IEEE WF-IoT Keynote: Orchestrating the Smarter Planet in the world of the Internet of Things
Chung-Sheng Li, Director of Commercial Systems, IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center
The introduction of pervasive and ubiquitous instrumentation within a smarter planet and internet of things leads to unprecedented real-time visibility of the power grid, traffic, transportation, water, oil & gas, and personal health. Interconnecting those distinct physical, people, and business worlds through ubiquitous instrumentation, even though still in its embryonic stage, has the potential to unleash a planet that is much greener, more efficient, more comfortable, and safer. In this talk, we will describe the opportunities and challenges after applying intelligence on interconnected and instrumented worlds and call out the system of systems trend on interconnecting these distinct but interdependent worlds. It has become increasingly crucial that digital representations of these distinct worlds (a.k.a. models) need to be created as a pre-requisite in order to assess the complexity, maneuver through uncertain environments and eventually achieve the predicted outcome. The starting point of such an Internet of Things solution is always the real world itself - whether it is smarter grids, buildings, supply chains or water systems. The instrumentation provides a mechanism to facilitate high-fidelity capture of the real world into the observed world, which is often based on models of the real world. These digital representations (or models) facilitate stitching together or assimilating the data captured from the instrumented world and enable interpolation and extrapolation of those areas where data were not available or contaminated. In many cases, these models allow the generation of the most plausible hypothesis to explain the available information. From these models, the expected outcome is generated through simulation and/or predictive analysis. The course of action based on the models is then taken for command and control (or actuating) the real world. A smarter planet solution requires optimal or near optimal orchestration of the control flow and information flow. The "music notes" of the orchestration really came from the behavior models assimilated from the real-world information. Consequently, developing models at the behavior levels is often necessary to facilitate the optimal orchestration of the generation, management, and continuous assurance of the business outcome.