An Integrated LoRa-Based IoT Platform Serving Smart Farming and Agro-Logistics

The value chain of agri-food is radically changed due the fact that consumers, as well as various players in the agro-logistics chain, seek for increased and trustful food safety. Given the specific characteristics of the agri-food supply chain, having numerous origin points, several aggregations hubs at different levels and then again numerous points of sales, the need of a holistic approach in collecting, forwarding and interpreting data in an interoperable way is a dire need. In this chapter, the authors present the architecture of the traceability platform KalaΘosTM and its IoT management module called, GP CoreIoTTM. The KalaΘos infrastructure includes a network of sensors devices at farms, equipment, trucks, aggregation, processing, and logistics facilities, connected to a network of LoRa gateways. Its open architecture focuses on semantic and syntactic interoperability approaches for joint exploitation of data collected and managed by other systems with similar aims and scope.

Manufacturing, Control, and Automation

This chapter identifies the common needs for process controls and automation that include methodologies to enable in-situ-level process controls, optimization at the plant or industry level, open-architecture software tools, adaptive control systems, methods and diagnostic tools for condition-based maintenance of process equipment in a manufacturing industry.

The New Edge. Building and Deploying a New State of the Art, High Speed Acquisition, Automation and Analytics Platform for Drilling, Completions, Production, and Renewable Energy Applications

This paper discusses the architecture, development, and deployment of a new state-of-the-art data acquisition and analytics platform. The system is designed to capture and store data for all phases of well construction and is also suited to aggregating data from renewable energy sources such as offshore wind turbines. In today's well construction world it is vitally important that an edge platform can capture high-quality, high-speed data. It needs to be able to universally translate data from many protocols and provide outbound data streams that are easy to consume and store. The high-quality data streams can then be queried by high-value analytics that ultimately deliver predictive and prescriptive solutions. Our approach was to identify the market pain and develop a system that solved the digital requirements for our customers who needed a field-deployed and field-supported, agnostic digital ecosystem. In the new "Digital Oilfield" the requirements for data capture, aggregation, edge computing, automation, cloud infrastructure and office applications are all expanding rapidly. Most "Edge" solutions are cloud-based and come from purely digital companies who have little or no domain knowledge or field infrastructure with which to deploy and maintain those systems. It was observed that an "Edge" solution was required that remained highly performant even if network connectivity from the cloud to the location was lost. This paper will also discuss the novel approach to the development of this platform with an oil & gas operator's subject matter experts being embedded in the contractor's product development team. The result being an end-to-end solution designed for both the requirements of the field and the office. The customer had previously built its own system internally, but was looking for a partner who could update and maintain an evergreen technology stack, increase speed and capability and be able to maintain and support a scalable product worldwide on all its operational locations. We will explain the development process, early field testing and commercialization of this product and the results that were achieved. This new system will have an open architecture that allows other digital companies to leverage the high-speed data and host their applications on the platform both on the wellsite and in the office. The system also provides interoperability with the machines on location, this interoperability enables a wide range of 3rd parties to be able to deliver automated applications on the well location. This technology will enable significant performance improvements in drilling and completion operations.

Optimisation of Technological Processes by Solving Inverse Problem through Block-Wise-Transform-Reduction Method Using Open Architecture Sensor Platform

This paper presents an open architecture for a sensor platform for the processing, collection, and image reconstruction from measurement data. This paper focuses on ultrasound tomography in block-wise-transform-reduction image reconstruction. The advantage of the presented solution, which is part of the project “Next-generation industrial tomography platform for process diagnostics and control”, is the ability to analyze spatial data and process it quickly. The developed solution includes industrial tomography, big data, smart sensors, computational intelligence algorithms, and cloud computing. Along with the measurement platform, we validate the methods that incorporate image compression into the reconstruction process, speeding up computation and simplifying the regularisation of solving the inverse tomography problem. The algorithm is based on discrete transformation. This method uses compression on each block of the image separately. According to the experiments, this solution is much more efficient than deterministic methods. A feature of this method is that it can be directly incorporated into the compression process of the reconstructed image. Thus, the proposed solution allows tomographic sensor-based process control, multidimensional industrial process control, and big data analysis.

Evolution of Approaches to Countering Hybrid Threats in the European Union’s Strategic Planning

This article aims to identify the main components of the EU approach to countering hybrid threats. To achieve this goal, research questions were posed: 1) How does the theory of hybrid warfare define hybrid threats, what are its strengths and weaknesses? 2) How is the approach to combating hybrid threats regulated in the EU? 3) What changes are taking place in this approach under the influence of trends in recent years, including the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic? The author concludes that the “open architecture” of the hybrid war theory, the wide possibilities of interpreting the definition of hybrid threats allow us to improve practical measures and theoretical approaches to security problems. However, as economic competition and political contradictions under geopolitical rivalry deepen, the approach to countering hybrid threats is hyper politicized, being used to justify sanctions pressure, strengthening military blocs or massive psychological campaigns against a political adversary. The EU tries to develop and improve a systemic approach to ensuring security in the context of the growth of hybrid threats. However, this approach is increasingly deformed under the influence of above-mentioned hyperpoliticization. This is especially evident in the EU’s attitude towards Russia and China, which are constantly accused of creating hybrid threats. The excessive use of the rhetoric of the hybrid war theory in the EU discourse jeopardizes the security of Europe.

Polymer-loaded three dimensional microwave cavities for hybrid quantum systems

Microwave cavity resonators are crucial components of many quantum technologies and are a promising platform for hybrid quantum systems, as their open architecture enables the integration of multiple subsystems inside the cavity volume. To support these subsystems within the cavity, auxiliary structures are often required, but the effects of these structures on the microwave cavity mode are difficult to predict due to a lack of a priori knowledge of the materials’ response in the microwave regime. Understanding these effects becomes even more important when frequency matching is critical and tuning is limited, for example, when matching microwave modes to atomic resonances. Here, we study the microwave cavity mode in the presence of three commonly-used machinable polymers, paying particular attention to the change in resonance and the dissipation of energy. We demonstrate how to use the derived dielectric coefficient and loss tangent parameters for cavity design in a test case, wherein we match a polymer-filled 3D microwave cavity to a hyperfine transition in rubidium.

Underwater Ad-Hoc Networks: A Review

Underwater sensor networks have become increasingly interesting in the past four decades. They can be used in a multitude of scenarios, commercial and military alike. Underwater networks can communicate in several ways, but when nodes are far apart, underwater acoustic communication is the only feasible way. The complex underwater acoustic channel puts high demands on the network protocols. The physical layer needs to contend with short coherence times, high intersymbol interference and significant Doppler spread. The routing protocol needs to handle intermittent connectivity and mobile network topologies, such as autonomous underwater vehicle networks. The medium access control protocol needs to manage medium access with high latency and potentially high packet loss ratios without congesting the network. The available acoustic modems are still rather expensive, which limits the size of a sensor network. Voices have also been raised from the academia for a paradigm shift, from hardware-defined, proprietary modems to software-defined, open-architecture modems, in order to accelerate research in the field and enable interoperability. This paper reviews the recent advancements in designing and implementing underwater networks on several levels and discusses some interesting approaches to underwater ad-hoc networking. The focus lies on acoustic communication.<br>