AIOTI Strategic Foresight Through Digital Leadership: IoT and Edge Computing Convergence
AIOTI has published its vision on IoT and Edge Computing convergence.
The document examines arguments, observations, experiences and reflections from relevant events and documents that underline IoT and edge consumer, business, industrial sector-specific perspectives based on a review of technology trends. It also recognises potential new innovative concepts and possible obstacles to future research and innovation. In summary:
- Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and edge computing are at the core of digitalisation, with key industrial sectors seeing great potential in these technologies.
- New IoT and edge capabilities drive the decentralisation of architectures and topologies and accelerate the decarbonisation of applications in industrial sectors.
- Edge computing has triggered a paradigm shift in cloud computing. There is a clear need to orchestrate resources to create a “computing continuum”.
- We are seeing calls for a new operating system at the edge for decentralised IoT/IIoT computing architectures and real-time processing.
- Open industrial IoT edge computing platforms must strive for leadership to address the challenges of the evolving digital age.
The ideas and trends identified have been consolidated into four main recommendations.
Europe must build on its strengths in electronic control systems, safety-critical systems, sensing and automation, mechatronics and microelectronics/microsystems, privacy-preserving technologies, and intelligent connectivity.
A single market for IoT/IIoT edge computing is required. There is a need for a single market for IoT/edge devices and systems founded on open standards, able to connect seamlessly and on a plug-and-play basis to the edge and the cloud.
Europe needs a trustworthy infrastructure that builds on flexible federation and a “fair business offer” to manage vast amount of IoT-generated data and change how ownership and location of data are treated. The EU needs to identify the catalysts that may speed up innovation at the edge, to scale-up and invest in infrastructure, enable orchestration across relevant players in the value chain, and facilitate coordination on horizontal issues such as interoperability and open standards.
Europe needs to capitalise on the shift of value creation to the edge. It can do this by further accelerating the technological developments of IoT and edge computing, and support the convergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), digital twins, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) and intelligent connectivity at the edge by creating large-scale open edge IoT projects.
Full document could be downloaded here.