreational space, where
citizens can sit and enjoy the view over the harbor, play sports, fish, and take part in
cultural events. Aarhus has a focus on multiple helix collaborations across the city
and acknowledges that the societal problems that cities are facing today cannot be
solved by the municipality alone but requires experimentation and collaboration with
many different stakeholders. When it comes to IoT and publishing data, Aarhus was
the first city in Denmark to have an open data portal, however this open data
represents just a small portion of the IoT data that exists in the city: Some citizens
have open weather stations, makers and students create small-scale experiments,
and start-ups create new IoT devices all which generate data that could be used to
create better services and solutions in the city if their data was made accessible. The
City of Aarhus can see a great potential in using IoTCrawler to leverage all the open
data that is available across the multiple helix ecosystem in the city. The mission we
therefore set out in the Aarhus testbed was to find out how IoTCrawler could help
support experimentation and co-creation of new IoT solutions and services.
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4.1 Co-creation Process description
To get a basic understanding of the current practice of Aarhus City Lab and its
opportunities we used observation as a method and did short on-the-spot interviews
with people using the space. After that we carried out semi-structured interviews with
IoT startups to further explore the challenges and opportunities, that presents
themselves when collaborating with the municipality to develop IoT solutions. We
also had internal sessions in the municipality with smart city staff to understand some
of these aspects seen from their perspective. Based on the insights gathered we
invited the smart city stakeholders and IoT startups to a co-creation workshop to
develop solutions to support the experimentation and use of the City Lab. The insights
are also informed by the experiences and insights generated in the EU funded project
Organicity (Grant Agreement No. 645198). Below is picture of the co-creation
workshop with IoT startups and Smart City stakeholders:
To understand the opportunities of experimenting with IoT with the people already
using City Lab, we carried out a workshop with a high school that uses City Lab for
gym classes.
21
The concepts that came out of the co-creation workshops were validated with
relevant stakeholders and discussed during IoT Week 2019 in Aarhus.
22
4.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in
the domain
In Aarhus City Lab there is a basic set of environmental sensors installed, where the
data generated from these are presented on a large public screen at Aarhus City Lab.
Around the city there exists a number of implemented IoT devices that measure
everything from real time traffic on the roads, books checked in and out of the library,
to solar panel energy on schools, etc. These IoT data sources are available on the
public open data portal; www.opendata.dk. There is also a city-wide LoRaWAN that
Aarhus Municipality has set up to increase to uptake of IoT solutions into the city.
Alongside of this there is also an Aarhus chapter of The Things Network, the citizen-
driven IoT Infrastructure based on LoRaWAN. This infrastructure is especially
interesting when it comes to IoT experiments and new sources of data and we know
that some of startups in the city is using this to develop their solutions on a small
scale. OS2 IoT is another software solution under development in the national
municipality-driven open source community OS2, which will collect data from various
types of transmission and integrate it into the open data platform.
4.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current
practices
After the initial observations of Aarhus City Lab and validation of insights by smart city
staff, we identified two main target groups that connects to this space: Producers and
consumers. “Producers” we define as the startups, students, makers or similar who
are able to develop and test smart city solutions together with the City of Aarhus and
to use Aarhus City Lab as a test facility in this process. The producers that we have
approached in this process has been IoT Startups.
23
The “consumers” in Aarhus City Lab we define as everyday citizens, who might gain
value from taking part in testing the solutions that the City or producers provide. The
consumers are also the ones who use Aarhus City Lab already e.g. they use the
football and basketball court for sports, use the path through Aarhus City Lab to run,
bike or walk, they use the harbor side for breaks and fishing. There is also a local high
school that uses this space for gym classes.
4.4 Identified challenges and opportunities
Not a clear entry point for IoT experimentation
The way an IoT startup ends up collaborating with the municipality does not happen
in a very systematic way ‑ often it is more luck and chance encounters with relevant
stakeholders that makes things happen. Finding the right person to talk to in the
municipality can be difficult as the municipality is a large organization with multiple
departments and magistrates ‑ this becomes increasingly difficult if a suggested
experiment or IoT solution goes across these.
Not being aware that Aarhus City Lab is an option for doing early proof of concept
testing
“I just put up one of my early prototypes on a lamppost outside my office to test it,
however since it was not approved by the municipality it was removed shortly after”
That was one of the stories that we learned from a startup that was involved in our
co-creation activities. By creating more awareness of Aarhus City Lab and the
opportunity to use it as a testbed maybe this situation could have been avoided.
There is a need to be close to the municipality to understand the needs
Because IoT solutions are still not widely used in cities, then it seems that the IoT
producers does not always have a clear understanding about what societal
challenges their technology can help solve. And from the perspective of the
employees at the municipality the opportunities of applying IoT is not widely known
or is on the top of their minds. Therefore, they are not able to connect it with the
challenges and opportunities they see in city. This supports that spaces for IoT
experimentation and dialogue about IoT is needed.
24
What data generates value for a city is based on assumptions
When translating raw data into meaningful data sources that the city can use it seems
that the producers, do not think that e.g. anomalies in the data is interesting to the
city, but instead the companies tries to correct it and align with expected data
readings. From a city perspective it could very well make sense to see all unexpected
data readings. So therefore, there should be transparency in the way that the data
providers model their data and the municipality should whenever possible have
access to the raw data.
The producers of Aarhus City Lab are interested in following other experiments
The producers that we have talked to thinks that it would be of great value if they
could see data from other experiments and they would also share their own. The
argumentation for this was that they could use the data to validate the readings of
their own devices, and there is also a possibility to correlate different data sources to
understand new aspects of their own readings and use them for new services. This
was also were the startups could see the potential of an IoT search engine.
Students are interested in spaces for experimentation
The consumers, which in this is specific case was the high school students that use
the City Lab for classes and breaks, expressed an interest in having dedicated areas
of Aarhus City Lab, where they could carry out experiments with IoT. Many of the
concepts that they developed during our workshop had a focus on sustainability and
sought to find a right solution and adapt the space to the people using the City Lab.
Based on this insight and the interest from the innovation class teacher we identified
a need to have spaces, where we could allow this type of experimentation to happen
and given the current restrictions of using city these spaces would need to be
temporary and flexible.
25
Sports equipment in the City Lab sports courts is lost
During our observations and interviews at Aarhus City Lab to understand the current
practice we learned that the wind can sometimes pick up the balls and lead them
astray, and possible they fall into the harbor. During our workshop with the high
school we also learned from one of the high school gym teachers, that they keep
their sports equipment for gym class in the benches in the City Lab sports courts.
They do not have any sports courts or gyms that they can use at the high school for
these classes, so they rely on the ones at City Lab. However, when a big cultural event
takes place at City Lab, these sport courts and benches are moved away, which has
caused problems since more institutions also keep their equipment in other benches.
This has caused that the high school has lost a great deal of their equipment. So
tracking of assets at City Lab could be an area to explore with the help of IoTCrawler.
In the next chapters we will present two concepts that builds on the insights above;
we have called them “CompariSense” and “PoP-up experimentation space”.
4.5 The Concept: CompariSense
In the early stages of an IoT startup’s product development there is a need to find out
if the product generates valid data by comparing it to other data sources.
E.g. IoT startups that develops parking sensors, can use webcams as an additional
data source to validate if their sensors are giving a correct reading about the
availability of a parking spot. Or a startup the creates products for environmental
monitoring in a city might be asked to benchmark their product against other
measurement units already in place in the city to prove their business case.
To support this practice the concept “CompariSense” that is presented below makes
use of IoTCrawler to give IoT startups and customers of IoT solutions an easier way
to test and benchmark IoT products, by comparing it to others that are already
installed in the environment. If a data source is missing, then there is an option to
create a new virtual sensor by fusioning existing sensors.
4.5.1 A visual scenario of the concept
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4.5.2 Wireframes
4.5.3 User value
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During our interview sessions we identified that there was a potential for IoTCrawler
to support the development of IoT solutions by giving the companies and their
customers a way to validate and benchmark their products up against existing ones.
Having a large number of IoT sensors available could also be used to create virtual
sensors that again could assist in this process. Another way that this concept delivers
value is that it could be used to explore patterns in a city by observing the correlation
between different data sources, which could present itself as a new business
opportunity. On a larger scale, then this can also be used the by IoT industry to explore
different cities to see what types of data a city has available, and if a city does not
have e.g. parking data, then a startup that creates parking sensors can use this to
generate new business leads. Or Smart Cities can identify what cities have similar
solutions available in their cities, so they can establish meaningful collaborations.
4.5.4 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
CompaniSense is planned to be connected to data devices integrated on TTN, the
municipality’s IoT infrastructure, SmartCitizen.me, and OpenWeatherMaps, but will be
open for other data sources once they are identified.
4.5.5 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
CompariSense is expected to have a positive impact on the experimentation capacity
of the IoT startups in Aarhus. This can create an open ecosystem of IoT experiments,
where the IoT startups can learn from each other’s experiments and make better
solutions and identify new business opportunities.
The municipality will have an easier way to explore if a new IoT solution that is being
tested delivers the promised effect.
Feasibility:
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From the City of Aarhus, we are relying on a well-documented framework for
IoTCrawler, that is accessible to partners who have not developed the core
components themselves. Guidance will be needed but is easy to find within the
consortium of the more technical partners and therefore we deem the concept as
feasible to be developed into an MVP. On the scale of the MVP, then we will have a
relevant set of data sources to integrate, however to fully realize the vision of the
CompariSense concept, then all available and open data in a city is integrated into
the platform. Therefore we rely also on the general uptake of IoT.
Demonstration Value:
CompariSense will be a good concept to demonstrate the crawling capabilities of
IoTCrawler. The privacy aspect is also built into the concept, since the users of the
platform should be able to keep the data from their own IoT device private, while still
comparing it to other public data sources. Indexing, ranking, data quality and semantic
annotation are also key components of this concept. The virtual sensor functionality
might not be ready for the MVP level of the prototype, but will be a relevant
component to showcase for IoTCrawler.
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4.6 The Concept: Pop-up Experiment Space
Another idea we wish to use as a basis for our continued work is aimed at the non-
tech users we hope to engage in Aarhus City Lab. It overlaps to a certain extent with
learnings from IoT start-ups and Smart City stakeholders, since both has a need for
improved experimentation spaces and a better overview of the possibilities
involved. The concept is based on insights from our workshop with Aarhus
Katedralskole – a local high school, where we introduced IoT and Aarhus City Lab.
We explored the students’ and teachers’ needs to access outdoor areas for learning
opportunities for e.g. Innovation class. The students are very interested in working
with IoT focused on sustainability, real-life solutions and the city showing a similar
engagement in providing a greener city scape. Their ideas for monitoring and
managing the plants in this public space, could also be used to support biology
class. This ended up being the concept “Pop up experimentation space”, which is a
platform that creates geo-fenced flexible urban experimentation spaces with
automatic integration of IoT devices that invites citizens to join together to create
meaningful IoT solutions for the city.
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4.6.1 5.6.1 A visual scenario of the concept
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4.6.2 Wireframes
IoTCrawler crawls the geofenced area that defines the experimentation space and
automatically integrates all IoT sensors and devices from users, who have been
allowed to be part of this particular experimentation space.
A user can subscribe to the data generated in the experimentation space, which
IoTCrawler monitor the value of and its quality.
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4.6.3 User value
The main user value is that it allows citizens, such as the high school students or even
IoT startup to take part in IoT experiments together in an easy way without having to
worry about integrating their devices to a specific platform. The citizens will learn
about the opportunities and barriers of using IoT and will also potentially come up
with new meaningful solutions for the city. If we could further integrate easy tools for
creating triggers connected to the data, then we could optimize the user value even
further, so the experimenters are not just monitoring the data.
5.6.4 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
The concept makes use of data sources from IoT experiments on TTN’s LoRaWAN
gatewats, but also data from other transmission types such as GSM, Wifi, Sigfox,
NBIoT will be collected. Besides using data from approved experiments that is
targeting a specific challenge, then data sources from citizens sharing data from e.g.
open weather stations or the city’s open data is also accessible from the platform to
enable validation of the data from the experiments.
5.6.5 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
From Aarhus Municipality’s perspective the impact potential is high. Providing better
access to the City Lab and between the devices installed, would make it possible for
us to interact with students and start-ups in creating new services. We plan to take
the concepts back to the students in August, when the new school year starts.
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Feasibility:
As mentioned in the CompariSense concept, then we rely on user friendly
documentation of the IoTCrawler framework. In this specific concept we also rely on
getting the first flexible experimentation spaces approved at Aarhus City Lab to test
the MVP, which should be feasible. The concept also integrates this aspect in a
flexible way, by introducing “Experimentation Spaces rules”, where the users are
giving guidelines and limitations about experimenting in the space. E.g., maybe they
can only measure data with their device while they are there with it and should bring
it back with them after the readings have been carried out.
Demonstration Value:
The demonstration value of Pop-up experimentation space is also deemed high as it
also showcases IoTCrawles dynamic crawling capabilities within the geofenced
experimentation areas. The experimentation spaces that are created on the portal
should also have the option to keep their data private and only approved
experimenters will have their devices integrated into the space and platform.
Indexing, ranking, data quality and semantic annotation are also key components of
this concept.
5 Smart City Concepts: Smart Parking by University of
Murcia, Odins and University of Surrey
Traffic congestion is one of the significant problems associated with large cities. One
of the leading causes for this is the time dedicated to finding a free parking spot in
the desired destination area. This is the problem addressed in our use case. The goal
of this use case is to take advantage of IoTCrawler to develop a solution that allows
users to specify a destination, time of arrival and other preferences and to use this
information to provide the user with a recommendation for the specific area where it
is more likely to find a free parking spot. The co-creation process for the concept was
carried out in Murcia by University of Murcia and Odins, but the concept can be
applicable for other cities, so University of Surrey will also explore how it can be
scaled to Aarhus with additional functionalities.
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5.1 Co-creation Process description
The co-creation process took part in two sessions of roughly one hour each, in which
16 participants (plus 2 organizers) participated in a number of activities, designed with
the purpose of introducing users to the problem at hand, and later helping or assisting
them in the process of exploring different solutions and devising a first prototype of
a technology to solve it.
The problem addressed, in this case, was to improve the experience of commuters
trying to find parking in the city center of Murcia, although this case could easily be
applied to any other city with minimum effort. Users were introduced to the problem
with the help of some graphic material (context maps), and descriptions obtained
from the probing phase.
After this initial introduction, users were engaged in the process of creating POVs and
HMWs (Points Of View and How Might We), capturing user needs and insights from
the problem space, which were later shared and discussed in common.
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The following session started by revisiting the POVs and HMWs of the previous one,
to follow shortly afterwards with a quick ideation phase, in which users had little time
to capture any ideas to solve the problem, that would cross their mind. Following the
rapid ideation, ideas where presented in common, clustered into bigger/more
general groups and voted by them, producing a set of candidates for the next phase.
The final phase of this workshop, was to create prototypes (or wireframes) for the
selected solutions, using graphic templates and material provided by the organizers.
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After the workshop, all the ideas and material produced was gathered by the
organizers, sorted and further processed to extract valuable concepts that where the
again validated by users and relevant stakeholders, locally and during IoT Week.
5.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in
the domain
Additionally, to the identifier and type associated to every entity stored in our Orion
Context Broker, the following information is also associated to the Smart Parking use
case:
Private parking site information in Murcia
Each private parking site registered in the platform provides the following
information:
• Location: GPS coordinates of the parking site's location
• Name: Name of the parking site
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• Total Spot Number: The total number of spots offered by this parking site
• Free Spot Number: The number of free spots provided by the parking site
Regulated Parking Zone information in Murcia
For this aspect we can count with information regarding parking meters and
information provided by the tickets issued by them.
Parking meters
• name associated to the parking meter
• location: GPS coordinates of the parking site's location
• available Spot Number: The number of available spots associated to the
parking meter.
• sector: The parking meter is associated to an area or sector of the RPZ.
Tickets
• issued time: the timestamp when the ticket was issued
• from: this is the first end of the time interval reserved for the parking activity,
i.e. the timestamp associated to the beginning of the parking task
• to: this is the other end of the time interval reserved for the parking activity, i.e.
the timestamp associated to the end of the parking task
• parking meter: parking meter which issued the ticket
• amount: the cost associated to the reservation of the parking spot
• rate: the rate associated to the ticket
• sector: although this information is also provided in the parking meter
information, it can also be available in the tickets information too.
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5.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current
practices
The activity of reducing traffic congestion involves different stakeholders. Our smart
parking solution aims at citizens that day-by-day commute to go to work to the city
center, as well as others which go to the city center for making administrative
processes with the city council or any other regional or state agency.
For this reason, we consider the City Council of the city, in addition to end-users, one
of the most significant entities to collaborate within the scope of this use case.
5.4 Identified challenges and opportunities
As a result of the interaction with users and stakeholders during the co-creation
sessions and the validation activities, the following challenges were put forward:
• Lack of quality public transport hinders possible inter-modal solutions.
• Interacting with a mobile app should be avoided during driving.
• In general, the parking congestion problem stems from the fact that there is
more demand of parking spots than there is offer of effective available parking
places. This trend keeps increasing relentlessly.
At the same time, the main opportunity that was extracted from these sessions was
that there is a real existing need for parking solutions, that only grows with more and
more people living and working in the cities and IoTCrawler provides a valuable tool
to address it, by applying it to very different solutions.
5.5 The Concept
We have addressed one of the most common problems that large cities, which is
traffic congestion. Mainly we have dealt with one of its causes, which is the number
of vehicles wandering around the city finding a free parking spot. Our solution is
presented as an App since smartphones are usually nearby users and can even be
fully integrated with the most modern vehicles.
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This app allows the user to select his preferences and establish a destination area
and time of arrival. With this parameter, our solution generates a recommendation
specifying the most appropriate destination to find a free parking spot with a high
probability.
5.5.1 A visual scenario of the concept in Murcia
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5.5.2 Wireframes for the Murcia concept
5.5.3 Visual scenario for the extended concept in Aarhus
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5.5.4 Wireframes for the Aarhus concept
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5.5.5 User value
As previously commented, this use case addresses the challenge of finding a free
parking spot in a destination area. To do so, our solution takes two sorts of information:
the availability of the private parking sites, and the information coming from the
tickets issued by the parking meters the day before.
These two sorts of information are processed differently. On the one hand, private
parking site availability is considered by our solution only when a certain number of
free parking spots are available, reducing this way the possibility to recommend a
free parking spot that is no longer available at the time of arrival. On the other hand,
RPZ information is used to train a model which provides parking meters sector
availability at a specific time of arrival.
All this information, together with rate policies and user preferences, is processed to
issue the most appropriate recommendation for parking in the desired destination
location.
The extension of the Murcia scenario to the City of Aarhus’ open data search
addresses the needs for a more environmentally friendly traffic management by
integrating the information about different sort of parking areas (private parking and
regulated parking zones) into a service that will allow the users to reduce the time
spent for a free parking spot in a specific destination. The real-time search and pattern
query interface that will be created for this concept will also allow more enhanced
access to the data and will support citizens and city planners and managers to have
an overall view of the data and access to the detailed patterns and changes in the
continuous data.
5.5.6 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
The information obtained for the Murcia use case is available in the MiMurcia Smart
City platform, thanks to the collaboration with the city of Murcia. This use case
processes both private parking site availability and RPZ information.
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For the extended use case in Aarhus the Open Data DK portal will provide relevant
data such as parking information, traffic count, and pollution.
5.5.7 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
With our solution we expect to reduce the time dedicated by citizens and commuters
to look for a free parking spot. Reducing this time, a significant reduction in the traffic
congestion is expected. Additionally, this situation will contribute also to improve the
quality of living of the citizens in two ways: reduction of the noise associated with
working engines of the vehicles, and a reduction in the pollution in the air.
The impact can be also extended to reduction in the CO2 emissions associated to the
vehicles; improving the traffic management because of the reduction of the time in
pursuing a free parking spot and enhanced planning and management of the city
services and mobility around the city of citizens by having access to the patterns and
changes in the data.
Feasibility:
Since we already count with the information required to develop this use case, we
expect to obtain an MVP within the project lifetime.
Demonstration Value:
Thanks to the use of IoTCrawler, our use case accesses the IoT information using a
standard and homogeneous representation of information. Additionally, IoT providers
can define security restrictions in the access of the information integrated into the
IoTCrawler framework.
Since also policy rates are considered in this use case, semantic search allows
introducing more specific queries from the user’s point of view, which gives more
accurate and useful information. For instance, application and services will be able to
search for specific parking sites whose rate is less than an amount of money.
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6 Smart Home Concept: Smart Home Data Integration by
AGT
Sensors deployed in smart home environments are used in various applications such
as home automation, home safety and energy management. Where the individual
smart home devices can be accessed with the help of smart home gateway that acts
as a central control unit. Those are usually developed either by the vendor of the
sensor or the third-party company. The later usually provides the capabilities to
integrate multiple smart home systems. An enormous number of sensors has
emerged on the market over the last years from the range of vendors that use
different communication protocols such as ZigBee, Z-Wave, WiFi, EnOcean,
Bluetooth, etc. However, smart home environments are extremely heterogeneous.
Each vendor uses its own communication channel and data format for exchanging
messages. As a result, smart home application developers are forced to integrate with
vendor specific APIs that increase the development time and efforts. It is important to
address the challenge of accelerating the integration of smart home devices to
provide a common semantic abstraction layer for integration of existing smart home
systems in a common infrastructure such as the one provided by IoTCrawler and to
address the problem of interoperability of smart home systems and sensors.
6.1 Co-creation Process description
First insights were captured from the experience that AGT gained during the EU
funded project GrowSmarter, where the energy awareness application for the smart
home domain was developed. The application provides energy consumption
statistics, costs calculation and fine-grained historical data of connected appliances
to the smart plugs with measuring capabilities. The developed system supports
collection of energy measurements from Pikkerton smart plugs that are accessed via
our own gateway and Fibaro smart plugs via a third-party smart home gateway.
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For the co-creation activities, we brought together people interested in smart home
technologies at different experience levels. This included Smart Home expert users
over less experienced users to people that already bought Smart Home equipment
but have not really used it yet. People that participated at the workshop were partly
consisting of AGT colleagues with technical background that were not involved in the
project as well as one external person with no technical background. First, the
individual interviews were conducted with our participants to identify challenges and
extract insights about the experience of using smart home systems as well as
integrating smart home sensors using existing open source home automation
platforms. After that, the first version of use cases was developed based on the
insights gathered from the individual discussions. Finally, the co-creation workshop
was organized to present and validate developed use-cases with our participants.
After that, a two-hour session with participants was conducted to brainstorm ideas
that would extend and enhance presented use cases. A major outcome of this
discussion was that the participants were struggling a lot with the heterogeneity of
technologies in the smart home domain and that even simple home automation
scenarios required huge effort. The concepts that were developed during the co-
creation workshop and learnings from the previous project were used to develop the
first version of MVP that was presented during IoTWeek.
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6.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in
the domain
The enabling technology for the smart home data integration is from one hand
integration of the existing smart home devices into the IoTCrawler platform and from
another hand is the semantic understanding of the discovered sensors. Shared
understanding provides the interoperability of sensors from different vendors and
abstract access layer across gateways. Addressing the first challenge, there are many
smart home platforms such as OpenHAB, Vera, Home Assistant, Homee, etc, that
integrate various IoT sensors and actuator. The main distinction between those
platforms is whether it is open source and was developed by the community and
requires more technical background in order to use it, or it is a commercial product
that can be purchased off the shelf. To tackle the second aspect of semantic
understanding of the connected sensors, the number of ontologies for the smart
home domain is available. However, all existing ontologies are tailored to the specific
use case and do not provide a holistic semantic description of the smart home
environment. Extensive work has been done to provide the comprehensive overview
of the existing ontologies in the IoT domain, for example Lov4IoT5.
5 https://lov4iot.appspot.com/
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6.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current
practices
We have identified two main group of users that are involved in the process: tech-
savvy smart home users and smart home application developers. Tech-savvy users
are users that have a basic understanding of technologies and a limited level of
experience of basic software development. A smart home user can describe the
concrete sensor device that was discovered in his home to integrate it into the
IoTCrawler platform. An application developer is acting as a consumer of the added
data sources that are secure, privacy preserved and semantically enriched, to build a
third-party smart home application.
6.4 Identified challenges and opportunities
The most common challenges that were identified from the co-creation workshop
with tech-savvy smart home users can be clustered in the following groups.
Interoperability between sensors and systems
One of the tech-savvy users pointed out that it is difficult to find one smart home
system that would solve the task that he has. As a result, he had to combine multiple
solutions to have the capabilities that he needs. However, it is very time consuming
and expensive to build your own application that consists of multiple smart home
systems.
“I had to buy the second system in order to have needed functionality for my garden
sensors that was not provided by the vendor application”.
“There are various smart home systems and smart devices on the market, but none
provides comprehensive solution. As a result, I had to integrate several smart home
systems to obtain the expected functionality”.
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Semantic sensors understanding
Whereas one of the end users of a smart home system mentioned that their smart
home system lacks the semantic understanding of the sensors connected. It is usually
fixed assignment of the sensors to the specific functionality and it is difficult to
remember sensors’ names when the number of connected sensors grow, as a result
you cannot remember the specific command to activate the sensor and the smart
home system becomes non-functional.
“Smart home systems annoys me when the home automation rules don’t work, for
example to turn on and off lights.”.
6.5 The Concept
The smart home data integration scenario addresses the problem of integration of
IoT data sources. It provides the capabilities to automatically crawl IoT environments
such as smart home. With the ability to discover new sensors that are available in the
certain environment and understand the type of sensor that has been discovered. For
example, it can identify that the discovered sensor is of type "smart plug" and has the
energy measuring capabilities. And how to integrate these sensors in a common
infrastructure such as IoTCrawler, providing semantic understanding of the
discovered sensors. Those sensors will be available in the IoTCrawler platform for
subscription and use on the abstraction layer by other applications.
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6.5.1 A visual scenario of the concept
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6.5.2 Wireframes
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6.5.3 User value
By using the IoTCrawler platform with data integration capabilities, the Energy
Awareness application could have been easily integrated with smart plugs from other
vendors and with sensors that provide energy measurements. Without the need to
modify the application during the integration process.
6.5.4 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
As a testbed for the prototype development and validation, we have integrated the
following smart home platforms: Home, OpenHAB and Domoticz. To each of the
selected gateways the various smart home sensors were connected such as smart
plugs, motion sensors, door and window sensors, multisensors.
6.5.5 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
The smart home data integration scenario helps to accelerate the process of
integrating new IoT data sources into the common infrastructure such as IoTCrawler.
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Feasibility:
The smart home data integration tool will be developed as an MVP. The prototype of
an application will be developed to show the applicability of the developed
technologies only.
Demonstration Value:
The IoTCrawler provides a common infrastructure to integrate and access data from
various smart home sensors in the secure and privacy aware mode that were
integrated with the help of presented concept.
7 Smart Campus Concept: Room Booking by Aarhus
University
Smart Campus Herning is an initiative at Aarhus University in Herning campus to
provide an open Living Lab providing better services, data insights and a
technological infrastructure that students can access for their own experiments in a
working environment via internet. Various investments in connectivity and sensing
platforms have laid the foundation to connect different IoT enabled resources, and a
new data analysis layer is required to expose the value to students, staff and
researchers in a less technical way. Under this umbrella platform several concept test
beds/pilots are under development, where IoTcrawler components will be used.
7.1 Co-creation Process description
Co-creation has been the key method for user engagement and use case
development activities. Students, support staff and researchers have all taken part in
an extensive series of IoT co-creation workshops exploring IoT and IoTCrawler at the
campus.
A complete co-creation kit has been devised for IoTCrawler integrating IoT
technologies and local data sources to help to explain the components in a more
intuitive way. This includes exploration flashcards, inspiration cards, situation
definition templates and a range of UI, Data and Device mockup templates.
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The workshops have contextualized IoTCrawler as a new way to solve challenges
within the campus and local areas. Participants are challenged in a two-hour session
to explore their environment, define opportunities, ideate, paper prototype solutions
and present their new concepts.
Over 15 concepts have further been devised by the end-user groups. Several of which
are being considered for implementation, with one project already starting with an
intelligent Room Booking system.
Partner Co-creation Workshop training
The design methods and Co-creation tools were further demonstrated in a training
and validation session with IoTCrawler partners, with the goal to help them carry out
design tasks and user engagement in their own testbeds.
The exploration activities of the local testbed included a ‘walkaround’ tour and expert
interviews to get to know the domain, users and key challenges. The partners goal
where to relate their own experiences to the domain and consider the empathy
exercises that we previously carried out.
Preview of the IoTCrawler Co-creation method used in the testbed
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An example report has been created to show partners the overall process, and how
their co-creation and design activities can be an effective communication tool for
stakeholders. The report explains the overall process, the tools used and the
individual problems and concepts that were co-created.
7.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in
the domain
To support application development at Smart Campus Herning, a modular IoT
Gateway has been developed and is being deployed across campus. The solution
extends IoT connectivity via existing LAN opening up mesh and BLE interfaces for
low-power autonomous devices and a LoRaWan network.
The gateway is being deployed with eight different environmental sensors, collecting
base data to compare in dedicated experiments. This includes CO2, sound level,
temperature, humidity, light level and a range of gas sensors. The gateway can also
‘sniff’ bluetooth UUID’s indicating presence in certain locations. Furthermore we have
deployed LoRa PIR and IR senors in 10 study rooms which they can monitor in
presence in the rooms allowing for the students to check which rooms are available
and book then in advance to carry on their group assessments and individual studies.
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This base data helps to understand popular location, usage times, underused
resources and helps keep the work environment accountable to key health factors.
Graphical representation of network infrastructure and heatmap data on activity
With a data set for correlation, active experiments can understand how their trials
influence the campus.
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To create valuable change, a process to identify trends and activity hot spots is being
developed, using open-source web apps to support time-series and heatmap data
analysis of the campus. This will work with IoTCrawler components to expose data in
a highly searchable way allowing different experiment trials to share insights and
build upon each other's work.
7.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current
practices
To fully include the users in the environment, each “IoT Point” is presented with a
dedicated and unique poster explaining the purpose, technology, benefits and
privacy details. All code and data on the device are publicly available to anyone on
the campus to remix the code or explore data for their own unique projects.
‘IoT Point’ Awareness poster
More specific for the student room availability pilot three stakeholder groups are
identified:
• Group 1: students for day to day use,
• Group 2: research academic staff for research and
• Group 3: facility maintenance staff for monitoring the environment conditions
in the rooms (heat, clean air, etc.)
Similar for the Aarhus University industry 4.0 pilot three stakeholder groups are
identified:
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• Group 1: students for day to day use,
• Group 2: research academic staff for research and
• Group 3: the company owners and employes.
7.4 Identified challenges and opportunities
Room booking challenges
For the students of Herning Campus it can often be frustrating and difficult to find an
available room for study activities, without having to check all of campus. This
happens because AU Herning suffers from capacity problems with regards to student
work facilities, which is negatively impacting the students and their ability to be
productive. This will eventually have to lead to the need for expanding the facilities,
by constructing new workspaces for the students, since the University wants to
supply the students with enough rooms for working in groups. This construction will
be quite costly, estimated to 1.000.000 - 2.000.000 DKK, based on information from
our research and Jan Møller Nielsen. For many years, the University has tried to
improve the Resource Booking System, to lower the downtime of facilities and avoid
physical expansions but have failed to find a proper solution. The problem can be
solved by deploying an IoT scalable solution which can be implemented at a low cost.
The implementation of Internet of Things based presence sensors, as part of the
Resource Booking system, will diminish the issue significantly, by providing the
students with sufficient information about the availability of AU Herning’s work
facilities. More specifically, it does allow the students to check which rooms are
actually available, instead of having to interrupt the work of other groups, by
physically entering the rooms. It will remove the stress that comes from having to
book facilities one week in advance, and more spontaneous meeting will be possible
without the inconvenience of having to check all the rooms.
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Community development
The IoTCrawler project has helped to bring students and researcher staff interested
in IoT around a real initiative to solve and implement real solutions. The ‘IoTClub’ is a
student led initiative looking at how Internet of Things can improve the campus and
the local area. Coding workshops, co-creation exercises, exploration exercises and
general meetups have connected students and help to get projects started. Such as
the intelligent Room Booking system which IoTCrawler will support.
Several other students are also supporting prototype development upon the heat
map and times series analytics visualisation systems.
Technology transfer - Industry 4.0 application of uptime and heatmap solutions
From the experience and development of the SCH-gateway solutions, a range of co-
created cases and potential verticals have been identified. The Smart Campus
Herning project is being mapped and implemented with a local textile factory to
create an IoT ‘Ninja Shadow Infrastructure’ next to their existing production line, and
legacy monitoring line to support rapid deployment of new IoT sensors and new
analytic services.
Utilising a different hardware platform, the same data collection and analysis
methods will be employed to collect data and more efficiently analyze time series
and heatmap data. Similarly, we expect the IoTCrawler components to further add
value in this testbed as it is providing in the Smart Campus Room Booking project.
The textile factory case will specifically identify machinery that is either unproductive
(available and not being used), in an unplanned downtime state, and to tracking
general uptime for accountability.
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7.5 The Concept
The Room boking concept is to discover and integrate different sensors at smart
campus and industry in order to save integration costs and offer more flexibility to
use a wide range of sensor vendors for offering monitoring services to stakeholders.
In our case automatic discovery of presence, air quality and vibration sensor to get
instant analytical insights for rooms and equipment availability.
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7.5.1 A visual scenario of the concept
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7.5.2 Wireframes
7.5.3 User value
This pilot makes use of the discovery of IoT capabilities, as well as the secure access
to the contextualized information. The usage of IoT Crawler features will make
possible to discover available space in university campus and to easily deploy new
discoverable sensors over different facilities thanks to the searching tools of the
IoTCrawler project.
7.5.4 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
The pilot testbed utilize Microsoft Azure server with Ubuntu 18.04 Linux where on top
of that a docker daemon is running hosting containers of NodeRed for data filtering,
InfluxDB for data storage, and Graphana for data visualization and user interface,
furthermore a custom made dashboard is made on HTML, CSS and JS to display the
data from gateways and Industry 4.0 setup.
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7.5.5 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
This solution has a primarily impact on the students of Campus Herning and resource
optimization. Most students have experienced the situation where a room was
needed to work in, and it can often be difficult to get an overview of where to find
one, because the bookings people make are often misguiding, as they do not show
up or leave earlier than anticipated. The societal impact of the solution involves
reducing frustrations, giving an overview of the availability of rooms and provide
study-facilities for as many groups/people as possible. Furthermore, one of the
important factors of this is reducing the risk of disturbing students while working or
having a meeting in the study-rooms, which will result in a better work environment
for the users of Herning Campus and cost reductions facilities
operation/maintenance. Finally, the testbed it can be used for student projects on IoT
and software development areas.
Feasibility:
It is implemented and being further iterated. Integration and correlation with the
actual booking system will be the next steps, the aim is to do this.
Demonstration Value:
The IoTCrawler provides a common infrastructure to integrate and access data from
various smart campus sensors in a secure and privacy aware mode that were
integrated with the help of the presented concept allowing to better utilization of
facilities, space and equipment.
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8 Smart Home Concept: Elderly Care by University of Surrey
The technology of Smart Homes, as an instance of ambient assisted living
technologies, is designed to assist the homes’ residents accomplishing their daily-
living activities and thus having a better quality of life while preserving their privacy.
A Smart Home system is usually equipped with a collection of inter-related software
and hardware components to monitor the living space by capturing the behavior of
the resident and understanding his activities. By doing so the system can inform about
risky situations and take actions on behalf of the resident to his or her satisfaction. It
can also be used in the healthcare domain for monitoring patients and assisting
especially elderly people who suffer from disease such as dementia. The goal of this
use case is to take advantage of IoTCrawler to develop a solution that allows users
who suffer from dementia to have better quality of life and also by monitoring patients
it can help clinical team in decision making.
8.1 Co-Creation Process description
This process was informed by the user research from an existing 3-year research
project, which aim is to assist people who suffer from dementia.
The testbed provides an IoT environment for healthcare and elderly care. The testbed
is currently linked to a national project funded by the NHS, called TIHM for Dementia.
Surrey offers 2 living labs; one for engineering design and one for clinical and trial
tests. The main testbed for the TIHM project is a part of a trial with over 200 patients
and care givers and the technologies (in collaboration with 7 SMEs) are deployed in
patient homes. For the purpose of the IoTCrawler we will provide test and trial
facilities and also test data from our living labs. The crawling and search methods
then work on the results of the machine learning algorithms to find and extract
specific types of patterns and events that happen in single or multiple sensory data
analysis scenarios. The following picture presents the living lab that is used in the
testbed.
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a picture of our test bed for smart home environment for people with dementia
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8.2 Description of available technologies and data sources in
the domain
Smart Homes and Smart Healthcare rely on the ability to gather data from a variety
of sources including the environment, the home and the patient themselves. The
TIHM Medical Device is a Software Device which comprises of an alert and learning
module, a graphical user interface (GUI) and biomarkers and sensors. Health data for
dementia patients are analyzed both online and offline by a machine learning (ML)
and analytics module generating insights. The observations and measurements of
raw data and data trends are presented through the Integrated View (iView) graphical
user interface, which provides information to the Monitoring Team about the
wellbeing and change of health of the patients. The device adheres to standard NHS
IG/ IT data security protocols in regards the use and management of personal data.
Following epicures presents these devices and their usability.
Door sensor to detect the status of the door
if it is closed or open
This sensor is used on the fridge door to
check if person used the fridge or not
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PIR sensor is used to measure the activity of
person in house
physiological measurement such as heart-
rate, blood pressure and temperature.
weight scale to measure the weight of
patient
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8.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current
practices
Interfaces of a Smart home must be designed in a way that empowers the users
(stakeholders) to interact effectively and comfortably with the Smart Home system.
In the case of Smart Homes for healthcare, we can distinguish four groups of users:
- Residents (e.g., dementia patients, disabled people, elderly people, etc.)
- Informal caregivers (e.g., family members of older adults)
- Social caregivers (e.g., care homes, professional caregivers)
- Formal caregivers (e.g., doctors, nurses)
Therefore, the design requirements of the interface must be specific for these user
groups. For instance, a formal caregiver is interested in receiving updates about the
progress of the resident’s disorder by capturing physiological signs such as blood
pressure, blood sugar and body temperature. However, such information is not
necessarily relevant to the informal caregivers. Moreover, choosing an adequate
interaction medium for a stakeholder needs particular considerations. As an instance,
people with dementia might not be able to learn how to operate a new equipment;
thus, Smart Homes for people with dementia should be able to operate regardless of
the residents’ capacity.
The three year ‘Internet of Things’ Test Bed is being led by Surrey and Borders
Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and will involve over 100 people with dementia
and their carers living in Surrey and North East Hampshire.
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8.4 Identified challenges and opportunities
First, one of the most pressing concerns for the smart home technologies is
associated with the privacy and security of the transmitted data. The data may contain
sensitive, protected or confidential information that can endanger residents’ privacy
and safety, if breached. Therefore, ensuring strong data encryption, database security
as well as secured communication channels is critical for smart homes.
Second, smart homes use a wide range of sensors, actuators and other wireless
devices, thus generating a large volume of data. Therefore, the communication
protocols, hardware and computation resources impose bottlenecks for the
connectivity.
Third, a smart home is a complex system with many discrete devices and systems
connected in a common platform. However, the system needs to be carefully
designed to deal with integration issues among different devices and also to have
optimum number of sensors in order to avoid redundant data, minimize infrastructure
and maintenance cost as well as energy consumption without losing key information.
Fourth, the sensing systems of the smart homes, are aimed for long-term monitoring
purposes. Therefore, these systems need to be energy efficient, which can be
achieved by using low-power components and efficient batteries.
Fifth, modularity, expansion capability of the system and interoperability among
different smart home platforms are vital for achieving flexibility and widespread
acceptance among the users.
Sixth, ensuring a highly reliable, accurate and robust implementation of AI
technologies particularly for decision making and execution purposes is critical for a
trustworthy and safe operation of the smart homes. In addition, in order to make the
best use of AI driven features such as machine learning, robotics and big-data
computing in the smart home, standardized protocols need to be developed and
implemented.
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8.5 The Concept
The concept of “Elderly Care” is to discover and integrate health related sensors at a
home in order to save integration costs and offer more flexibility to use a wide range
of vendors for offering health related services to elderly people. In this concept this
functionality is shown through automatic discovery of a blood pressure sensor to get
an instant analytical insight for an elderly person.
8.5.1 A visual scenario of the concept
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8.5.2 Wireframes
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8.5.3 User value
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This study will potentially deliver fundamental change to future dementia care. This
is vital because there are an estimated 850,000 people living with a confirmed
diagnosis of dementia in the UK. It is predicted that this figure will be over a million by
2025.
8.5.4 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
IoT Crawler has a role of a mediating agent that connects unknown devices to the AI
bot with minimal a priori knowledge about the devices. It facilitates device integration.
This scenario focuses on integrating IoTCrawler into an IoT environment for
healthcare and elderly care in order to detect unusual patterns and events (e.g. social
isolation and changes in daily activities). In this case, IoTCrawler will enable search
and discovery of changes in activity data streams, especially changes in sensory
observation and measurement and environmental monitoring data.
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8.5.5 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
Active aging enables elderly people to live at their own homes and promotes
preventing hospitalization.
Feasibility:
We have already developed machine learning algorithms for analyzing daily patterns,
the risk of Urinary Tract Infection (UTI), Detection of Agitation, Irritation, Aggression
(AIA), daily risk awareness scores and body vital signal processing for detecting
conditions such as Hypertension. IoTCrawler will provide generic change and event
search and discovery for the data streams that will allow creating more advance
algorithms using the information.
Demonstration Value:
The IoTCrawler provides a common infrastructure to integrate and access data from
various smart home sensors in a secure and privacy aware mode that were integrated
with the help of presented concept allowing to better utilization of time, life and
equipment to improve quality of life of people for instance people who suffer from
dementia to have more independent and healthy life with respect to their privacy.
Further, we will demonstrate that by using connected sensors and algorithms that
was developed in the TIHM project and IoTCrawler project we can create patterns
from continuous and dynamic sensory observation and measurement data. We will
then use these patterns with machine learning algorithms for clustering and
classification. Following this the crawling and search methods will work on the results
of the machine learning algorithms to find and extract specific types of patterns and
events that happen in single or multiple sensory data analysis scenarios.
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9 Industry 4.0 Concept: Machine monitoring by Digital Worx
In general, the testbed aims to optimize industrial processes in the shop-floor by
supporting worker and shop-floor managers with digital views on process data and
integrating it as digital layers to existing optimization methods of KAIZEN. This
method of lean production is providing principles and physical tools to identify, track
and solve problems in industrial environments. Usually many KAIZEN visualization
tools are "non digital" e.g. Shift-boards for continuous improvements, where workers
are noting their recommendations and remarks during a shift. The WAFIOS testbed
enables a digital enrichment of lean production optimization by linking data layers to
remarkable incidents during a production shift. IoTCrawler will allow a better
identification of problems in the data sets of production processes. Linking this digital
information to lean production principles will increase the quality and efficiency of the
production.
9.1 Co-Creation Process description
The pilot use case is embedded into the general industry 4.0 strategy and activities
of the company. For the co-creation activities a joint project team of WAFIOS
engineering and Digital Worx was working together.
The design principle had to be lean and agile and was a process that covered Ideation
in jour-fixe meetings of all team members, visualizations of MVP’s, and Concept
Presentations for Clearance at the Management board. The development and
progress have been organized in the SCRUM Methodology. Concepts have been
validated to customer interactions in the Technology Center and on Fairs.
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Concept of mobile machining data search, which was presented for the Managing
Board.
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Validation Concept studies with customer interaction on fairs and expositions
9.2 Description of available technologies and data sources
in the domain
The data is provided by Gateway APIs on machining centers by MQTT protocol and is stored
on MongoDB databases. Data can be accessed for search analytics directly from machining
processes via Gateway or for retrospective analytics via REST calls on MongoDB.
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9.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current
practices
Working on industrial environments at the shop floor requires to fulfill the needs of
workers and shop floor management. Both groups of stakeholders have different
skills and needs. Workers are mainly operating in harness environments, the tools
they are using are often "non digital" as e.g. whiteboards to note remarks on a
production shift. When they are using digital tools, the devices need to be robust
and the user-interfaces have to be simple: less information and less functionality.
While shop floor managers are requiring digital mobile access on the whole data
universe to get an overall view on processes and to deep dive into particular
production steps. In practice these two different requirements are leading into a
divided situation, where workers are mainly using "non digital" tools and shop floor
managers can access a wide variety of digital assets.
9.4 The Concept
Industrial machining on the shop floor is creating a mass of data from sensors during
the production process. It is a challenge for humans to identify critical processes or
anomalies with the amount of process data on manufacturing sites.
Powerful searching is needed to create added value from industrial process data
e.g. to detect conditions for predictive maintenance or optimize the production
process. With support of the IoTCrawler data search, we can add digital data layers
on approved KAIZEN processes on the industrial shop floor. This will support the
shop floor managers to dive into process data and find links between incidents on
the shop-floor and data points of the production process. By that, troubleshooting
and continuous improvement will be speed up.
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9.4.1 A visual scenario of the concept
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9.4.2 Wireframes
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9.4.3 User value
The concept presented here will enable the shop floor managers to optimize the
shop floor processes much faster through a mobile user interface, when an incident
happens on the shop floor. Examples of incidents could for example be a single
machining production step, where the tool loader is unprecise, which will causes
problems later on the in the production process and workpiece quality. Failures like
these are often linked to complex production chains and it is hard to identify the
cause of trouble in the chain. Identifying and solving the trouble at the source of
problem is much easier on the shop floor, when data can be searched on the
involved processing components. This will lead into better production quality,
reducing downtimes and increasing the productivity of production lines.
9.4.4 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
This concept integrates machining process data based on MQTT that is sourced
from the machine gateways.
9.4.5 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
Data is nothing without knowledge of the industrial processes. The concept support
to merge both worlds: the massive amount of data from machining processes at the
shop-floor and the need to search and extract data points and values to tie them to
the human knowledge of workers and shop-floor managers. Increasing the ability to
optimize shop floor processes by merging both worlds has a high impact on
increasing the industrial productivity.
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Feasibility:
MVP of the concept is under construction and the realization is depending on the
progress of overall digitization efforts at WAFIOS AG. Currently we have access on a
data pool by virtual machining (digital twins) and live data of machining test cycles. It
is feasible to finish the MVP during the project by the current progress of
development.
Demonstration Value:
Searching on process data is a huge challenge due to the amount of data and the
dependencies of data from process knowledge. The demonstrator will show how
valuable data points can be searched and used to optimize shop-floor processes.
10 Smart Energy Concept: Flexibility trading for small assets
by Siemens
Deviations between injection to and withdrawal from electricity networks must
constantly be balanced out by increases or reductions in the output of control energy
suppliers’ power stations. Distinctions are drawn between primary, secondary and
tertiary control energy. Usually this control energy is provided by controllable assets
that change their energy consumption/production on request with respect to a given
operating point. Depending on the power of the assets, they need to be aggregated
by a so-called Virtual Power Plant (VPP) in order to offer a relevant amount of control
energy to the market. In order to guarantee availability, assets need to fulfill several
preconditions (communication, accountability, etc.) for participating in the balancing
market. This process of approving these capabilities by the transmission grid operator
is called prequalification.
Prequalification of assets is a complex process that is not feasible (from both
economic and technical perspectives) for small assets in terms of their available
control energy (e.g. domestic homes equipped with photovoltaic and batteries) which
in turn restricts accessibility of energy markets for these small assets.
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10.1 Co-Creation Process description
For organizational reasons, the conduction of a co-creation workshop as originally
planned in this working package was not feasible at Siemens. As a substitute, an
interview with colleagues from the Smart Infrastructure business unit was carried out.
The use case concept was presented during a virtual meeting and feedback was
collected from the representatives. The gained suggestions were regarded, and
adaptions were made to the original intent accordingly. A follow-up feedback
discussion with representatives will take place soon.
10.2 Description of available technologies and data sources
in the domain
For operation of the IoTCrawler as an enabler of a VPP for small assets, the following
domains and technologies come into question:
Electric vehicle charging:
The Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) and the Open Smart Charging Protocol (OSCP)
published by the Open Charge Alliance are a designed to integrate EV charging
stations into a smart grid. It provides not only means for gaining information about
charging processes but also to perform demand response actions, i.e. to adapt
charging power of a station remotely. A charging station might have spare charging
power such that less charging power is actually consumed than the current forecast
allows. This way, flexibility can be provided by the central controller of a Charge
Service Provider (CSP). To achieve this, e.g. the UpdateCableCapacityForecast
message of the OSCP can be utilized which is originally intended to be used by the
Distribution Service Provider (DSO) to reduce charging power.
Smart Home Energy Management:
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EEBus is an open communication and application standard for connecting energy
management-enabled appliances in homes, industry, e-mobility and power grids. It
therefore defines a number of device types and functional profiles (Entity Types) with
according interfaces. Examples are listed in the following:
• Device Types: EnergyManagementSystem
• Entities Types: Battery, BatterySystem, CEM (Customer Energy
Manager, ElectricityGenerationSystem, ElectricityStorageSystem, EV, EVSE
(Electrical Vehicle Supply Equipment), PVSystem, SmartEnergyAppliance,
• Feature Types: SmartEnergyManagementPs
Communication in EEBus takes place via messages relying on the WebSockets
protocol.
MODBUS
Modbus is used by numerous vendors of photovoltaics (PV) inverters and battery
controllers to access and control their equipment. Integration of MODBUS-talking
devices requires individual configuration since there is no application-specific
information model or standardized schema for MODBUS register addresses. PV and
buffer equipment can this way be interfaced by IoT gateways or edge computing
platforms making their datapoints accessible for IoTCrawler.
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Desigo CC SODIAP
The Desigo CC SODIAP allows third party applications to connect to the Siemens
building management system Desigo Insight and hereby enables access to BACnet
building automation systems and other subsystems. This way, the current state of
building services can be read out or setpoints can be modified. The Rest API provides
a browse service to traverse through different views of the designation hierarchy
exposed by the plant. Full access to BACnet datapoints is given by the value service.
This interface is relevant for the IoT crawler to access building energy management
systems (BEMS) allowing to get information about current and historical energy flows.
Additionally, energy-related actions can be performed by modifying power setpoints
or switching loads by activation or deactivating components of the building
automation systems.
PV Inverter APIs:
SMA is providing an open source communication library called YASDI to interface
SMA devices like inverters. A similar API is provided by Fronius. It allows to read out
measurement values and to set device parameters (only SMA). These interfaces can
be used by the IoTCrawler to get information about the current state of inverters in
photovoltaic plants like current feed in power.
10.3 Description of stakeholders and users and current
practices
• Transmission Grid Operators (TGOs) are responsible for prequalification, i.e. a
procedure to approve the ability of a plant operator to participate in the control
energy (balancing) market. They are also in charge of assuring grid stability.
Therefor required control energy is publicly advertised where prequalified
operators can bid.
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• Distribution System Operators (DSOs) are responsible for the low voltage grids.
These grid segments directly connect small end-consumers and prosumers of
electric energy like single households. DSOs must be able to handle
bottleneck situations like caused by EV-charging stations or PV plants. These
bottleneck situations can be countered by local flexibilities like load shifts
discovered and made accessible by the IoTCrawler.
• Virtual power plant operators (VPPs or aggregators) participate in the control
energy market and trade their aggregated flexibility with TGOs. The IoTCrawler
performs its discovery mechanisms on small flexible assets like proposed as a
key application for the IoTCrawler.
• Small flexible asset owners act as providers of micro flexibilities. They are
currently not enabled to directly participate in the control energy market but
may use an aggregator to get indirect access. The discovery of micro
flexibilities and provision to aggregators is achieved by the IoTCrawler.
• Potentially in the future, Siemens might act as an IoTCrawler system provider.
The goal is to support the Siemens-internal stakeholders, i.e., the Smart
Infrastructure business unit (BU), in the development of smart energy
applications. To this aim, an interview has been carried out with colleagues
from this BU to define the requirements in this domain. The result of this work
was presented at the IoTCrawler booth during IoT Week 2019 in Aarhus which
is shown in the following picture.
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10.4 Identified challenges and opportunities
One of the most relevant statements from the stakeholder interview regarding the
further proceeding of the project was the following:
“The major problem faced in building automation engineering is still 3rd party technology
integration. Tasks like M-Bus, heat pump and PV inverter integration consume a lot of
resources.”
Due to this fact, the focus of the Siemens demo case is temporary shifted from the
originally intended smart energy field to service discovery in building automation
systems (BAS). A prototype showing the feasibility of service discovery in BAS using
the IoTCrawler methodology shall this way act as a starting point for future Smart
Energy applications. However, the underlying problem of making a heterogeneous
device and service landscape accessible by applications in a unified way is inherent
to both areas.
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Another suggestion by the stakeholders was to not only use service discovery for
creating a context image describing building services but also to regard configuration
information from BAS engineering tools. This way, insights into plant topology and
functional relationships between devices can be gained.
10.5 The Concept
The already mentioned increasing number of small assets capable of providing
control energy is currently excluded from participating in the control energy market.
This can be circumvented using an aggregator collecting flexibility from these small
assets and acting as a market player on behalf of them. A yet unsolved issue is the
discovery and rating of available flexibilities by the aggregator provided from
inherently unreliable sources. For this purpose, the IoTCrawler might bring the
desired solution. Its continuous discovery and rating mechanisms create a context
image representing the availability of micro-flexibilities. The aggregator can use the
semantic search interface to receive the endpoints of flexible assets depending on
current market needs. Using these endpoints, the aggregator can collect the required
flexibilities and put an offer to the energy market. After the transactions has taken
place, the aggregator returns feedback on the reliability of each asset which
influences the IoTCrawler rating systems and this way improves future search results.
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10.5.1 A visual scenario of the concept
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10.5.2 Wireframes
Smart Energy Web frontend showing a map of the selected location and a form for
specifying the search criteria. It provides a view for building-related queries and one
for energy-related queries.
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The map now shows the results when querying for temperature sensors related to
heating modules.
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If one of the returned temperature sensors is selected, detailed information about the
sensor including current value, quality of information and nearby temperature
sensors.
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Here, the Energy Flexibility view of the Web frontend shows the query results for solar
modules output in form of a heatmap.
10.5.3User value
The IoTCrawler enables owners of small assets to participate in flexibility trading. This
results on the one hand in financial benefits to this stakeholder group but also creates
consciousness in the relevance of renewable energy sources and smart grid rollout.
These environmental and financial incentives might result in acceleration of PV and
battery systems rollout in the domestic area.
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10.5.4 Integrated IoT platforms and data from the testbed
As a testbed for the building automation discovery use case, equipment of a real
building which already acts as a prototype for another research project will be
interfaced. This includes a BACnet network of devices delivering live sensor values
and device data. This way, live measurement values of the inside as well as the
outside conditions like temperature, humidity, brightness values, datapoints from a
heatpump, battery and PV inverters are available.
For the smart energy use case, which is an extension the former setup, the live
building automation process image is complemented with values from a scalable
simulation setup reflecting a multitude of energy-related assets. For this purpose, the
FIWARE Device Simulator will be used.
10.5.5 Impact, Feasibility, and Demonstration Value
Impact:
The smart energy scenario allows a broad and even growing number of small energy
assets also partly acting as prosumers to access the control energy market. This
means also a strong gain in grid stability which is necessary due to continuous
deployment of renewable sources.
Feasibility:
The Siemens research groups involved in the IoTCrawler project do not develop
products but only prototypes. Product development takes place in this case in e.g.,
the Smart Infrastructure business unit which might eventually take up and continue
the development of the IoT Crawler prototype developed during this project.
Demonstration Value:
The Siemens smart energy demonstrator covers following features of the IoTCrawler
concept:
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• Semantic enrichment of IoT devices and services (meta data)
• Rating and ranking by a monitoring component/application feedback
• Semantic search engine
• Integration of heterogeneous (also legacy) resources from various domains
Apart from the intended new application scenario of enabling small-scale prosumers
to flexibility trading, the IoT Crawler concept can also be used to facilitate
engineering/reconfiguration/adaptation of Building Energy Management System
(BEMS) applications.
11 Next steps
The next steps in workpackage 7 is that the concepts presented above will be
grouped into clusters where there are synergies and similar functionalities between
the concepts and at least 5 of them will be developed into MVP’s. This will happen in
task 7.2, where the development of the prototypes will take place. The first selection
of concepts that will be developed into the MVP’s are the ones listed below.
• Smart Parking
• SmartConnect
• Room Booking
These concepts have a clear relation to the technology demonstrators created during
the project to demonstrate some of the IoTCrawler components and enabler and are
therefore further along in their development. These first MVP’s will be used to test
the integration of the components in IoTCrawler, where after the other concepts will
be developed.
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12 Conclusion
The system of technologies we refer to as IoT can be difficult to grasp to the end-
users and is further complicated by introducing the concept of an IoT search engine.
Therefore, a great deal of effort will be used for translating the opportunities of the
technology and extracting needs from the relevant stakeholders in order to create
meaningful and valuable concepts and prototypes. The user aspect is not always a
priority in technology-centric development processes, as the processes can be
demanding and resource intensive, but it will pay off in the end. The documentation
of the process makes it possible to validate concepts and prototypes by people who
has expressed a need for the solution can meet, which makes a long term impact far
more likely. The user-centric approach in this project has sought to enable this
translation between different disciplines and domains to create the concepts that
lands in the “sweet spot” of user needs, technology demonstration, and are relevant
to the organisations involved in the development of the solutions. In the next stages
of the IoTCrawler project we will continue this balancing act of demonstrating the
technology, while also trying to solve challenges in real-life situations. The goal of the
concepts presented in deliverable 7.1 is that they will act as a sounding board for the
development of the MVP’s in task 7.2 to bring in the user perspective. The work has
already started and the most mature concepts in terms of feasibility and technology
readiness are chosen to be developed into the first MVP’s.
The visual scenarios in this deliverable was created with Scenes™ by SAP AppHaus
(https://experience.sap.com/designservices/scenes)
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 779852
@IoTCrawler IoTCrawler EUproject /IoTCrawler www.IoTCrawler.eu [email protected]