Many governments are considering adopting the smart city concept in their cities and implementing big data applications that support smart city components to reach the required level of sustainability and improve the living standards. Smart cities utilize multiple technologies to improve the performance of health, transportation, energy, education, and water services leading to higher levels of comfort of their citizens. This involves reducing costs and resource consumption in addition to more effectively and actively engaging with their citizens. One of the recent technologies that has a huge potential to enhance smart city services is big data analytics. As digitization has become an integral part of everyday life, data collection has resulted in the accumulation of huge amounts of data that can be used in various beneficial application domains. Effective analysis and utilization of big data is a key factor for success in many business and service domains, including the smart city domain. This paper reviews the applications of big data to support smart cities. It discusses and compares different definitions of the smart city and big data and explores the opportunities, challenges and benefits of incorporating big data applications for smart cities. In addition it attempts to identify the requirements that support the implementation of big data applications for smart city services. The review reveals that several opportunities are available for utilizing big data in smart cities; however, there are still many issues and challenges to be addressed to achieve better utilization of this technology.

Blockchain technologies have recently come to the forefront of the research and industrial communities as they bring potential benefits for many industries. This is due to their practical capabilities in solving many issues currently inhibiting further advances in various industrial domains. Securely recording and sharing transactional data, establishing automated and efficient supply chain processes, and enhancing transparency across the whole value chain are some examples of these issues. Blockchain offers an effective way to tackle these issues using distributed, shared, secure, and permissioned transactional ledgers. The employment of blockchain technologies and the possibility of applying them in different situations enables many industrial applications through increased efficiency and security; enhanced traceability and transparency and reduced costs. In this paper, different industrial application domains where the use of blockchain technologies has been proposed are reviewed. The paper explores the opportunities, benefits, and challenges of incorporating blockchain in different industry applications. Furthermore, the paper attempts to identify the requirements that support the implementation of blockchain for different industry applications. The review reveals that several opportunities are available for utilizing blockchain in various industry sectors; however, there are still some challenges to be addressed to achieve better utilization of this technology.

Health 4.0 establishes a new promising vision for the healthcare industry. It creatively integrates and employ innovative technologies such as the Internet of Health Things (IoHT), medical Cyber-Physical Systems (medical CPS), health cloud, health fog, big data analytics, machine learning, blockchain, and smart algorithms. The goal is to deliver improved, value-added and cost-effective healthcare services to patients and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency or the healthcare industry. Health 4.0 (adapted from the Industry 4.0 principles) changes the healthcare business model to enhance the interactions across the healthcare clients (the patients), stakeholders, infrastructure, and value chain. This effectively will improve the quality, flexibility, productivity, cost-effectiveness, and reliability of healthcare services in addition to increasing patients’ satisfaction. However, building and utilizing healthcare applications that follow the Health 4.0 concept is a non-trivial and complex endeavor. In addition, advanced potential applications based on Health 4.0 capabilities are not yet being investigated. In this paper we define the main objectives of Health 4.0 and discuss advanced potential Health 4.0 applications. To have a clear understanding of these applications, we categorize them in 4 groups based on the primary beneficiary of these applications. Thus we have patient targeted applications, applications supporting healthcare professionals, resource management applications and high-level healthcare systems management applications. In addition, as we studied the different applications, we realized that these is a certain collection of services that these most of them need regardless of their goals or business context. Services supporting data collection and transfer, security and privacy, reliable operations are some examples. As a result we propose creating a service-oriented middleware framework to offers the common services to the applications developers and facilitate the integration of different services to build applications under the Health 4.0 umbrella.

In this paper, we focus on the use of linear sensor networks (LSNs) to monitor underwater pipelines. We propose the use of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) to move along the pipeline and collect data from the sensor nodes (SNs). It then delivers the collected data to the surface sink at the end of the LSN or LSN segment. In turn, the surface sink transmits the collected data to the network control center (NCC) using any of the communication technologies that are available in the area such as WiMAX, cellular, and satellite. The use of the AUV for data collection allows for considerable advantages including flexibility in SN placement, considerable energy savings, and reduced interference, hidden terminal problems, and collisions. We also provide, different AUV movement strategies and analyze the effect of various network design parameters on network performance metrics such as packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay.

Factories use many manufacturing processes that consume a lot of energy and highly contribute in greenhouse gas emissions. The introduction of the concept of Industrial Internet in USA and Industry 4.0 in Europe offers many opportunities to reduce energy consumption in these factories. Introducing and utilizing smart techniques for the applications pertinent to manufacturing processes within the Industry 4.0 domain can offer many benefits for reducing energy consumption in smart factories. This paper investigates and discusses these opportunities and benefits. The paper also discusses the roles of Industry 4.0 technologies in enabling these opportunities. Consequently, introducing these capabilities will help significantly reduce both production costs and greenhouse gas emissions. The paper then provides a benefit analysis that shows the advantages of such leverage. In addition, the paper offers an enabling architecture and its components that includes cyber-physical system (CPS) manufacturing services layer, fog manufacturing services layer, cloud manufacturing services layer, and blockchain-based service-oriented middleware to support such opportunities.

Smart cities are becoming a reality. Various aspects of modern cities are being automated and integrated with information and communication technologies to achieve higher functionality, optimized resources utilization, and management, and improved quality of life for the residents. Smart cities rely heavily on utilizing various software, hardware, and communication technologies to improve the operations in areas, such as healthcare, transportation, energy, education, logistics, and many others, while reducing costs and resources consumption. One of the promising technologies to support such efforts is the Cloud of Things (CoT). CoT provides a platform for linking the cyber parts of a smart city that are executed on the cloud with the physical parts of the smart city, including residents, vehicles, power grids, buildings, water networks, hospitals, and other resources. Another useful technology is Fog Computing, which extends the traditional Cloud Computing paradigm to the edge of the network to enable localized and real-time support for operating-enhanced smart city services. However, proper integration and efficient utilization of CoT and Fog Computing is not an easy task. This paper discusses how the service-oriented middleware (SOM) approach can help resolve some of the challenges of developing and operating smart city services using CoT and Fog Computing. We propose an SOM called SmartCityWare for effective integration and utilization of CoT and Fog Computing. SmartCityWare abstracts services and components involved in smart city applications as services accessible through the service-oriented model. This enhances integration and allows for flexible inclusion and utilization of the various services needed in a smart city application. In addition, we discuss the implementation and experimental issues of SmartCityWare and demonstrate its use through examples of smart city applications.