ETSI IoT Conference 2023

The ETSI IoT Conference – IoT Technologies for Green and Digital Transformation –  takes place on 4-5-6 July 2023 in ETSI premises, Sophia Antipolis, France. This 2023 edition includes the ETSI IoT Conference and IoT demonstrations. It offers a mix of keynote speeches, presentations, interactive panels, IoT demonstrations, with many networking opportunities to help understand the importance of standard-enabled technologies for IoT service deployments.

Our colleague, Dave Raggett (W3C), gives a talk on “Cognitive control of swarms for the IoT computing continuum” to explain the benefits of swarm-based models of coordination of IoT devices, with example use cases, and the relationship to digital twins. See the presentation slides (pdf).

Presentation abstract: Swarm-based models of coordination are compelling for applications of dynamic collections of IoT devices. This talk will report on work supported by the SmartEdge Project in relation to smart low-code programming tools for edge intelligence. A web-based demo will be shown featuring a 2.5D simulator for swarms.

This presentation introduces a framework for developing smart IoT applications involving autonomous intelligent swarms featuring real-time semantic integration, discoverability, and composability. Swarms are composed of dynamic collections of agents (e.g. devices) with differing capabilities and playing different roles.

We can model the agents in terms of perception, cognition and action, at a level that builds upon the notion of digital twins. Perception involves progressively higher-level interpretations of sensor data and messages from other agents. Cognition is the process of deciding on what actions to take. Actions include messaging other agents as well as real-time control over actuators, allowing for low-latency control loops.

This approach allows us to consider the swarm as a collection of communicating agents, but we can also consider an agent in terms of the emergent behaviour of an assembly of simpler agents, in what can be termed a /”hive mind”,/ that is resilient in respect to agents joining and leaving the swarm, resilient to hardware and network problems, resilient to demand spikes, and resilient to cyber-attacks.