Use cases

Intelligent Transport Systems

This use case will assess the feasibility of IoT services in the domain of train integrity control, in particular for the logistics and maintenance of the rolling stock and on-track equipment. In this domain, the infrastructure and the resources that should be used are usually expensive and require a long-time in planning and execution. Therefore, the usage of the rail systems must be optimised at maximum, following security and safety directives due to the critical and strategic characteristics of the domain. This use case will involve logistic and maintenance activities. Within the ENACT scope, it will be focused on the logistics activities.

A logistic and maintenance scenario will be defined with the aim to provide information about the wagons that form the rolling stock. This scenario will cover not only optimizing cargo storing and classification, but also providing the appropriate resources to assure the correct functioning of the system. These will be only possible if the train integrity is confirmed when the different wagons are locked and moving together. This situation will assure the proper transportation of cargo or passengers, avoiding possible accidents. This use case will involve an infrastructure consisting of large sets of on-board sensors (e.g., Integrity Detector, Asset data info, Humidity and temperature sensors) and multiple gateways interacting with cloud resources.

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eHealth

The eHealth use case will develop a digital health system for supporting and helping various patients staying at home to the maximum extent possible either during treatment or care. Elderly people are one type of subject in this case study. The Digital health system will feature elderly care to allow the subjects to live at home as long as possible. Another type of patients that we consider is Diabetes patients that need to follow their glucose level and regularly be followed up by health personnel.

The digital health system will both control equipment normally present in smart homes to make life comfortable (automatic light control, door locks, heater control, etc.), and control various types of medical devices and sensors. These devices and sensors support the care and wellness for the specific patient and consist of a wide variety of types, including: blood pressure meter, scales, fall detection sensors, glucose meter, video surveillance, medicine reminder, indoor and out-door location etc). In addition, the system needs to integrate with other systems to provide information or alarms for example to response centres, care-givers, physicians, next of kin etc., and to feed information to medical systems such as electronic patient journals (EPJ). The pivotal role of the system's Edge Computing will be what we denote "the medical gateway" which integrates sensors and devices, controls the edge and ensures the right data are provided to the various stakeholders and to integrated systems such as EPJ.

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Smart Building

This use case will make use of smart building sensors, actuators and services. To this aim two sets of applications covering Smart Energy Efficiency and Smart Elderly Care will be developed within a Care Centre environment. Energy efficiency of new and existing buildings is crucial to achieve carbon emission reduction, and as we increasingly spend more time indoors, adequate levels of user comfort need to be guaranteed by the smart buildings. This implies a trade-off between energy use and the different aspects of users' comfort. They will be tested in the KUBIK, a smart building especially designed for testing new solutions for sustainable buildings. The use case will simulate a care centre consisting of small apartments where a group of elderly people live together. This care centre use case includes sensors and actuators that monitor and control the environment in order to ensure the safety of the facilities, to perform energy efficiency measures and also to support the care-takers in monitoring the wellbeing of users.

The trend for smart buildings is to provide an increasing range of services supported by an increasing number of IoT sensors and actuators. Example of such services or applications include thermal comfort, visual comfort, energy efficiency, security, etc. Applications in this space need to share building infrastructure and may have conflicting objectives. The solution requires a clear hierarchy between the different actuation scenarios.