Naser Hossein Motlagh

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have attracted a lot of attention, since they represent a new potential market. Along with the maturity of the technology and relevant regulations, a worldwide deployment of these UAVs is expected. Thanks to the high mobility of drones, they can be used to provide a lot of applications, such as service delivery, pollution mitigation, farming, and in the rescue operations. Due to its ubiquitous usability, the UAV will play an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, and it may become the main key enabler of this vision. While these UAVs would be deployed for specific objectives (e.g., service delivery), they can be, at the same time, used to offer new IoT value-added services when they are equipped with suitable and remotely controllable machine type communications (MTCs) devices (i.e., sensors, cameras, and actuators). However, deploying UAVs for the envisioned purposes cannot be done before overcoming the relevant challenging issues. These challenges comprise not only technical issues, such as physical collision, but also regulation issues as this nascent technology could be associated with problems like breaking the privacy of people or even use it for illegal operations like drug smuggling. Providing the communication to UAVs is another challenging issue facing the deployment of this technology. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on the UAVs and the related issues will be introduced. In addition, our envisioned UAV-based architecture for the delivery of UAV-based value-added IoT services from the sky will be introduced, and the relevant key challenges and requirements will be presented.

Integration of renewable energy and optimization of energy use are key enablers of sustainable energy transitions and mitigating climate change. Modern technologies such the Internet of Things (IoT) offer a wide number of applications in the energy sector, i.e, in energy supply, transmission and distribution, and demand. IoT can be employed for improving energy efficiency, increasing the share of renewable energy, and reducing environmental impacts of the energy use. This paper reviews the existing literature on the application of IoT in in energy systems, in general, and in the context of smart grids particularly. Furthermore, we discuss enabling technologies of IoT, including cloud computing and different platforms for data analysis. Furthermore, we review challenges of deploying IoT in the energy sector, including privacy and security, with some solutions to these challenges such as blockchain technology. This survey provides energy policy-makers, energy economists, and managers with an overview of the role of IoT in optimization of energy systems.

Unmanned aerial vehicles are gaining a lot of popularity among an ever growing community of amateurs as well as service providers. Emerging technologies, such as LTE 4G/5G networks and mobile edge computing, will widen the use case scenarios of UAVs. In this article, we discuss the potential of UAVs, equipped with IoT devices, in delivering IoT services from great heights. A high-level view of a UAV-based integrative IoT platform for the delivery of IoT services from large height, along with the overall system orchestrator, is presented in this article. As an envisioned use case of the platform, the article demonstrates how UAVs can be used for crowd surveillance based on face recognition. To evaluate the use case, we study the offloading of video data processing to a MEC node compared to the local processing of video data onboard UAVs. For this, we developed a testbed consisting of a local processing node and one MEC node. To perform face recognition, the Local Binary Pattern Histogram method from the Open Source Computer Vision is used. The obtained results demonstrate the efficiency of the MEC-based offloading approach in saving the scarce energy of UAVs, reducing the processing time of recognition, and promptly detecting suspicious persons.

The concept of a digital twin has been used in some industries where an accurate digital model of the equipment can be used for predictive maintenance. The use of a digital twin for performance is critical, and for capital-intensive equipment such as jet engines it proved to be successful in terms of cost savings and reliability improvements. In this paper, we aim to study the expansion of the digital twin in including building life cycle management and explore the benefits and shortcomings of such implementation. In four rounds of experimentation, more than 25,000 sensor reading instances were collected, analyzed, and utilized to create and test a limited digital twin of an office building facade element. This is performed to point out the method of implementation, highlight the benefits gained from digital twin, and to uncover some of the technical shortcomings of the current Internet of Things systems for this purpose.

Over 33% of final energy consumption is used in buildings which leads to nearly 40% of total direct and indirect CO2 emissions in the world. While energy consumption is steadily rising globally, managing building energy utilization by on-site renewable energy generation can help responding this demand. This paper proposes a deep learning method based on a discrete wavelet transformation and long short-term memory method (DWT-LSTM) and a scheduling framework for the integrated modelling and management of energy demand and supply for buildings. This method considers several factors including a two-step electricity price, uncertainty in climatic factors, availability of renewable energy resources (wind and solar), energy consumption patterns in buildings, and the non-linear relationships between these parameters. This novel method analyzes and continuously learns from data patterns based on hourly, daily, weekly and monthly intervals. The method enables monitoring and controlling renewable energy generation, the share of energy imports from the grid, employment of saving strategy based on the user priority list, and energy storage management. The main objective of the proposed method is to minimize the reliance on the grid and electricity cost, especially during the peak days. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can forecast building energy demand and energy supply with a high level of accuracy, showing a 3.63- 8.57% error range in hourly data prediction for one month ahead. The results also show that the method can supply 304 days (83.2%) of a year without reliance on energy grids, decreasing 87.2% in energy demand on one hand and exporting annually 7777 kWh to the grid on the other hand. In addition, the rescheduling framework decreased the imported electricity cost with the higher electricity tariff by 98 %. The combination of the deep learning forecasting, energy storage, and scheduling algorithm enables reducing annual energy import from the grid from 6709 to 858 kWh (84.3%).