A communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. A scalable and pervasive communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of a smart grid. In this paper, we present the background and motivation of communication infrastructures in smart grid systems. We also summarize major requirements that smart grid communications must meet. From the experience of several industrial trials on smart grid with communication infrastructures, we expect that the traditional carbon fuel based power plants can cooperate with emerging distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc, to reduce the carbon fuel consumption and consequent green house gas such as carbon dioxide emission. The consumers can minimize their expense on energy by adjusting their intelligent home appliance operations to avoid the peak hours and utilize the renewable energy instead. We further explore the challenges for a communication infrastructure as the part of a complex smart grid system. Since a smart grid system might have over millions of consumers and devices, the demand of its reliability and security is extremely critical. Through a communication infrastructure, a smart grid can improve power reliability and quality to eliminate electricity blackout. Security is a challenging issue since the on-going smart grid systems facing increasing vulnerabilities as more and more automation, remote monitoring/controlling and supervision entities are interconnected.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=electricalengineeringfacpub

A Survey on Smart Grid CommunicationInfrastructures: Motivations, Requirements andChallenges

Manufacturing industry profoundly impact economic and societal progress. As being a commonly accepted term for research centers and universities, the Industry 4.0 initiative has received a splendid attention of the business and research community. Although the idea is not new and was on the agenda of academic research in many years with different perceptions, the term “Industry 4.0” is just launched and well accepted to some extend not only in academic life but also in the industrial society as well. While academic research focuses on understanding and defining the concept and trying to develop related systems, business models and respective methodologies, industry, on the other hand, focuses its attention on the change of industrial machine suits and intelligent products as well as potential customers on this progress. It is therefore important for the companies to primarily understand the features and content of the Industry 4.0 for potential transformation from machine dominant manufacturing to digital manufacturing. In order to achieve a successful transformation, they should clearly review their positions and respective potentials against basic requirements set forward for Industry 4.0 standard. This will allow them to generate a well-defined road map. There has been several approaches and discussions going on along this line, a several road maps are already proposed. Some of those are reviewed in this paper. However, the literature clearly indicates the lack of respective assessment methodologies. Since the implementation and applications of related theorems and definitions outlined for the 4th industrial revolution is not mature enough for most of the reel life implementations, a systematic approach for making respective assessments and evaluations seems to be urgently required for those who are intending to speed this transformation up. It is now main responsibility of the research community to developed technological infrastructure with physical systems, management models, business models as well as some well-defined Industry 4.0 scenarios in order to make the life for the practitioners easy. It is estimated by the experts that the Industry 4.0 and related progress along this line will have an enormous effect on social life. As outlined in the introduction, some social transformation is also expected. It is assumed that the robots will be more dominant in manufacturing, implanted technologies, cooperating and coordinating machines, self-decision-making systems, autonom problem solvers, learning machines, 3D printing etc. will dominate the production process. Wearable internet, big data analysis, sensor based life, smart city implementations or similar applications will be the main concern of the community. This social transformation will naturally trigger the manufacturing society to improve their manufacturing suits to cope with the customer requirements and sustain competitive advantage. A summary of the potential progress along this line is reviewed in introduction of the paper. It is so obvious that the future manufacturing systems will have a different vision composed of products, intelligence, communications and information network. This will bring about new business models to be dominant in industrial life. Another important issue to take into account is that the time span of this so-called revolution will be so short triggering a continues transformation process to yield some new industrial areas to emerge. This clearly puts a big pressure on manufacturers to learn, understand, design and implement the transformation process. Since the main motivation for finding the best way to follow this transformation, a comprehensive literature review will generate a remarkable support. This paper presents such a review for highlighting the progress and aims to help improve the awareness on the best experiences. It is intended to provide a clear idea for those wishing to generate a road map for digitizing the respective manufacturing suits. By presenting this review it is also intended to provide a hands-on library of Industry 4.0 to both academics as well as industrial practitioners. The top 100 headings, abstracts and key words (i.e. a total of 619 publications of any kind) for each search term were independently analyzed in order to ensure the reliability of the review process. Note that, this exhaustive literature review provides a concrete definition of Industry 4.0 and defines its six design principles such as interoperability, virtualization, local, real-time talent, service orientation and modularity. It seems that these principles have taken the attention of the scientists to carry out more variety of research on the subject and to develop implementable and appropriate scenarios. A comprehensive taxonomy of Industry 4.0 can also be developed through analyzing the results of this review.

Literature review of Industry 4.0 and related technologies

Big data

Data-driven smart manufacturing

The surge in global population is compelling a shift toward smart agriculture practices. This coupled with the diminishing natural resources, limited availability of arable land, increase in unpredictable weather conditions makes food security a major concern for most countries. As a result, the use of Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics (DA) are employed to enhance the operational efficiency and productivity in the agriculture sector. There is a paradigm shift from use of wireless sensor network (WSN) as a major driver of smart agriculture to the use of IoT and DA. The IoT integrates several existing technologies, such as WSN, radio frequency identification, cloud computing, middleware systems, and end-user applications. In this paper, several benefits and challenges of IoT have been identified. We present the IoT ecosystem and how the combination of IoT and DA is enabling smart agriculture. Furthermore, we provide future trends and opportunities which are categorized into technological innovations, application scenarios, business, and marketability.

An Overview of Internet of Things (IoT) and Data Analytics in Agriculture: Benefits and Challenges

Voluminous amounts of data have been produced, since the past decade as the miniaturization of Internet of things (IoT) devices increases. However, such data are not useful without analytic power. Numerous big data, IoT, and analytics solutions have enabled people to obtain valuable insight into large data generated by IoT devices. However, these solutions are still in their infancy, and the domain lacks a comprehensive survey. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art research efforts directed toward big IoT data analytics. The relationship between big data analytics and IoT is explained. Moreover, this paper adds value by proposing a new architecture for big IoT data analytics. Furthermore, big IoT data analytic types, methods, and technologies for big data mining are discussed. Numerous notable use cases are also presented. Several opportunities brought by data analytics in IoT paradigm are then discussed. Finally, open research challenges, such as privacy, big data mining, visualization, and integration, are presented as future research directions.

Big IoT Data Analytics: Architecture, Opportunities, and Open Research Challenges

The explosive growth in volume, velocity, and diversity of data produced by mobile devices and cloud applications has contributed to the abundance of data or `big data.' Available solutions for efficient data storage and management cannot fulfill the needs of such heterogeneous data where the amount of data is continuously increasing. For efficient retrieval and management, existing indexing solutions become inefficient with the rapidly growing index size and seek time and an optimized index scheme is required for big data. Regarding real-world applications, the indexing issue with big data in cloud computing is widespread in healthcare, enterprises, scientific experiments, and social networks. To date, diverse soft computing, machine learning, and other techniques in terms of artificial intelligence have been utilized to satisfy the indexing requirements, yet in the literature, there is no reported state-of-the-art survey investigating the performance and consequences of techniques for solving indexing in big data issues as they enter cloud computing. The objective of this paper is to investigate and examine the existing indexing techniques for big data. Taxonomy of indexing techniques is developed to provide insight to enable researchers understand and select a technique as a basis to design an indexing mechanism with reduced time and space consumption for BD-MCC. In this study, 48 indexing techniques have been studied and compared based on 60 articles related to the topic. The indexing techniques' performance is analyzed based on their characteristics and big data indexing requirements. The main contribution of this study is taxonomy of categorized indexing techniques based on their method. The categories are non-artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, and collaborative artificial intelligence indexing methods. In addition, the significance of different procedures and performance is analyzed, besides limitations of each technique. In conclusion, several key future research topics with potential to accelerate the progress and deployment of artificial intelligence-based cooperative indexing in BD-MCC are elaborated on.

A survey on indexing techniques for big data: taxonomy and performance evaluation

A survey of big data management

There is a great thrust in industry toward the development of more feasible and viable tools for storing fast-growing volume, velocity, and diversity of data, termed ‘big data’. The structural shift of the storage mechanism from traditional data management systems to NoSQL technology is due to the intention of fulfilling big data storage requirements. However, the available big data storage technologies are inefficient to provide consistent, scalable, and available solutions for continuously growing heterogeneous data. Storage is the preliminary process of big data analytics for real-world applications such as scientific experiments, healthcare, social networks, and e-business. So far, Amazon, Google, and Apache are some of the industry standards in providing big data storage solutions, yet the literature does not report an in-depth survey of storage technologies available for big data, investigating the performance and magnitude gains of these technologies. The primary objective of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive investigation of state-of-the-art storage technologies available for big data. A well-defined taxonomy of big data storage technologies is presented to assist data analysts and researchers in understanding and selecting a storage mechanism that better fits their needs. To evaluate the performance of different storage architectures, we compare and analyze the existing approaches using Brewer’s CAP theorem. The significance and applications of storage technologies and support to other categories are discussed. Several future research challenges are highlighted with the intention to expedite the deployment of a reliable and scalable storage system.

/pdf/big-data-storage-technologies-a-survey-5b7k3lpuo1.pdf

Big data storage technologies: a survey

The tremendous increase in global industrial activity has resulted in high utilization of natural energy resources and increase in global warming over the last few decades. Meanwhile, computing has become a popular utility of modern human lifestyle. With the increased popularity of computing and IT services, the corresponding energy consumption of the IT industry has also increased rapidly. The computing community realizes the importance of green measures and provides technological solutions that lead to its energy-aware operations along with facilitating the same in other IT enabled industries. Green and sustainable computing practices review the environmental impact of the computing industry to encourage the adoption of practices and technologies for efficient operations. “Green Computing” paradigm advocates the energy-proportional and efficient usage of computing resources in all emerging technologies, such as Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT). This article presents a review of green computing techniques amidst the emerging IT technologies that are evident in our society. The best practices for green computing and the trade-off between green and high-performance policies is debated. Further, we discuss the imminent challenges facing the efficient green operations of emerging IT technologies.

/pdf/greening-emerging-it-technologies-techniques-and-practices-2edsqv4r9r.pdf

Aisha Siddiqa

Papers

Big IoT Data Analytics: Architecture, Opportunities, and Open Research Challenges

A survey on indexing techniques for big data: taxonomy and performance evaluation

A survey of big data management

Big data storage technologies: a survey

Greening emerging IT technologies: techniques and practices