Success Stories

Internet of Things Success Stories Series #3
IoT-based Monitoring and Management Approach for Smart Infrastructures
1. Problem
During the last years a spectacular growing of the cities has been produced, being such that by 2050
more than six billion people are expected to live in cities and surrounded areas (Habitat 2010). Such
amount of people concentrated in cities means a great challenge for the latter ones in terms of providing
autonomous and efficient services assuring their sustainability. In particular, challenges such
as water supply, public transport, healthcare, education, security and power supply have already been
identified as mid-term targets.
So far, the current trend of the market regarding the energy management of infrastructures is that of focusing its interests
on energy efficiency in the stage of system design, but only in limit or extreme conditions. In addition, low or no interest has
received the exploitation and maintenance of these systems. Another interesting behavior of these companies is they only
design and deploy the systems but they do not hold responsible for their operation (at least from the energy point of view). So,
after the deployment the owner ends up being the person in charge of this system who owns neither the knowledge nor means
to proceed properly.
From the point of view of the customer, he is only aware about the initial cost of the system, i.e. the price of the devices,
their implantation and maintenance costs. Nevertheless, he is not aware about the cost of the system to be operative, i.e. its
daily consumption. Besides, he is neither aware of different optimization alternatives by which this initial cost could be rapidly
amortized. All these premises have made customers to acquire the cheaper choice which usually cannot provide an efficient
approach regarding the management of energy consumption.
On the other hand, there exist other kind of infrastructures like refineries, transport, water, etc. or large growing areas which also
need a solution for their monitoring and management.
In the latter ones, owners are more and more aware of how precious is a resource such as water. For this reason, they are more
and more interested in efficient solutions that are able to monitor the environmental conditions of croplands (humidity, temperature,
soil conditions, etc.) so as to know the proper moment to water them keeping always the highest quality of their products.
In this context IoT also provides
2. Solution
In this context, thanks to the great advance in integration
and development of Intelligent Computation Systems which
are based on Information and Communications Technologies
(ICT) (Jones 2011), and the widespread deployment of sensors
and actuators the paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) promotes
(Perera et al., 2013), there exists a great opportunity to
develop applications which allow a smarter and more efficient
performance of the services provided in cities. IoT allows the
interaction among smart objects and the effective integration
of real information and knowledge in the digital world. Smart
objects are equipped with the abilities of sensing and interacting
which allow them to capture real world information with
a level of detail never obtained before. This technology is the
cornerstone of efficient energy management systems.
Despite this technology enables the development of new
management systems pursuing energy efficiency, other elements
are also required so as to provide such a system. These
systems need to rely on a smart management platform that
permits both monitoring and controlling the different components
of the system (sensors and actuators). Actually, energy
efficiency is only reached thanks to the interaction among different
actors and entities. They allow the platform to monitor
real time information, to obtain feedback of the carried out
actions, to take control measurements, to design saving strategies,
etc.
Internet of Things • Success Stories 60 SERIES #3 - November 2015