Fast Prototyping of the Internet of Things Solutions with IBM Bluemix

Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2017 Fast Prototyping of the Internet of Things solutions with IBM Bluemix Aleksey Popov and Andrey Proletarsky Sergey Belov and Alexander Sorokin Bauman Moscow State Technical University, IBM Corporation, Moscow, Russia Presnenskaya emb. 5, Moscow, Russia [email protected], [email protected] Sergey [email protected], alexander [email protected] Abstract control physical processes much better than ever before. Fast prototyping for IoT projects has gained attrac- The true challenge today is to get maximum value from tion in many industries. Today’s IT market requires the Internet of Things and Smart technology incorpo- new faster techniques to get business advantages in dif- rated into factories, cities, buildings, retail environment, ferent industries starting from the energy consumption agriculture and healthcare [1]. and retail to the manufacturing, services, and agricul- The IoT is usually defined as the technology to dig- ture. Combining sensors and actuators, embedded sys- itize and connect everything into computing networks tems and networks with cloud computing platforms and [2]. Billions of physical assets already generating data cognitive services in one project is a very promising ap- volumes twice as fast as social networks and traditional proach to address industry needs. Thus, system devel- computers [3]. Highly varied and noisy streaming data opers have to be familiar with many design technolo- with short lifetime make it difficult to implement effec- gies and best practices. At the same time, this approach tive IoT projects in reasonable time. Hence the most IoT requires a profound change in the way of interaction data are not used for an active analytic optimization and between major IoT market actors: suppliers and con- control, but for single event detection. To reduce the sumers of cloud platfrm and services, teams of devel- complexity and to release the potential of data analytic opers and universities. In this paper, we analyze how and Smart services, the information industry needs to to build effectively interaction of major IoT market ac- implement robust cloud technology and cognitive com- tors and discuss a platform for such collaboration. We puting. present a collaborative framework for fast prototyping The speed of development is expected to grow signif- of IoT solutions with different stakeholders participat- icantly, which requires jointly orchestrated efforts of all ing. The paper demonstrates the results of this approach parties involved. The major resource to increase devel- in the case of interaction between vendor, university, opment speed is drastically reducing time to prototype and industry. We consider a number of technological the product while keeping its core analytic functional- and practical aspects of this collaborative framework ity. Fortunately with new cloud platforms for develop- using IBM Bluemix cloud platform and IoT templates. ers with a rich set of services embedded it now becomes We tested this approach in IoT hackathon with a par- possible to implement a prototype in just a few hours by ticipation of a vendor, local business partners, and in- applying the new approach, which will be given in later dustry representatives. Projects developed during this analysis. hackathon will be used to illustrate results achieved by With great progress made in recent years with scal- applying introduced concept for IoT solutions prototyp- able cloud computing, the development paradigm shift- ing. ing from the computation time to the development speed optimization. The fast-changing market makes time of 1. Introduction development the most valuable resource than any others. That means besides other things that the IoT edu- In order to achieve the sustainable development, hu- cation should be of more interest in academic world [4]. manity is now faced with global problems of air and soil We also believe that universities can play an even more contamination, lack of drinking water, carbon dioxide important role in the new technological environment by emissions, the fast growing city population and many addressing new issues which all parties involved in IoT others. Therefore we need the new powerful concept to projects are facing, by testing new frameworks in stu- improve and optimize our life everywhere where it is dent teams projects, hackathons, etc. possible. The Internet of Things as the promising infor- The paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we mation technology gives the ability to understand and will consider the production chain for IoT projects and introduce general collaborative framework. In Section 3 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41279 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-0-2 CC-BY-NC-ND 1064 ers in cloud market should create an active ecosystem of development teams across the globe. Therefore, cloud enterprises have to collaborate with universities to pro- vide practices to the market and to get an experienced feedback. We identify at least four challenging issues that can be effectively addressed here by the university research institutes. The professional competencies problem: IoT industry will require an interdisciplinary education and a flexible stuffing. Students as the most driven and creative workers, have to be involved in the developing. With big ambitions and wide skills, student society gen- erates most of the startups now. Therefore, IoT-enabled Figure 1. Internet of Things supply chain universities are possibly the best place to produce developers for the innovation industry. The actual experience problem: This issue addressed to distribute recent experience and best prac- we move on to build a practical template for fast proto- tices inside the ecosystem. When new assets or services typing of IoT services which will include infrastructure appear in the market, they should be tested and imple- component. In section 4, we’ll give the description of mented to demonstrate best use cases and carry out im- IoT hackathon at the Technical University. The projects provements. completed during a hackathon organized jointly by IBM The technology availability problem: This issue in Bauman Moscow State Technical University will be can be specified because most of IoT cases are based on shown in section 5. A successful project started during hardware and software. The technology availability as- this hackathon which was funded by a client right af- sumes the open access to the developing facilities to en- ter, will be demonstrated in section 6. In section 7, we able the cost and time effective prototyping. Solved by present the conclusions and discuss next steps. the universities technology centres, it allows to perform the advanced technology delivering into the developer’s 2. Problem Definition society, helps to accumulate best experiences, advances the methodological component of education. We would note, that this approach is relevant and is being imple- We define four actors in the IoT supply chain: a mented more or less. cloud service company (i); universities or academic The fundamental research problem: This issue is technology centers (ii); creative development teams or based on the market opportunities rather than pure func- individuals (iii); and customers (iv). Figure 1 shows the tional value, because of all IT industry focused on the basic concept of an IoT supply chain interactions: the demand generation. Therefore, the sufficient time and clockwise process of experience movement goes from analysis are required to summarize the actual market ex- cloud service company to customers (i); and the counter- periences and combine them with technology factors. clockwise process of technology movement - from cus- The challenge of bringing hundreds of teams of tomers to cloud service company(ii). While this area is highly professional IoT developers for sustainable de- relatively new for the research, we discuss some related velopment is difficult to address. Universities turn out works. to be ideally located on IoT development crossroads, so The IoT supply chain can be defined as an intelli- both industry and development team can leverage it to gent interconnected network that binds together multi- start a number of small projects when a large number of ple tiers of suppliers, contract manufacturers, service multidisciplinary developers required. providers, distributors and customers, physically located To understand the variety of skills for the IoT de- across different regions of the world [5]. By improv- velopment let’s consider a situation, where we analyze ing the entire supply chain efficiency all trading partners sensor data and control actuators by making decisions will greatly increase the economic benefit [6]. Taking on the cloud platform. The most common educational into account the important role of universities and the example is the irrigational systems in the greenhouse sustainable technologies improvement we revise this ap- [7, 8] or trash can in the Smart city [9]. First, devel- proach with the IoT supply chain (as it depicted in Fig- opers need to work with sensors on a physical layer ure 1). that require at least the hardware developer who will be To make profitable business long term, major play- 1065 able to solve the electrical connectivity problems and and Node.js) and device IoT layer (RaspberryPi, Ar- to register analog or digital information. Then they duino, Grove sensors and wireless interfaces). The ad- need to implement the system on chip (SoC) to ma- vantages of this platform

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