From Smart Homes to Smart Cities: Opportunities and Challenges from an Industrial Perspective

Abstract

Driven by the advances in hardware technologies, smart environments (or “pervasive computing”) already penetrate many spaces of our daily live. Smart Homes, Smart Buildings and larger ensembles like airports, hospitals or university campuses are already equipped with a multitude of mobile terminals, embedded devices as well as connected sensors and actuators. Some activities already envision the “Smart City” which uses the opportunities provided by pervasive computing technologies to the benefits of their inhabitants. In such a setting, smart environments are expected to play a crucial role for coping with the challenges of urbanization and demographic chance e.g. regarding sustainability, energy distribution, mobility, health or public safety/security.

While “smartness” is often centered on a user perspective, we give the business perspective of a large industrial supplier of infrastructures and solutions. This includes application scenarios for smart cities and an outline of the involved business- and research challenges. A particular focus will be the setup and energy efficient operation of smart infrastructures and data centers. While “autonomic computing principles” like self-configuration, self-healing, self-protection, and self-optimization are well understood for enterprise IT infrastructures, their application to highly-distributed, heterogeneous pervasive computing systems is less straightforward. A particular concern is the incorporation of energy efficiency in such settings. This involves a reduction of the rapidly raising IT energy costs and concepts for making software applications and services more aware of their energy consumption. It is therefore the basis for the identification of IT energy hotspots in software and IT system architecture and therefore for a sustainable development and operation of smart environments