IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things
12-14 December 2016 // Reston, VA, USA

The Challenges in Automating, Controlling and Regulating Complex Systems Using IoT Technologies: Machines, Robots, Buildings, Factories, Vehicles and More Industry Forum

Organizers

Jacques Durand
jdurand@us.fujitsu.com

Jacques Durand is technical director of IoT standards and engineering, in research and development at Fujitsu America, Inc. He has been working on software architectures and middleware standards in: eBusiness, SOA, Cloud computing standards and IoT systems, while representing the company in technology consortia and standard organizations. Jacques is currently on the steering committee for the Industrial Internet Consortium (industrial IoT), and has participated as organizer or speaker in recent industrial IoT events in Europe and US. He has a long-time involvement in testing activities, organizing and chairing conformance and interoperability test events in US, Europe and Asia. Prior to this he was director of development in a business process management (BPM) start-up, Santa-Clara (Bay area), after years in telecommunications (US West, Denver). He has more than 30 years of experience in software engineering, ranging from research software to commercial products.
Martin Burns
martin.burns@nist.gov

Marty has been driving standards and implementations of standards in the Smart Grid and Home and Building Automation — i.e. the Internet of Things for 35+ years.
As a senior researcher in the Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the US Department of Commerce, Marty applies his skills and experience as part of the Smart Grid and Cyber Physical Systems Program Office specializing in Data Interoperability, IoT Architecture, and Federated Test Beds.
Marty led the Data Interoperability working group of the NIST CPS Framework Public Working Group and was one of the principle editors of that effort. Marty currently leads the IES-City Framework activity which is an voluntary international working group seeking to drive consensus harmonization of technologies in IoT and Smart Cities. He also co-leads a CPS testbed architecture activity.
He is a voting member of IEC TC57WG10,14 and Syc Smart Energy, and a participating member of the IIC Architecture Committee.

Session Objective

A complex system is defined here as requiring the coordination of a rich set of interdependent often real-time controls, the processing of a rich set of sensory inputs with contextual data, and advanced logic between inputs and controls that would typically require a significant level of expertise if performed by humans. Cars, buildings, medical equipment, robots, factory equipment, cities are examples of these.

The panelists are expected to address one or more of the following questions:

Q1: What is the rationale for enabling such controls with IoT technologies and where does IoT add value? What is the business case?
Known objectives have been: optimizing energy consumption, reducing latency between physical systems input & control, unreliability of human control, adaptability to a variety of challenging and unpredictable situations, improving scale, reliability and safety.

Q2: What are the challenges to overcome for IoT technologies in such systems and what is the current status on their solutions? Some of the known challenges are:

  • enabling reliable and timely decision-making loops.
  • enabling human intervention and take over.
  • encoding, access and scope of domain knowledge required, contextual data.
  • reliability, verifiability and certification of embarqued software.
  • fault recovery and resilience.
  • accuracy of time stamped event and measurement records

Q3: What are the IoT technologies that are or will become critical for such systems? Candidates are:

  • networks and communication,
  • analytics, deep learning,
  • reliable SCADA and sensors,
  • embarqued software & firmware, and their platforms.
  • semantic models
  • role based authorization

Q4: What are the desired architectures? How open and evolutive should they be? What concept of “platform” is appropriate here? (e.g. platform for developing automotive apps).

  • should the application logic be local, or remote?
  • should the knowledge be opaque, or intelligible to humans?

Panel Session

Assuming a 90mn duration, the panel and subject will be introduced by a 10mn presentation from the chair, in order to state the scope and general issues at hand.  Then each panelist will be given 10mn maximum each to state his/her position. The above general questions (in panel description) will serve as guidelines for panelist presentations. Finally the floor will be open to questions/comments from the audience.

Panelists

  1. Kazunori Iwasa, smart buildings project lead (Fujitsu)
  2. Soumya Kanti Datta, Research Engineer and Co-Founder of Future Tech Lab (Eurecom)
  3. Stan Schneider, CEO (Real Time Innovations – RTI)
  4. Hiroshi Yamamoto, Distinguished Engineer & Global Electronics Industry CTO (IBM)
  5. Said Tabet, IoT lead for Machine Learning pilots (EMC/DELL)
  6. Sameer Joshi, IoT Practice co-lead (Infosys)