Digital Twin Technologies and Smart Cities

Digital twins, Internet of Things (IoT), block chains, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) may redefine our imagination and future vision of globalization. Digital Twin will likely affect most of the enterprises worldwide as it duplicates the physical model for remote monitoring, viewing, and controlling based on the digital format. It is actually the living model of the physical system which continuously adapts to operational changes based on the real-time data from various IoT sensors and devices and forecasts the future of the corresponding physical counterparts with the help of machine learning/artificial intelligence. We have investigated the architecture, applications, and challenges in the implementation of digital twin with IoT capabilities. Some of the major research areas like big data and cloud, data fusion, and security in digital twins have been explored. AI facilitates the development of new models and technology systems in the domain of intelligent manufacturing.

The smart city means using information technologies as per the needs of citizens in order to improve their day-to-day activities with high efficiency and decrease the living cost. The development of the smart city is the process of urbanization which can further improve the efficiency, reliability, and security of a city. The integration of communication and information technologies with the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques will be helpful for the urban/metro city areas in the overall management of schools, colleges, universities, libraries, power plants, transportation systems, waste management, hospitals, water supply, law enforcement, and other community services. The information and digital technologies will be used by end users and office administrations for the overall management of the things related to urban/metro city areas. The information and communication technologies (ICT) will allow officials of the city to interact/communicate directly with social communities and the infrastructure of the city will be available to the city officials on their fingertips. This chapter describes the economic benefits, implementation costs, and challenges toward the development of a smart city and its integration with cloud computing, IoT, and AI technologies. In this research work, we have tried to study the existing technologies, and we have proposed a novel architecture of a smart city which incorporates IoT, AI, and distributed cloud computing technologies and the smart city will have its own independent self-management system for managing almost everything related to the needs of our daily life. The proposed work will be helpful in maintaining the ecological system of the earth and the use of clean solar energy is making it friendly to the environment.

Cities around the world are being wrecked by the ever-increasing burden of traffic. Smart cities are a recent innovation perceived as a winning strategy to cope with some severe urban problems such as traffic, pollution, energy consumption, waste treatment. This concept is attracting significant interest in the world of technology and sensors. Governments can streamline the way cities are run, saving money and making them more efficient as a result. Rapid urban developments, sustainable transportation solutions are required to meet the increasing demands for mobility whilst mitigating the potentially negative social, economic and environmental impacts. This study analyses the smart mobility initiatives and the challenges for smart cities with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), and it also highlights the literature that supports why CAVs are essential for smart maintainable development as part of the intelligent transportation system (ITS).

Dynamic manufacturing processes are characterized by a lack of coordination, complexity and sheer volumes of data. Digital transformation technologies offer the manufacturers the capability to better monitor and control both assets and production. This provides also an ever-improving ability to investigate new products and production concepts in the virtual world while optimizing future production with IoT-captured data from different devices and shop floor machine centres. In this study, a digital twin is presented for an assembly line, where IoT-captured data is fed back into the digital twin enabling manufacturers to interface, analyse and measure the performance in real-time of a manufacturing process. The digital twin concept is then applied to an assembly production plan found in the automotive industry, where actual data is considered to analyse how the digital duplicate can be used to review activities and improve productivity within all production shifts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the high-order themes to information sharing in sustainable value chain network (SVCN) with a focus on the applications of Internet of things (IoT) as an enabling innovative technology from the perception of the expert community. This research is an inductive study and adopts a multi-case study strategy in the context of smart transportation for freight flow in the UK. Twenty semi-structured interviews are conducted with experts in smart transportation projects. The phenomenon of information sharing is enabled by effective innovative technologies such as IoT. A conceptual framework is constructed by the themes of IoT applications and information sharing in SVCN.

Cyber-Physical Systems and Digital Twins are commonly used today in the industrial sector, and the healthcare sector is keen to implement these technological solutions to enhance their capabilities and offer better services for patient care provision. In fact, the adoption of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) based on IoT along with cloud computing systems has led to the development of new methodologies to monitor and treat patients. However, the adoption of the new technologies comes with several challenges in terms of performance and security. Considering that, WBAN can be wearable or implanted under the skin, and the overall concept leads to several cybersecurity challenges that would require deeper investigation. This chapter presents an analysis of the impact that WBAN has on health care. It also provides some definitions of Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPSs) and Digital Twins along with technological enablers such as cloud and IoT.

To explore IoT’s hidden prospective and to address many global complications, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is working. They are making the IoT standardized for several years in the Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). ITU-T Study Group 20 was formed in recent times, to further endorse coordinated advancement of global IoT technologies, services, and applications. Some of the important IoT projects, their security pitfalls and their applications domains are discussed here. We need some secure architecture. Case by case, we need multi-layer architectures for secure IoT, such as in the smart city environs; we have numerous protocols, access technologies, functions and several types of nodes. Universally, future focuses in the security issues of the Internet of Things would typically quintessence on the following features, related laws for the security of the Internet of Things, the open security system, terminal security function, individual privacy protection mode, etc. We have developed a Secure Hybrid RSA (SHRSA) messaging system for End to End encrypted messaging, with solutions to many bottlenecks of RSA and Instant messaging schemes. Our scheme has much more decryption efficiency. Presently we have used our Secure Hybrid RSA (SHRSA) cipher for secure and efficient messaging scheme. We have found in real-time testing results analysis that, our scheme is much more authentic, efficient and secure system. So as a cipher Secure Hybrid RSA (SHRSA) cipher can be used in present IoT communications and in near future in Future Internet of everything (IoE) communications.

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a revolution of the Internet which can connect nearly all environment devices over the Internet to share their data to create novel services and applications for improving our quality of life. Using cheap sensors, the IoT enables various devices and objects around us to be addressable, recognizable and locatable. Although the IoT brought infinite benefits, it creates several challenges, especially in security and privacy. Handling these issues and ensuring security and privacy for IoT products and services must be a fundamental priority. Users need to trust IoT devices and related services are secure. Moreover, the IoT safety must be considered to prevent the IoT system and its components from causing an unacceptable risk of injury or physical damage and at the same time considering social behaviour and ethical use of IoT technologies to enable effective security and safety. This chapter provides a discussion of IoT security, privacy, safety and ethics. It starts by providing an overview of the IoT system, its architecture and essential characteristics. This is followed by discussing IoT security challenges, requirements and best practices to protect IoT devices. The IoT privacy is also discussed by highlighting various IoT privacy threats and solutions to preserve the privacy of IoT devices. The IoT safety, ethics, the need for the ethical design and challenges encountered are also discussed. In the end, smart cities are introduced as a case study to investigate various security threats and suggested solutions to maintain a good security level in a smart city.

The Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is a standard web transfer protocol. The CoAP runs over UDP, resulting in an unreliable message transport. CoAP offers a request/response communication model among application endpoints. The Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) can offer various security services like limited traffic flow confidentiality, anti-replay mechanism, access control, confidentiality, connection-less integrity, and data origin authentication. One way to use IPSec to secure the CoAP transactions can be Encapsulating Security Payload Protocol [RFC 2406] (IPSec-ESP). It can be a special case, if the hardware provisions encryption at layer 2 (it is the situation with some IEEE 802.15.4 radio chips). Another way can be, the 6LowPAN (IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks) extension, for using the IPSec with Authentication Header (AH) [RFC 2402] and Encapsulation Security Payload (ESP). To give more security to the major User Datagram Protocol (UDP) well-known applications, Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) runs on top of UDP instead of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The DTLS offers automatic key management, confidentiality, authentication, and data integrity. It also provisions wide range of dissimilar cryptographic algorithms. We have found that providing end-to-end security is not so easy, so we have developed a Secure Hybrid RSA (SHRSA) cipher. At present, we are using it in personal messaging scheme, and it is able to provide end-to-end security with efficiency and lightweight features. Later, this cipher can be used in lightweight and efficient communication scenario of Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything (IoE).

Sometimes healthcare perspectives in communications technologies require data mining, especially classification as a supervised learning. Support vector machines (SVMs) are considered as efficient supervised learning approaches for classification due to their robustness against several types of model misspecifications and outliers. Kernel-based SVMs are known to be more flexible tools for a wide range of supervised learning tasks and can efficiently handle non-linear relationship between input variables and outputs (or labels). They are more robust with respect to the aforementioned model misspecifications, and also more accurate in the sense that the root-mean-square error computed by fitting the kernel-based SVMs is considerably smaller than the one computed by fitting the standard/linear SVMs. However, the choice of kernel type and particularity kernel’s parameters could have significant impact on the classification accuracy and other supervised learning tasks required in network security, Internet of things, cybersecurity, etc. One of the findings of this study is that larger kernel parameter(s) would encourage SVMs with more localities and vice versa. This chapter provides some results on the effect of the kernel parameter on the kernel-based SVM classification. We thus first examine the effect of these parameters on the classification results using the kernel-based SVM, and then specify the optimal value of these parameters using cross-validation (CV) technique.

Balancing efficiency, privacy, and security along with strong authentication in the End-to-End (E2E) communication is a burning issue in personal messaging. Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm is an omnipresent cryptographic approach, so here we have implemented a Secure Hybrid RSA (SHRSA)-based lightweight and efficient personal messaging communication protocol for E2E secure, authenticated, and efficient messaging. The SHRSA decryption is much more secure and efficient than RSA and Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-RSA. It is protecting the messaging scheme users with a perfect privacy. The SHRSA cipher’s communication protocol is resolving many RSA-related issues. Full mesh networked personal messaging communication protocol ensures E2E encryption for all peers. The testing results of the personal messaging communication protocol have proved that this protocol is an efficient and secure personal messaging communication protocol. Also, it occupies very less memory and very less CPU than RSA and CRT-RSA. So high security, decryption efficiency with less memory and less CPU occupancy features make this secure message communication protocol much relevant to the era of Internet of Everything (IoE). Also, it is relevant to other secure and authentic message communications.