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This paper summarizes the key findings of a qualitative study based on feedbacks of experts from the wind industry followed by a demo case of blockchain technology. This study includes investigation on mapping of supply chain and commodity products related end-to-end life cycle associated data and operational events. Furthermore, identification and blueprinting of the requirements have been pursued for enabling traceability at various stages of their life cycle utilizing blockchain. In this study context, blockchain offers digital traceability of operational events and associated data sharing with complete immutability, ownership, confidentiality, trust, and transparency across distributed supply chain which comprises of multiple stakeholders. In addition, digital technology intervention like IoT has been leveraged to support quality of operations in quantitative manner through real time data driven digitized operations. Thereby, providing economy of scale over operations execution on commodity products in wind industry. This study has focused only on bolts and fasteners associated commodity products and related supply chain. However, this provides a steppingstone foundation for future which can be scaled and mapped to any other commodity product and related supply chain in wind industry. Finally, this study also presents a demonstrator developed in a controlled lab environment to demystify the use of blockchain technology in related manufacturing and supply chain setups of the wind industry.

Over the last decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has undergone rapid and extensive changes becoming a key enabler of digital transformation across many sectors and driving the adoption of data-driven decision-making systems, remote management solutions and automation processes. The IoT approach evolved into a paradigm that integrates a broad set of technologies, each of which are advancing at a rapid pace. Increasingly, IoT technologies and solutions, in combination with Cloud and Edge computing, are leading profound transformation across a variety of sectors and supply chains. In this complex and articulated context, European stakeholders are mobilising forces to ensure the foundation of a digital transformation continuum able to strengthen the European data economy and ensure the rapid restart of our society. This requires the growth of a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem structured as a community of communities for European players to join forces and align on core priorities, by overcoming their main diversities (of interests, backgrounds, and contexts). Within this context, the EU-IoT Coordination and Support Action ambition is to act as a "hub" facilitating liaisons, collaborations, exchanges and promoting accordingly the activities and outcome of the various relevant projects and initiatives. The ambition is to support the development, harmonisation and consolidation of a common research, innovation, and policy roadmap for NGIoT in Europe that can guide efforts and translate into a concrete set of actions, processes and tools facilitating interaction and collaboration and grounding a vibrant and sustainable ecosystem. This document represents a preliminary step to build and ensure the growth of a vibrant European IoT ecosystem, and it includes: A critical mapping of various relevant efforts and initiatives. A guidance framework to capture experts’ input, together with main outcomes of the first EU-IoT Expert Groups (EG) workshop and Advisory Board (AB) consultations. A structured presentation of input gathered from ongoing EC projects that highlights major trends and priorities mapping them into the same framework used with the EG. A wrap-up view on how the EU-IoT plans to act as a living hub connecting the various forces and stakeholders for the growth of a vibrant and sustainable European IoT ecosystem.

The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual approach for SMEs to balance digital initiatives between digital maturity progression and operational performance benefits. Research shows that it is vital that companies digitalize their operations to remain competitive, yet SMEs are far behind with implementing digital initiatives. Therefore, this paper conducts a critical review of existing literature on digital maturity that highlights the need for a more pragmatic approach for SMEs. From this, an initial framework, that seeks to assist SMEs in prioritizing digital initiatives, is developed and tested on a single Danish SME. The model offers a pragmatic way of assessing digitalization projects in terms of digital maturity progression and operational performance effects. Future work should focus on testing the framework on more cases, alignment with additional literature and refine the assessment of operational performance.

We present an IoT based new energy service concept, as a product service system for residential contexts of urban India. The service as demand side energy management regulates air conditioning energy use through pre-paid measures, automation and flexible capacity for generating savings up to 20%. From this pool of savings, the service extends into an alternative offering to its customers for addressing a particular concern of social disparity within their homes in urban India. By describing the service components, the context of use and survey results of such a hybrid IoT service offering, we present the potential for combining energy savings and demand side management while provisioning social capital to customers for addressing social disparity within their homes.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are evolving towards the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT, which will bring together hyperconnectivity, edge computing, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Future IoT applications will apply AI methods, such as machine learning (ML) and neural networks (NNs), to optimize the processing of information, as well as to integrate robotic devices, drones, autonomous vehicles, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), and digital assistants. These applications will engender new products, services and experiences that will offer many benefits to businesses, consumers and industries. A more human-centred perspective will allow us to maximise the effects of the next generation of IoT/IIoT technologies and applications as we move towards the integration of intelligent objects with social capabilities that need to address the interactions between autonomous systems and humans in a seamless way.

The chapter presents an overview of the eight that are part of the European IoT Security and Privacy Projects initiative (IoT-ESP) addressing advanced concepts for end-to-end security in highly distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic IoT environments. The approaches presented are holistic and include identification and authentication, data protection and prevention against cyber-attacks at the device and system levels. The projects present architectures, concepts, methods and tools for open IoT platforms integrating evolving sensing, actuating, energy harvesting, networking and interface technologies. Platforms should provide connectivity and intelligence, actuation and control features, linkage to modular and ad-hoc cloud services, The IoT platforms used are compatible with existing international developments addressing object identity management, discovery services, virtualisation of objects, devices and infrastructures and trusted IoT approaches.

This paper reflects the outcome of several years of the IoT international cooperation between the EU and China and documents the state-of-the-art on IoT development in both regions and future cooperation avenues.