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Smart cities include complex ICT ecosystems, whose definition requires the cooperation of several software systems. Among them, Intelligent Public Transportation Systems (IPTS) aim to effectively exploit public transit resources. Still, adopting an IPTS is non-trivial. Off-the-shelf IPTS are often tied to specific technologies and, thus, not easy to integrate within existing software ecosystems. Moreover, despite IPTS introduce several peculiar issues, there is a lack of domain-specific reference architectures, which would significantly ease the work of practitioners. To fill this gap, starting from the experience gained with the Hitachi Rail company in deploying a large-scale IPTS, we identify a set of requirements for IPTS, and propose a domain-specific reference architecture, compliant with these requirements, whose primary objective is facilitating and standardizing the design of IPTS, by providing guidelines to IPTS designers. Consequently, it eases also the interoperability among different IPTSs. As an example of an IPTS obtainable from the architecture, we present a solution currently deployed by Hitachi in a major Italian city. Still, being independent from the specific considered urban scenario, the architecture can be easily instantiated in different cities with similar needs. Finally, we discuss some research challenges which should be further investigated in this domain.

This paper presents SPHERE, a project aimed at the realization of an integrated framework to abstract the hardware complexity of interconnected, modern system-on-chips (SoC) and simplify the management of their heterogeneous computational resources. The SPHERE framework leverages hypervisor technology to virtualize computational resources and isolate the behavior of different subsystems running on the same platform, while providing safety, security, and real-time communication mechanisms. The main challenges addressed by SPHERE are discussed in the paper along with a set of new technologies developed in the context of the project. They include isolation mechanisms for mixed-criticality applications, predictable I/O virtualization, the management of time-sensitive networks with heterogeneous traffic flows, and the management of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to provide efficient implementations for cryptography modules, as well as hardware acceleration for deep neural networks. The SPHERE architecture is validated through an autonomous driving use-case.

Technological development and market expansion offer an increased availability of resources and computing power on IoT nodes at affordable cost. The edge computing paradigm allows keeping locally on the edge of the network a part of computing, while keeping all advantages of the cloud and adding support for privacy, real-time and network resilience. This can be further improved in IoT applications by exibly harvesting resources on IoT nodes, by moving part of the computing tasks related to data from the edge server to the nodes, raising the abstraction level of the data aspects of the architecture and potentially enabling larger IoT networks to be efficiently deployed and managed, in a stand-alone logic or as a component of edge architecture. Anyway, an e_cient energy management mechanism is needed for battery powered IoT networks, the most exible implementations, that dynamically balances task allocation and execution in order to In this paper we present a fuzzy logic based power management strategy for IoT subsystem that aims at maximizing the duration of the network by locally migrating part of the computing tasks between nodes. As our goal is to enable the deployment of semi-autonomic large IoT networks, our proposal does not rely on external resources for migration control and operates on a local basis to ensure scalability: at the best of our knowledge, this differentiates our proposal with respect to similar solutions available in literature.

Blockchain technology plays a pivotal role in the undergoing fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. It is considered a tremendous boost to company digitalization; thus, considerable investments in blockchain are being made. However, there is no single blockchain technology, but various solutions exist, and they cannot interoperate with one each other. The ecosystem envisioned by the Industry 4.0 does not have centralized management or leading organization, so a single blockchain solution cannot be imposed. The various organizations hold their own blockchains, which must interoperate seamlessly. Despite some solutions for blockchain interoperability being proposed, the problem is still open. This paper aims to devise a secure solution for blockchain interoperability. The proposed approach consists of a relay scheme based on Trusted Execution Environment to provide higher security guarantees than the current literature. In particular, the proposed solution adopts an off-chain secure computation element invoked by a smart contract on a blockchain to securely communicate with its peered counterpart. A prototype has been implemented and used for the performance assessment, e.g., to measure the latency increase due to cross-blockchain interactions. The achieved and reported experimental results show that the proposed security solution introduces an additional latency that is entirely tolerable for transactions. At the same time, the usage of the Trusted Execution Environment imposes a negligible overhead.