Fast Prototyping of the Internet of Things solutions with IBM Bluemix

Abstract

Fast prototyping for IoT projects has gained attraction in many industries. Today's IT market requires new faster techniques to get business advantages in different industries starting from the energy consumption and retail to the manufacturing, services, and agriculture. Combining sensors and actuators, embedded systems and networks with cloud computing platforms and cognitive services in one project is a very promising approach to address industry needs. Thus, system developers have to be familiar with many design technologies and best practices. At the same time, this approach requires a profound change in the way of interaction between major IoT market actors: suppliers and consumers of cloud platfrm and services, teams of developers and universities. In this paper, we analyze how to build effectively interaction of major IoT market actors and discuss a platform for such collaboration. We present a collaborative framework for fast prototyping of IoT solutions with different stakeholders participating. The paper demonstrates the results of this approach in the case of interaction between vendor, university, and industry. We consider a number of technological and practical aspects of this collaborative framework using IBM Bluemix cloud platform and IoT templates. We tested this approach in IoT hackathon with a participation of a vendor, local business partners, and industry representatives. Projects developed during this hackathon will be used to illustrate results achieved by applying introduced concept for IoT solutions prototyping.

Student Hackathons for Low Cost Digital Solutions

“…Examples of these are the Greenpower competitions [10], the Autodesk Design for Industry Challenge [11] or the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) programs [12]. Hackathons have been adopted in a variety of digital manufacturing related domains such as industrial control research [13], software engineering [14], internet of things [15] to name a few. For this reason, the rest of this work presents the results of applying student hackathons to drive a solution development pathway while offering students the opportunity to broad their knowledge and build technical skills on digital solutions for manufacturing SMEs much needed to help close the skills gap and fill the roles that Industry 4.0 demands.…”

A Review of Data Synchronization and Consistency Frameworks for Mobile Cloud Applications

“…Many commercial services provide back-end cloud storage services to link mobile and web applications to the cloud, such as IBM Bluemix Mobile Cloud Service [63] [64]. Services of Firebase [65] and Kinvey [66], also aid app developers to connect their apps to cloud backend.…”

Interworking Layer of Distributed MQTT Brokers

“…Although typical IoT systems place an MQTT broker in the cloud [3] as shown in Fig. 2 (a), this centralized architecture can cause some issues due to the following characteristics of IoT data:…”