The IoT technology and market landscape will become increasingly complex in the longer term i.e. 10+ years from nowiv, especially after IoT technologies will have proven their full potential in business-critical and privacy-sensitive scenarios. An important shift is expected to happen as technology evolutions will allow to safely employ IoT systems in scenarios involving actuation and characterized by stricter requirements in terms of dependability, security, privacy and safety constraints, resulting in convergence between IoT and Cyber Physical Systemsv (CPS). Attracted by the trend, several organizations have started studying how to employ IoT systems also to support tasks involving actuation and control in business-critical conditions, resulting in a demand for more dependable and ―smart II IoT systems. However, in order to turn such vision in reality, many issues must still be faced, including:
- Heterogeneity and (lack of) interoperability.
- Difficulty of implementing ―Smart Behaviours in open collaboration context.
- Security and safety.
- Enforcement of Privacy and Data Ownership policies.
- Business models colliding with long-term resilience and survivability of IoT services
- Market Fragmentation and incumbency of large players
While EU-based initiatives and policies are doing significant amount of work to tackle such issues, often with very positive results, solutions suitable to tackle challenges arising for futuristic IoT usage scenarios are still missing. Future critical issues may be hiding under the hood already now and be ready to appear in the close future, putting at stake user acceptance and the credibility of the whole eco-system of IoT solutions vendors, integrators and adopters and hindering wider adoption of IoT solutions in potentially valuable markets.
In order to tackle the aforementioned challenges, the BRAIN-IoT (model-Based fRamework for dependable sensing and Actuation in INtelligent decentralized IoT systems) project focuses on complex scenarios, where actuation and control are cooperatively supported by populations of heterogeneous IoT systems. In such a complex context, many initiatives fall into the temptation of developing new IoT platforms, protocols, models or tools aiming to deliver the ultimate solution that will solve all the IoT challenges and become ―the II reference IoT platform or standard. Instead, usually they result in the creation of ―yet-another II IoT solution or standard.
