Massive-Scale Automation in Cyber-Physical Systems: Vision & Challenges

Abstract

Abstract-The next era of computing is the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities with development of the Internet of Simulation (IoS). The existing technologies of Cloud, Edge, and Fog computing as well as HPC being applied to the domains of Big Data and deep learning are not adequate to handle the scale and complexity of the systems required to facilitate a fully integrated and automated smart city. This integration of existing systems will create an explosion of data streams at a scale not yet experienced. The additional data can be combined with simulations as services (SIMaaS) to provide a shared model of reality across all integrated systems, things, devices, and individuals within the city. There are also numerous challenges in managing the security and safety of the integrated systems. This paper presents an overview of the existing stateof-the-art in automating, augmenting, and integrating systems across the domains of smart cities, autonomous vehicles, energy efficiency, smart manufacturing in Industry 4.0, and healthcare. Additionally the key challenges relating to Big Data, a model of reality, augmentation of systems, computation, and security are examined.

Service-Oriented Reference Architecture for Smart Cities

“…Repair, maintenance and inspection could also be performed using robotic platforms [48], [49]. Figure 1 captures many of the dimensions of the smart city [1] and forms the basis of our reference architecture. The traditional city architecture layers of environment, infrastructure, logistics and human elements are not expected to change within the smart city.…”

“…The model of reality included in figure 1 is expected to be a basis of the intelligence of the city, utilising simulation so that system can predict future outcomes and react accordingly. As this simulation data is added to the data being generated by IoT systems, we expect a data explosion, where it will be vital to process data selectively in order to deal with the expected data flow [1].…”

“…Given the number of devices and services operating in a full implementation of a smart city there must be an ubiquitous, high-speed, wireless network supporting a large computing infrastructure. Both the network and computing infrastructure needs to be able to transmit and process the massive amount of data being generated by the city [1]. There is potential for information of interest to be lost in the noise of many data streams due to the curse of dimensionality.…”

“…Furthermore IoT for smart cities requires context-aware computation allowing intelligence to be incorporated and augment the System of Systems (SoS) with a model of reality [1], [5]. This automated integration will require a shared model of reality that aggregates the different perspectives on reality as seen by the different domains and systems.…”

“…A reference architecture for smart cities incorporating the viewpoints of the traditional city infrastructure, services and business roles. [1] directions that require significant attention in order for smart cities to become a reality.…”