arXiv subjects

Tiago M. Fernandez-Carames

Publications and source records attributed to Tiago M. Fernandez-Carames.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Towards the Industrial Metaverse: A Game-Based VR Application for Fire Drill and Evacuation Training for Ships and Shipbuilding

This paper details the creation of a novel Virtual Reality-based application for the Industrial Metaverse aimed at shipboard fire emergency training for fire drill and evacuation, aligned with the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention requirements. Specifically, the application includes gamified scenarios with different levels (e.g., varying fire intensities in engine rooms and galleys). The paper details comprehensively the VR development while providing a holistic overview and practical guidelines. Thus, it can guide practitioners, developers and future researchers to shape the next generation of Industrial Metaverse applications for the shipbuilding industry. Moreover, the paper includes the results of a preliminary user evaluation aimed at quantifying user decision-making and risk assessment skills. The presented results of the experiments provide insights into user performance and allow for pointing out at different future challenges.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Tactical Edge IoT in Defense and National Security

The deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in Defense and National Security faces some limitations that can be addressed with Edge Computing approaches. The Edge Computing and IoT paradigms combined bring potential benefits, since they confront the limitations of traditional centralized cloud computing approaches, which enable easy scalability, real-time applications or mobility support, but whose use poses certain risks in aspects like cybersecurity. This chapter identifies scenarios in which Defense and National Security can leverage Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Edge IoT capabilities to deliver greater survivability to warfighters or first responders, while lowering costs and increasing operational efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, it presents the general design of a Tactical Edge IoT communications architecture, it identifies the open challenges for a widespread adoption and provides research guidelines and some recommendations for enabling cost-effective Edge IoT for Defense and National Security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

IoT Architectures for Indoor Radon Management: A Prospective Analysis

The demand for real-time Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) management has increased recently, since low-cost and modern sensors such as Particulate Matter (PM), Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), Carbon Monoxide (CO), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Radon (Rn), among others, have been put forward with considerable accuracy. Although these low-cost sensors cannot be considered measurement instruments, they are very useful for a vast number of application domains, such as home automation, smart building management, IAQ management, risk exposure assessment, to name a few. This paper presents a literature review and a prospective analysis and discussion regarding Internet of Things (IoT) technologies adopted to deal with scenarios that present known indoor Radon gas problems. Specifically, the main requirements for developing IoT-enabled radon management solutions are reviewed. Thus, a traditional IoT architecture is described, its main components are analyzed and some of the most recent academic solutions are reviewed. Finally, novel approaches for deploying IoT radon management architectures are presented together with the most relevant open challenges. In this way, this article presents a holistic review of the past, present, and future of indoor radon management in order to provide guidelines for future designers and developers.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Advancing NASA-TLX: Automatic User Interaction Analysis for Workload Evaluation in XR Scenarios

Calculating the effort required to complete a task has always been somewhat difficult, as it depends on each person and becomes very subjective. For this reason, different methodologies were developed to try to standardize these procedures. This article addresses some of the problems that arise when applying NASA-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), a methodology to calculate the mental workload of tasks performed in industrial environments. In addition, an improvement of this methodology is proposed to adapt it to the new times and to emerging Extended Reality (XR) technologies. Finally, a system is proposed for automatic collection of user performance metrics, providing an autonomous method that collects this information and does not depend on the users' willingness to fill in a feedback questionnaire.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

A Cost-Effective Thermal Imaging Safety Sensor for Industry 5.0 and Collaborative Robotics

The Industry 5.0 paradigm focuses on industrial operator well-being and sustainable manufacturing practices, where humans play a central role, not only during the repetitive and collaborative tasks of the manufacturing process, but also in the management of the factory floor assets. Human factors, such as ergonomics, safety, and well-being, push the human-centric smart factory to efficiently adopt novel technologies while minimizing environmental and social impact. As operations at the factory floor increasingly rely on collaborative robots (CoBots) and flexible manufacturing systems, there is a growing demand for redundant safety mechanisms (i.e., automatic human detection in the proximity of machinery that is under operation). Fostering enhanced process safety for human proximity detection allows for the protection against possible incidents or accidents with the deployed industrial devices and machinery. This paper introduces the design and implementation of a cost-effective thermal imaging Safety Sensor that can be used in the scope of Industry 5.0 to trigger distinct safe mode states in manufacturing processes that rely on collaborative robotics. The proposed Safety Sensor uses a hybrid detection approach and has been evaluated under controlled environmental conditions. The obtained results show a 97% accuracy at low computational cost when using the developed hybrid method to detect the presence of humans in thermal images.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Practical Evaluation of Wize and Bluetooth 5 Assisted RFID for an Opportunistic Vehicular Scenario

Wireless communications are critical in the constantly changing environment of IoT and RFID technologies, where thousands of devices can be deployed across a wide range of scenarios. Whether connecting to cloud servers or local fog/edge devices, maintaining seamless communications is difficult, especially in demanding contexts like industrial warehouses or remote rural areas. Opportunistic networks, when combined with edge devices, provide a possible solution to this challenge. These networks enable IoT devices, particularly mobile devices, to redirect information as it passes via other devices until it reaches an edge node. Using different communication protocols, this paper investigates their effects on response times and total messages received for a opportunistic assisted RFID system. Specifically, this article compares two communications technologies (Bluetooth 5 and Wize) when used for building a novel Opportunistic Edge Computing (OEC) identification system based on low-cost Single-Board Computers (SBCs). For such a comparison, measurements have been performed for quantifying packet loss and latency. The tests consisted in two experiments under identical conditions and scenarios, with a node located roadside, transmitting identification information, and a node located inside a moving vehicle that was driven at varying vehicle speeds. The obtained results show for Bluetooth 5 average latencies ranging between 700 and 950 ms with packet losses between 7% and 27%, whereas for Wize the average delay as between 150 and 370 ms with packet losses between 20% and 52%.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

Practical Evaluation of Low-Frequency Vibration Energy Harvesting for Creating Green RFID and IoT Devices

One of the main limitations for the development and deployment of many Green Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Internet of Things (IoT) systems is the access to energy sources. In this aspect batteries are the main option to be used in energy constrained scenarios, but their use is limited to certain cases, either because of the constraints imposed by a reduced-form factor, their limited lifespan, or the characteristics of the environment itself (e.g. operating temperature, risk of burning, need for fast response, sudden voltage variations). In this regard, supercapacitors present an interesting alternative for the previously mentioned type of environment, although, due to their short-term capacity, they must be combined with an alternative energy supply mechanism. Energy harvesting mechanisms, in conjunction with ultra-low-power electronics, supercapacitors and various methods to improve the efficiency of communications, have enabled the emergence of battery-less passive electronic devices such as sensors, actuators or transmitters. This paper presents a novel analysis of the performance of an energy harvesting system based on vibrations for Green RFID and IoT applications in the field of maritime transport. The results show that the proposed system allows for charging half of a 1.2 F supercapacitor in about 72 minutes, providing a stable current of around 210 uA and a power output of 0.38 mW.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

From Pre-Quantum to Post-Quantum IoT Security: A Survey on Quantum-Resistant Cryptosystems for the Internet of Things

This article provides a survey on what can be called post-quantum IoT systems (IoT systems protected from the currently known quantum computing attacks): the main post-quantum cryptosystems and initiatives are reviewed, the most relevant IoT architectures and challenges are analyzed, and the expected future trends are indicated. Thus, this paper is aimed at providing a wide view of post-quantum IoT security and give useful guidelines to the future post-quantum IoT developers.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Review on the Use of Blockchain for the Internet of Things

The paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for a world, where many of our daily objects will be interconnected and will interact with their environment in order to collect information and automate certain tasks. Such a vision requires, among other things, seamless authentication, data privacy, security, robustness against attacks, easy deployment, and self-maintenance. Such features can be brought by blockchain, a technology born with a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. In this paper, a thorough review on how to adapt blockchain to the specific needs of IoT in order to develop Blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) applications is presented. After describing the basics of blockchain, the most relevant BIoT applications are described with the objective of emphasizing how blockchain can impact traditional cloud-centered IoT applications. Then, the current challenges and possible optimizations are detailed regarding many aspects that affect the design, development, and deployment of a BIoT application. Finally, some recommendations are enumerated with the aim of guiding future BIoT researchers and developers on some of the issues that will have to be tackled before deploying the next generation of BIoT applications.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Review on Blockchain Technologies for an Advanced and Cyber-Resilient Automotive Industry

In the last century the automotive industry has arguably transformed society, being one of the most complex, sophisticated and technologically advanced industries, with innovations ranging from hybrid, electric and self-driving smart cars to the development of IoT-connected cars. Due to its complexity, it requires the involvement of many Industry 4.0 technologies, like robotics, advanced manufacturing systems, cyber-physical systems or augmented reality. One of the latest technologies that can benefit the automotive industry is blockchain, which can enhance its data security, privacy, anonymity, traceability, accountability, integrity, robustness, transparency, trustworthiness and authentication, as well as provide long-term sustainability and a higher operational efficiency to the whole industry. This review analyzes the great potential of applying blockchain technologies to the automotive industry emphasizing its cybersecurity features. Thus, the applicability of blockchain is evaluated after examining the state-of-the-art and devising the main stakeholders' current challenges. Furthermore, the article describes the most relevant use cases, since the broad adoption of blockchain unlocks a wide area of short- and medium-term promising automotive applications that can create new business models and even disrupt the car-sharing economy as we know it. Finally, after a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis, some recommendations are enumerated with the aim of guiding researchers and companies in future cyber-resilient automotive industry developments.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A Review on the Application of Blockchain for the Next Generation of Cybersecure Industry 4.0 Smart Factories

Industry 4.0 is a concept devised for improving the way modern factories operate through the use of some of the latest technologies, like the ones used for creating Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robotics or Big Data applications. One of such technologies is blockchain, which is able to add trust, security and decentralization to different industrial fields. This article focuses on analyzing the benefits and challenges that arise when using blockchain and smart contracts to develop Industry 4.0 applications. In addition, this paper presents a thorough review on the most relevant blockchain-based applications for Industry 4.0 technologies. Thus, its aim is to provide a detailed guide for future Industry 4.0 developers that allows for determining how blockchain can enhance the next generation of cybersecure industrial applications.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Towards post-quantum blockchain: A review on blockchain cryptography resistant to quantum computing attacks

Blockchain and other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have evolved significantly in the last years and their use has been suggested for numerous applications due to their ability to provide transparency, redundancy and accountability. In the case of blockchain, such characteristics are provided through public-key cryptography and hash functions. However, the fast progress of quantum computing has opened the possibility of performing attacks based on Grover's and Shor's algorithms in the near future. Such algorithms threaten both public-key cryptography and hash functions, forcing to redesign blockchains to make use of cryptosystems that withstand quantum attacks, thus creating which are known as post-quantum, quantum-proof, quantum-safe or quantum-resistant cryptosystems. For such a purpose, this article first studies current state of the art on post-quantum cryptosystems and how they can be applied to blockchains and DLTs. Moreover, the most relevant post-quantum blockchain systems are studied, as well as their main challenges. Furthermore, extensive comparisons are provided on the characteristics and performance of the most promising post-quantum public-key encryption and digital signature schemes for blockchains. Thus, this article seeks to provide a broad view and useful guidelines on post-quantum blockchain security to future blockchain researchers and developers.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Towards an autonomous industry 4.0 warehouse: A UAV and blockchain-based system for inventory and traceability applications in big data-driven supply chain management

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of a UAV-based system aimed at automating inventory tasks and keeping the traceability of industrial items attached to Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags. To confront current shortcomings, such a system is developed under a versatile, modular and scalable architecture aimed to reinforce cyber security and decentralization while fostering external audits and big data analytics. Therefore, the system uses a blockchain and a distributed ledger to store certain inventory data collected by UAVs, validate them, ensure their trustworthiness and make them available to the interested parties. In order to show the performance of the proposed system, different tests were performed in a real industrial warehouse, concluding that the system is able to obtain the inventory data really fast in comparison to traditional manual tasks, while being also able to estimate the position of the items when hovering over them thanks to their tag's signal strength. In addition, the performance of the proposed blockchain-based architecture was evaluated in different scenarios.

cs.CR↗