Supporting smart construction with dependable edge computing infrastructures and applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) such as the use of robots, sensors, actuators, electronic signalization and a variety of other Internet enabled physical devices may provide for new advanced smart applications to be used in construction in very near future. Such applications require real-time responses and are therefore time-critical. Therefore, in order to support collaboration, control, monitoring, supply management, safety and other construction processes, they have to meet dependability requirements, including requirements for high Quality of Service (QoS). Dependability and high QoS can be achieved by using adequate number and quality of computing resources, such as processing, memory and networking elements, geographically close to the smart environments. The goal of this study is to develop a practical edge computing architecture and design, which can be used in to support smart construction environments with high QoS. This study gives particular attention to the solution design, which relies on latest cloud and software engineering approaches and technologies, and provides elasticity, interoperability and adaptation to companies' specific needs. Two edge computing applications supporting video communications and construction process documentation are developed and demonstrate a viable edge computing design for smart construction.

Trust management in a blockchain based fog computing platform with trustless smart oracles

“…These days, the use of IoT devices provides new automation opportunities in practically all domains [14,15,16,7]. However, the IoT devices are known to generate the Big Data problem, which requires to address the great variety, velocity, veracity and volume of data through new approaches to software engineering.…”

“…Today, there is an increasing trend to build smart applications in various domains, such as smart homes, smart cities and communities, industry 4.0, robotics and similar [1,2,3,4,5]. The development of smart applications in the construction sector motivates this study [6,7]. Generally, the emergence of such applications is supported by three types of converging technologies: the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Cloud.…”

A Commodity SBC-Edge Cluster for Smart Cities

“…This paper provides a vision for future research in edge computing. Kochovski in [18] presented the design and architecture of smart IoT construction environments. The proposed three tier architecture provides virtualization and communication mechanism at three levels namely embedded systems, edge gateway and virtual clusters.…”

On Energy Efficiency and Performance Evaluation of Single Board Computer Based Clusters: A Hadoop Case Study

“…All of these works demonstrate constructing a cluster using SBCs at an affordable cost to researchers and students. More recently, authors in [20][21][22][23][24][25] have used SBC devices or clusters in Edge computing scenarios. However, none of these works provide a detailed performance and power efficiency of executing hadoop operations in such clusters.…”