• Energy Research

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been evolving toward the creation of a cyber-physical world where everything can be found, activated, probed, interconnected, and updated, so that any possible interaction, both virtual and/or physical, can take place. A Crucial concept of this paradigm is that of the virtual object, which is the digital counterpart of any real (human or lifeless, static or mobile, solid or intangible) entity in the IoT. It has now become a major component of the current IoT platforms, supporting the discovery and mash up of services, fostering the creation of complex applications, improving the objects energy management efficiency, as well as addressing heterogeneity and scalability issues. This paper aims at providing the reader with a survey of the virtual object in the IoT world. Virtualness is addressed from several perspectives: historical evolution of its definitions, current functionalities assigned to the virtual object and how they tackle the main IoT challenges, and major IoT platforms, which implement these functionalities. Finally, we illustrate the lessons learned after having acquired a comprehensive view of the topic.

Energy usage inside buildings is a critical problem, especially considering high loads such as Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems: around 50% of the buildings’ energy demand resides in HVAC usage which causes a significant waste of energy resources due to improper uses. Usage awareness and efficient management have the potential to reduce related costs. However, strict saving policies may contrast with users’ comfort. In this sense, this paper proposes a multi-user multi-room smart energy management approach where a trade-off between the energy cost and the users’ thermal comfort is achieved. The proposed user-centric approach takes advantage of the novel paradigm of the Social Internet of Things to leverage a social consciousness and allow automated interactions between objects. Accordingly, the system automatically obtains the thermal profiles of both rooms and users. All these profiles are continuously updated based on the system experience and are then analysed through an optimization model to drive the selection of the most appropriate working times for HVACs. Experimental results in a real environment demonstrated the cognitive behaviour of the system which can adapt to users’ needs and ensure an acceptable comfort level while at the same time reducing energy costs compared to traditional usage.

Since the early stages of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), one of the application scenarios that have been affected the most by this new paradigm is mobility. Smart Cities have greatly benefited from the awareness of some people’s habits to develop efficient mobility services. In particular, knowing how people use public transportation services and move throughout urban infrastructure is crucial in several areas, among which the most prominent are tourism and transportation. Indeed, especially for Public Transportation Companies (PTCs), long- and short-term planning of the transit network requires having a thorough knowledge of the flows of passengers in and out vehicles. Thanks to the ubiquitous presence of Internet connections, this knowledge can be easily enabled by sensors deployed on board of public transport vehicles. In this paper, a Wi-Fi-based Automatic Bus pAssenger CoUnting System, named iABACUS, is presented. The objective of iABACUS is to observe and analyze urban mobility by tracking passengers throughout their journey on public transportation vehicles, without the need for them to take any action. Test results proves that iABACUS efficiently detects the number of devices with an active Wi-Fi interface, with an accuracy of 100% in the static case and almost 94% in the dynamic case. In the latter case, there is a random error that only appears when two bus stops are very close to each other.