Smart manufacturing 5.0
Smart manufacturing represents a privileged context for IoT systems, which have entered production lines since some time now, also in terms of evolution compared to "traditional" M2M and SCADA systems.
While technologies for monitoring industrial plants constantly evolve, the IIoT offers new ideas for innovation capable of representing incredible drivers for change.
The IoT concept of a "set of autonomous and interconnected devices" naturally leads to the development of intelligent devices, capable of optimizing data acquisition and management at both borders and center of the system.
Thanks to IIoT architectures development, which includes the use of long-range transmission vectors, such as Lo.R.a., it is possible to create monitoring systems that were unimaginable until a few years ago.
Smart City
Smart cities are the result of urban planning that is aware of the role that digital technologies can play in modernizing and making urban processes much more efficient, with the aim of improving the widespread quality of places, services and above all the lives of citizens, in order to promptly fulfill their needs.
The range of IoT solutions that connect a Smart City is dramatically heterogeneous and allows to establish an effective relationship between a service and the citizen who uses it. Among different examples we find the smart management of waste and water resources, the control of energy consumption, automatic irrigation systems, traffic lights, parking areas and smart lighting systems.
The governance of a Smart City involves a considerable burden, as beyond the positive effects in terms of benefits for citizens, it is necessary to guarantee those interoperability conditions that are essential to be able to add services on top of already existing ones. To this aim, public administrations are trying to adopt resources such as Open Data as much as possible, which are not limited by a specific technology, but can be used and shared between various applications. Open Data also help in facilitating transparency and competition in public procurement procedures for IoT services.
Smart Building
Moving from urban scale to building scale, we find Smart Building applications, at the basis of the so-called smart buildings, capable of managing and optimizing their systems thanks to the constant action of the sensors which guarantee monitoring and regulation. This is the case of smart control of lighting systems, electric power supply and special systems such as photovoltaic systems and other forms of renewable energy.
Smart Buildings, as well as civil infrastructures, in addition to traditional sensors, can use Smart Materials, because equipped with special chemical and physical properties capable of interacting with their surrounding environment.
Thanks to smart facade systems, for example, it is possible to carry out biometric measurements of the people present inside or the materials themselves can contain chemical reagents capable of self-repairing them in case cracks or other micro-breakage could occur.
These are not very widespread scenarios yet, which could however have rapid implementation over the next few years when these technologies will certainly become more affordable on an economic level and will solidly enter production.
Smart Home
Although they might appear almost synonymous, Smart Building and Smart Home refer to rather different application contexts. While the first, as we have seen, refers to the entire building system and its connection with the urban system in which it is contextualized, the Smart Home, or intelligent home, considers above all the aspects linked to the smart functions of which a single home currently can dispose.
Home automation applications have been at the basis of a continuously growing technological industry for years and represent the most consumer and B2C area of the Internet of Things world. Systems such as controlled sockets, burglar alarms, cameras, thermostats, lamps, and other small and large intelligent appliances are now widespread, and it is possible to control them via proprietary apps or thanks to integration with Amazon's Alexa and Google Nest's ecosystems, which allow you to manage a wide range of interconnected devices through a single software platform.
One of the main advantages of the Smart Home is that to guarantee the connectivity of IoT systems, a simple home Wi-Fi router connected to the internet is enough. On the other hand, these are rather vulnerable systems in terms of security, even if their lack of strategic relevance makes them less interesting than other contexts in the eyes of cybercriminals.
In any case, it is advisable not to underestimate the problem, because a malicious hacker could, for example, penetrate the home network through a weakness in an IoT device (e.g. default login, predictable password, etc.) and steal sensitive data, such as accesses to the financial services we use by connecting, via the internet, from home devices.
Smart Mobility
The topic of mobility is one of the fundamental pillars of innovation, as it is continuously reiterated by EU programs, which allow to obtain important funding to activate projects based on sustainable mobility and intelligent mobility, two dimensions that very often tend to be the same.
Smart mobility affects many industrial fields, ranging from autonomous driving, which equips vehicles with many IoT systems, attracting very substantial investments into its orbit, up to urban traffic control, which connects with Smart City devices. Also interesting are the areas linked to the safety of traffic infrastructures (bridges, overpasses, etc.), thanks to their sensors that allow the safety status of involved structures to be monitored in real time.
Smart Mobility is not limited to road traffic and cars but is applied perfectly to any type of vehicle (Smart Vehicles) with interesting applications in railway and maritime sectors.
Smart Agriculture
An incredibly extended and fascinating world, in which the Internet of Things can unleash all its potential, is represented by Smart Agriculture, otherwise known as Precision Agriculture. This essentially means the entire range of services and solutions that allow the processes used in agricultural production to be digitalized, thanks to sensors and applications that allow us to rationalize and reduce waste in the consumption of water, electricity, fertilizers, agrochemicals, and other resources necessary to support crops.
Environmental sensors allow the monitoring of very wide areas, for example with the help of drones, and in general contributes to making the entire agricultural production chain more efficient and sustainable, in what is generically classified under the title of Agrifood.