Taking someone else’s place is never easy, especially when you are the project manager of a big H2020 EU project like AGILE (www.agile-iot.eu). However, despite all the difficulties and obstacles, and I would like to use this opportunity to thank all the exceptional people that are part of a great consortium (the researchers, developers, biz guys, who I now call friends), I can say that WE did it very well! To be clear, I was already aware of that, but to read the conclusion of the official final review from the EU Commission which says “Project has delivered exceptional results with significant immediate or potential impact” is priceless!!!
So now you are probably wondering what’s next, right? As I mentioned earlier, it’s time to say goodbye to AGILE ☹
This amazing project has run its course, as it happens to all EU projects. But (now you know that) AGILE is not just another EU project. This is one more thing that makes it unique. AGILE is not dead! It has simply changed its name into ECLIPSE AGAIL. From now on, it will be fully Open Source and hosted by the Eclipse IoT Working group.
Our Orange Belgium partner presented during the final project review the “Port Area Monitoring for Public Safety” pilot project
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Our partner Worldline explains and demonstrates the pilot project they were in charge of
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Would you like to know more about the recommenders we have put in place in our various pilot projects? Discover the video made by our partner TU Graz!
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The EU funded AGILE project is over. Somewhere I read that projects are like villains in horror movies: they just won’t die. Even when you’ve doused them in gasoline, set them on fire, then dumped them in a river…well, they just keep coming back! This is the case of the AGILE project: you can change the Project Officer, the Project Coordinator, some Partners, some Pilot (…or anything else, given it starts with a P 😀 ), but you cannot change the pioneering and outstanding contribution it gave to the definition of a fully open-source and modular gateway for the IoT! And no, AGILE won’t die, exactly as these villains of horror movies: it will stay alive through the Eclipse AGAIL open source project. Don’t hesitate to try it, adopt it and contribute back to it!
Massimo Vecchio,
Project Coordinator of the AGILE project
AirEx is a novel smart home technology that helps reducing the home’s heat demand, without compromising moisture build-up and subsequently damp and indoor air quality. AirEx uses smart sensors to monitor and analyse environmental conditions while its cloud-based algorithms determine the vent state to automatically regulate airflow. It uses AI to predict occupants’ behaviour and weather patterns for more efficient airflow optimisation. Via improved thermal efficiency of the building fabric, the system can reduce heating energy bills by 15%, which means 2-3 years payback. AirEx’s key customers are Social Housing Associations who have the mandate to improve the energy efficiency of their building stock.
Within the scope of Agile IoT project, we had the opportunity to develop standard APIs using Agile IoT to interact to our product, AirEx and make it therefore more agnostic with regards to integration with third party connected devices and infrastructure. During this project the key component we utilised is ‘Connectivity and Communication Protocols’, where we managed to extend this component via implementing agile-rfm69 protocol to communicate using HopeRF RFM69 module.
We found that the communications component has a reasonable API and there is existing support for a number of useful technologies. For example, it provides a useful outline for integrating BLE sensors within Linux. During this Agile IoT project we have successfully developed communication protocols with Bluetooth-enabled low energy temperature and humidity sensors, which is a significant step in our development considering the increased need for connected devices.
One of the main benefits of using Agile IoT was that it did not require much effort for actual deployment: once the system is working, deploying new devices via resin.io requires minimal effort, since new devices will pull down the appropriate images automatically.
Furthermore, the use of Agile IoT does not require much memory: containers use limited RAM, some as little as 20MB and hence it works very efficiently on a Raspberry Pi. Nor did we experience any processor issues with using Agile IoT on Raspberry Pi 3 or even on Pi Zero.
The critical requirements are stability of the platform, extensibility and the ability to update remotely – all of which have been successfully managed using Agile IoT.
In the future we are keen to continue to use Agile-BLE in order to integrate additional sensors. In addition, once the Agile hub becomes LoRaWAN-enabled we will be very keen to explore the possibility of using Agile hub.
Our Software Lead is presenting some of the key outcomes of the project via this IoT Webinar:
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This other video demos AirEx on AGILE:
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Sensinov is a start-up specializing in smart building and industrial IoT setups offering an interoperability as a service which aims at coping with huge device diversity, lifecycle management, and continuous operations of IoT solutions.
The diversity of devices and connectivity networks in smart building can only grow with new and emerging devices that are entering the mainstream. To ensure future proof and sustainable deployment of smart buildings, there is a need to:
Transform the collected data into uniform data formats ensuring their proper handling by applications and IoT platforms. By doing so, the management of the life cycle (changing device vendor or changing IoT platform provider) becomes an easy task for IoT project owners.
Process the data locally and send only processed/filtered data to the cloud. Indeed, huge amounts of data sets could be generated. It is neither beneficial nor economically viable to send all the data to the cloud. Processing data locally is an emerging technical and business imperative. It is usually performed through running application logic closer to the IoT devices: i.e. where the data is generated.
Sensinov was selected for an open call of H2020 Agile IoT project. Our role in the project was to integrate Agile IoT gateways in the Watson IoT platform. This was an excellent opportunity for Sensinov to demonstrate its interoperability platform in action. Among our findings:
Agile IoT provides us a perfect development environment to cope with industrial IoT requirements from real life projects.
These requirements include:
The management of diversity in IoT devices and protocols
The enhancement of efficiency through local processing
Indeed, the role of the Agile IoT gateway is to perform several functions needed for running cost optimized IoT projects. These functions include
Device connectivity
Protocol adaptation
Data processing close to the devices
Securing IoT communications
Ensuring system extensibility through the installation of new applications
As a smart building specialist without any plan to build hardware, Agile IoT provides a perfect solution for deployment scenarios where the need to add a gateway is necessary with the absence of local and extensible local processing capabilities. Sensinov is currently considering the inclusion of an Agile IoT compatible gateway in its portfolio, partnering with a hardware player who adheres to the Agile IoT principles. In interest to our roadmap and strategy, Agile IoT offers us several interesting value propositions including:
A rich set of connectors (Enocean, ZWave, ZigBee, BLE, etc)
An open source approach which avoids lock-in for Sensinov as a provider and for our customers
The development of an ecosystem of providers
Modular hardware and software to adapt to different deployment needs
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Maintaining appropriate conditions in the storage and transport of sensitive products is an age-old problem for food supply chains. Many types of goods can be easily damaged by improper variations in temperature while others can be severely affected by shocks or excessive duration of transport. The impact from unsuitable transport and storage for wine is far greater than the mere cost of damaged goods, as it also includes brand damage for companies such as wine producers, wholesalers, retailers and logistics companies. The size of the problem is very large as nearly 5% of bottled wine worldwide is damaged, up to 25% is negatively affected, and the uprise in quality problems due to improper storage settings , along with 20% of the quality wine consumed worldwide is counterfeit.
ISTMOS monitoring platform allows the supply chain stakeholders of bottled wine to monitor the most critical parameters affecting wine quality during its storage and transportation. Delivering traceability information down to the level of each individual bottle, the platform includes complex-event processing, rule and alert management and an analytics engine. We employ monitoring stations (fixed for storage and mobile for transportation) and collect and analyze the information on our own IoT platform which relies on FI-WARE enablers, particularly PERSEO complex event processing and ORION context broker.
Wineries and retailers already have various types of measurement instruments in place to control temperature and humidity in wine storage spaces. Soon, an increasing number of stakeholders in the wine supply chain will be equipped with a plethora of IoT devices from different hardware vendors to measure wine storage environments. These sensors will operate across a wide range of wireless communication protocols, notably BLE and LoRaWAN, where low-power consumption is important, but also WiFi or NB-IoT.
In this market, ISTMOS needs to offer an open architecture solution which doesn’t lock customers into using a restricted set of devices or protocols. The modular, multi-protocol gateway architecture proposed by AGILE represents a promising approach to address the interoperability challenge faced by ISTMOS.
Therefore, we have evaluated AGILE as an interoperability solution for ISTMOS gateways. We ported ISTMOS gateway controller logic to the AGILE architecture by developing the necessary containerized applications that interact with several components of the AGILE stack.
We have used AGILE Node-RED for reading and collecting information from BLE and LoraWAN channels (sensors) and sending data via WiFi or NB-IoT to the external cloud services used by ISTMOS (based on FIWARE enablers).
The results of the ISTMOS-AGILE integration have been evaluated through a pilot case study in collaboration with two large Greek wineries.
Overall, AGILE offered a good approach for prototyping of devices. The interfaces to Cloud platforms are supportive, while remote fleet management is offering additional possibilities for the offer of custom services. AGILE is a big step in the right direction and has offered us valuable experiences and knowledge that will be further exploited.
The main objective of the experiment considers the integration of Senseioty, the FlairBit softwareplatform to accelerate the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) Big Data Analytics, with the Agile IoT gateway and services. This integration allows Senseioty to benefit in flexibility both in terms ofdata ingestion and edge computing capabilities.
From a technical standpoint, joining the Agile-IoT ecosystem allowed FlairBit to benefit from themany innovative services provided by the Agile-IoT platform that are also available in Senseiotyafter the integration carried out in the proposed project. The Agile IoT gateway modularity andcompliance with many architectures at the hardware level provide support for various wirelessand wired IoT networking technologies. Senseioty benefits from these additional protocols as away to create new data sources and IoT connectors which in turn creates data diversity andheterogeneity. These features allow to speed-up the development of the integrated solution and toreduce the time-to-market for the applications built on-top-of Senseioty. We have alsobenchmarked other gateways, but they usually lack the rapid and smooth integration of software components with third party systems.
In fact, at the software level, the Agile IoT stack provides data collection and managementcapabilities on the gateway, an intuitive interface for device management, a visual workflow editorfor creating integration patterns with less coding, and an IoT marketplace for releasing theresulting end-to-end applications. Senseioty generates data analytics applications and workflowsto be pushed as close as possible to the data sources and the devices, hence Agile IoT gateway representsthe perfect match to deploy secure, scalable and reliable Senseioty edge-computing applications.
The overall system resulting from the integration of the Agile IoT stack and Senseioty allows
application developers to rapidly create and deploy innovative IoT applications without the necessity to customize a given IoT platform which in turn,, saves development time and resources.
Moreover, FlairBit, as an IoT platform provider, can now benefit from the Agile IoT ecosystem as away to boost its user and developer base and create new revenue streams, since Senseioty cannow be exploited and used in innovative cross-domain applications.
Furthermore, , in accessing the Agile-IoT ecosystem, FlairBit benefits from the different competencies,technologies, and use cases of the partners in the consortium. From a business perspective, itallows the generation of partnership to speed-up the go-to-market strategy in new markets for FlairBit.In fact, Agile-IoT provides an interoperability framework to enable IoT platforms to open up accessto their devices/services in a controlled and secure manner. This pursues the acquisition of new revenuestreams for offering added value services along with receiving missing ingredients that enrichFlairBit business offerings.
To conclude, the open source software Agile-IoT consortium is developing with a business-friendly license that allows FlairBit’s Senseioty IoT platforms to be Agile-IoT compliant, and at the same time to remain proprietary which allows FlairBit to increase its own product value and unlocking potential businesses in new markets. Simultaneously, FlairBit open sourced software components extend the Agile IoT stack and enables Big-Data Analytics on-top-of Agile IoT gateway, based on open source technologies (e.g., Apache Cassandra, Apache Zeppelin, Apache Beam).
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It’s funny that almost no one talks about Information, yet everyone is connecting more and more devices to the internet and storing their data. And if they are not extracting information from that data, why bother storing it in the first place?
Seconds can be the differentiator between fixed and broken, faulty -working, accident-good fortune , life or death.
Fog computing becomes the standard due to firstly having the need of information in real-time but simultaneously , the need of data to be correlated, something that is impossible, if our processing is centered in either our devices or our datacenter.
The Agile Gateway was incredible in assisting us to understand how we could bring this decentralized value to our business and platform which enabled us to offer a better service with better performance and responsiveness.
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