The offshore industry is engaged in the exploration and production of renewable and non-renewable energy and resources at sea.The offshore market is huge and has a major impact on economy, society, and environment. The exploration and exploitation of oil and gas is increasing, and is getting more and more complex.Additionally, the offshore wind industry is facing increasing demands, and complex offshore installations are needed.At the same time, the need for more cost effective, safer, and environmentally aware systems is compelling, and gives additional demands to the offshore industries.Operation and predictive maintenance activities are areas where the optimization of costs is considered an absolute necessity. This project answers these challenges by providing an offshore Internet of Things solution for fully automated (i)multidimensional monitoring, inspection, and predictive maintenance, and (ii)in-situ analysis of environmental, social, and ecological impact of offshore industry operations. This project goes beyond today's IoT initiatives by addressing(i) an extra challenging operational environment for IoT sensing and communication technology, namely the Arctic, and(ii) a new generation of fully connected multidimensional IoT consisting of static and mobile wireless sensor networks deployed underwater, on water/ice surface, above water, flying in air, and carried by people/workers. The unique approach to be taken is based on cutting edge platforms and infrastructure for connected smart objects in harsh and heterogeneous environments.Technology innovation of SIRENS spans through areas such as open, dynamic, re-programmable IoT platforms and networks, wireless sensing and communication technologies, multi-modal sensing, anomaly detection and predictive maintenance, self-organizing and autonomous systems, and swarms of exploring underwater robots and air-borne drones (The ABSTRACT of the original SIRENS H2020 proposal was 2700 chars and cannot be fully included)
The marine industry has highly demanding and often conflicting requirements. Applications, including operation support to offshore plants and aquaculture installations, are required to be highly efficient and reliable, as any fault will have a significant impact on safety, costs, and economy in general. Erosion of sediments could damage pipelines or aquaculture cages, leaving them vulnerable to many different sort of malfunctioning. No matter how carefully designed these systems are, there is also always the risk of human error¿in manufacturing, installation, operation, and leak-detection. Existing IoT technology and techniques do not meet the requirements of offshore and other marine applications and many of the building blocks that are assumed as given in existing IoT applications need to be re-designed and developed with a completely new, all-inclusive engineering approach to deal with extreme heterogeneity, dynamicity and harshness of the physical environment and the communication medium used in marine industry applications. Recent efforts in underwater communication and networking have tried to address many of the requirement of these applications. EU-funded projects, such as UAN, CLAM, SUNRISE, RACUN, SNUSE, NeTS-NOSS, and NeTS, have targeted underwater networking and communication, designing and testing new protocol stack solutions specifically tailored to the dynamic and ever changing underwater environment. Networking and control of underwater vehicles have been addressed in projects such as Grex, Co3-AUVs, CoCoRo, TRIDENT, EUROFLEETS, and MORPH. The combination of aerial and underwater autonomous assets has been investigated in several projects, such as Con4Coop, NETMAR, ICARUS and NECSAVE. However, most of these projects addressed quite specific requirements and challenges of marine applications, producing progress in individual system components and ecosystems (underwater, above water, water surface, air-born, environment and people). The seamless combination of these components into a holistic monitoring control system covering all necessary aspects of complex marine applications (including safety, costs, economy, and integration of heterogeneous technologies) is still lacking and demands significant research.
A core strength of IoT4Offshore project concerns enabling Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) networked systems for supporting the largest possible heterogeneity of underwater sensing and communication platforms (underwater sensors, autonomous underwater and surface vehicles, aerial drones, and humans, e.g., divers). From the communication and networking perspective, one of the key objectives of IoT4Offshore is to introduce secure, reliable and robust heterogeneous networking protocols with real-time capabilities. To effectively address the integration and coordination of heterogeneous devices and networks made up of underwater, surface and aerial smart objects, we will also extend to the different domains the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) concept and open architecture first developed in SUNRISE. This encompasses the programmability of network elements, both endpoints and intermediate elements, and cooperative smart objects. This will be accompanied by a general control protocol instructing smart objects with rules to accomplish the objectives of the network. The SDN will enable efficient, flexible and self-adaptive networking: It will support reuse of protocol implementations, foster the creation of new protocols, and enable multiple solutions to run at each layer at the same time. Our framework will also enable integration of different sensing and communication technologies without affecting individual operation. Cross-layer interactions will be supported for protocol performance optimization, considering application requirements.
A second contribution will regard enabling real-time communication of data gathered by underwater platforms, so far not possible, by a combination of a) advanced underwater communications; b) adaptive and smart multi-modal networking; c) exploitation of computer vision techniques tailored to lossy and resource-constrained underwater environments, and d) the integration of advanced techniques developed for adaptive communications, networking, image and video compression. This will enable real-time transmission of underwater cameras and side-scan sonars data, something that today is not feasible and could enable a host of new IoUT applications.
These innovations, at the component and system level, are each a non-trivial breakthrough over the state of the art, with potential practical applications beyond the scope of the project. They collectively add to the highly innovative technical merit of IoT4Offshore, and provide the basis for an extremely high socio-economic impact of the project.
IMPORTANT: Some impact factors of publications are missing (see "Fundings from other institutions"