Designing CPS/IoT applications for smart buildings and cities

Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) technologies can be applied to many application domains. Examples include intelligent green house, intelligent transportation system, power distribution grid, smart home, smart building, and smart city. Among these application domains, some of them have been extensively studied, e.g., smart home and intelligent transportation systems. In the meantime, smart buildings and smart cities attract researchers and industries to investigate these two use scenarios. Well-designed IoT/CPS can reduce energy consumption, enhance safety in buildings and cities, or can increase the comfortability in the building. In the last few years, the research communities and industrial partners started to study and investigate these two use scenarios to develop prototype or commercial services for these two scenarios. Although many works have been conducted on these two scenarios, many challenges remain open. In this study, the authors study the development and challenges in five topics. They are middleware, computation model, fault tolerance, quality of data, and virtual run-time environment.