This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term “envirofied” Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management).

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We consider the recognition of dangerous situations in vehicle traffic. Unscented Kalman filters are used to predict vehicle trajectories within a short prediction horizon [t(0), t(0) + Delta t]. Based on this prediction, for each vehicle pair the mutual distance is computed for [t(0), t(0) + Delta t], whereby the distance accounts for the geometric distance, for the prediction uncertainties as well as for the spatial dimensions of the vehicles. If at least one of the mutual distances falls below a distance threshold epsilon within [t(0), t(0) + Delta t], then a dangerous situation arises for the cooperative group and may lead to an autonomous cooperative driving manoeuvre. This approach allows the usage of the system in a mixed environment (only some vehicles are cooperative and cognitive). Obstacles can also be handled. The key issues in this ongoing research work are the recognition and classification of dangerous situations and the formation of a cooperative group constituting an operational unit. A common relevant picture within a group coordinator fuses the necessary information from all cooperative vehicles of the group and forms the basis for situation recognition and classification. This paper is a step to expand a Cooperative Collision Warning System (CCWS) to an integrated Cooperative Collision Avoidance and Cooperative Collision Mitigation System (CCAMS)

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)