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Building blocks for the Internet of Things
Basic building blocks for the Internet of Things are introduced by Nirvana Meratnia.
NIRVANA MERATNIA: Hello. My name is Nirvana Meratnia. This week, we will look into the internet of things technology and how it can make the transport and logistics sector smarter, more efficient, cost-effective, and error free. In this lecture, I will talk about basic building blocks of the internet of things. There is an increasing demand from both consumers and the business sectors from an end-to-end quality assurance of goods and products and their on-time delivery. Solutions to guarantee goods’ quality and their on-time delivery, however, should be cost-effective since the business sector is under increasing pressure to justify products’ costs. Simultaneously, the fact that regulations are increasing and becoming more and more complex makes compliance with them more difficult than ever.
To ensure the quality of goods and having a complete insight into transport and storage conditions, solutions are needed which literally function as the eyes, the ears, the nose, and the touch of the consumers and the businesses. Translating these senses into technological solutions technically means requiring the following three functionalities– check, track, and trace. Check is all about sensing and monitoring and online alarming and recording about what is happening or what has gone wrong or well. Track is all about knowing about the location, where the goods are. Where have they been? And trace is all about the ability to report and log what has been happening.
Requirements posed by the consumer and the business sector go hand in hand with the benefits that check, track, and trace offer, namely, the low cost, easy to use, instal, and maintain, timely alerts, end-to-end awareness, reduced spoilage, and compliance with regulations. Let’s consider a typical scenario. Goods are produced. They come together. They are stored somewhere. And from that gathering point, they are distributed. They are transported by different means– planes, ships, buses, trucks. They are going to warehouses. From there, they are gathered again and distributed. And they are sent to consumers or to the local shops. So we are talking about lots of gathering and dispersion. Smart logistics utilise sensors and sensing devices, identification, and localisation.
All of these smart objects are networked because they need to reach each other in the first place. They need to talk to each other. They need to communicate with each other. And they need to share their information. They also need to reach the world for the purpose of reporting and logging. These are actually the components of the internet of things. But what is internet of things? Internet Of Things, or IOT, is a network of physical objects or things which often remotely collect, process, and exchange data and are also remotely controlled, configured, and maintained.
Just as internet connects people, systems, and businesses to each other, the internet of things connects the physical objects, systems, businesses, processes, and services to each other to result in higher efficiency, accuracy, and economic benefit. In internet of things, everything is networked. Everything is connected, even very small things like sensors and actuators. We have witnessed recently explosion in the number of connected end devices. But internet of things is not all about networking. The major benefits can be achieved using distributed processes or distributed processing. Let’s consider an example. Consumer wants to know about the quality of goods– flowers, for instance, how they have been transported, the conditions that they have been stored in, and the conditions of the transport itself.
They would like to know the temperature, the humidity, and the interaction between different flowers and chemicals. This is to know that the flowers at home can remain healthy and fresh for more days. The approach to achieve this is to measure environmental conditions during the entire transportation and storage, very close to the flower itself. So not measuring in the entire plane or not measuring in the entire ship, but having an insight about the actual temperature and actual environmental conditions of each flower individually. And not only measuring but being able to reason about the freshness of the flower.
Moreover, it is important to know where the flower has been, under what conditions, in which ship, which truck, and which airplane, or in which country. So localisation becomes very handy in this case. It is also very important to be able to provide a complete picture of the entire journey. So, so far, I have talked about the basic building blocks of the internet of things, namely sensing, localisation, and networking.
In this video the Internet of Things technology, and its basic building blocks will be introduced.
There is an increasing demand for an end-to-end quality assurance of goods and products and their on-time delivery. Solutions to guarantee goods’ quality and their on-time delivery should be cost-effective. Simultaneously, the fact that regulations are increasing and becoming more and more complex makes compliance with them more difficult than ever.
To ensure the quality of goods and having a complete insight into transport and storage conditions, solutions are needed which literally function as the eyes, the ears, the nose, and the touch of the consumers and the businesses. Translating these senses into technological solutions technically means requiring the following three functionalities– check, track, and trace.
This article is from the online course:
Supply Chain Innovation: How Technology Can Create a Sustainable Future
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Supply Chain Innovation: How Technology Can Create a Sustainable Future
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