In the recent era of the Internet of Things, the dominant role of sensors and the Internet provides a solution to a wide variety of real-life problems. Such applications include smart city, smart healthcare systems, smart building, smart transport and smart environment. However, the real-time IoT sensor data include several challenges, such as a deluge of unclean sensor data and a high resource-consumption cost. As such, this paper addresses how to process IoT sensor data, fusion with other data sources, and analyses to produce knowledgeable insight into hidden data patterns for rapid decision-making. This paper addresses the data processing techniques such as data denoising, data outlier detection, missing data imputation and data aggregation. Further, it elaborates on the necessity of data fusion and various data fusion methods such as direct fusion, associated feature extraction, and identity declaration data fusion. This paper also aims to address data analysis integration with emerging technologies, such as cloud computing, fog computing and edge computing, towards various challenges in IoT sensor network and sensor data analysis. In summary, this paper is the first of its kind to present a complete overview of IoT sensor data processing, fusion and analysis techniques.

Intelligent Automation (IA) in automobiles combines robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, allowing digital transformation in autonomous vehicles. IA can completely replace humans with automation with better safety and intelligent movement of vehicles. This work surveys those recent methodologies and their comparative analysis, which use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and IoT in autonomous vehicles. With the shift from manual to automation, there is a need to understand risk mitigation technologies. Thus, this work surveys the safety standards and challenges associated with autonomous vehicles in context of object detection, cybersecurity, and V2X privacy. Additionally, the conceptual autonomous technology risks and benefits are listed to study the consideration of artificial intelligence as an essential factor in handling futuristic vehicles. Researchers and organizations are innovating efficient tools and frameworks for autonomous vehicles. In this survey, in-depth analysis of design techniques of intelligent tools and frameworks for AI and IoT-based autonomous vehicles was conducted. Furthermore, autonomous electric vehicle functionality is also covered with its applications. The real-life applications of autonomous truck, bus, car, shuttle, helicopter, rover, and underground vehicles in various countries and organizations are elaborated. Furthermore, the applications of autonomous vehicles in the supply chain management and manufacturing industry are included in this survey. The advancements in autonomous vehicles technology using machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, statistical techniques, and IoT are presented with comparative analysis. The important future directions are offered in order to indicate areas of potential study that may be carried out in order to enhance autonomous cars in the future.

Blockchain technology is found to have its applicability in almost every domain because of its advantages such as crypto-security, transparency, immutability, decentralized data network. In present times, a smart healthcare system with a blockchain data network and healthcare 4.0 processes provides transparency, easy and faster accessibility, security, efficiency, etc. Healthcare 4.0 trends include industry 4.0 processes such as the internet of things (IoT), industrial IoT (IIoT), cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fog computing, edge computing, etc. The goal of this work is to design a smart healthcare system and it is found to be possible through integration and interoperability of Blockchain 3.0 and Healthcare 4.0 in consideration with healthcare ground-realities. Here, healthcare 4.0 processes used for data accessibility are targeted to be validated through statistical simulation-optimization methods and algorithms. The blockchain is implemented in the Ethereum network, and with associated programming languages, tools, and techniques such as solidity, web3.js, Athena, etc. Further, this work prepares a comparative and comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art blockchain-based smart healthcare systems. The comprehensive survey includes methodology, applications, requirements, outcomes, future directions, etc. A list of groups, organizations, and enterprises are prepared that are working in electronic health records (EHR), electronic medical records (EMR) or electronic personal records (EPR) mainly, and a comparative analysis is drawn concerning adopting the blockchain technology in their processes. This work has explored optimization algorithms applicable to Healthcare 4.0 trends and improves the performance of blockchain-based decentralized applications for the smart healthcare system. Further, smart contracts and their designs are prepared for the proposed system to expedite the trust-building and payment systems. This work has considered simulation and implementation to validate the proposed approach. Simulation results show that the Gas value required (indicating block size and expenditure) lies within current Etherum network Gas limits. The proposed system is active because block utilization lies above 80%. Automated smart contract execution is below 20 seconds. A good number (average 3 per simulation time) is generated in the network that indicates a health competition. Although there is error observed in simulation and implementation that lies between 0.55% and 4.24%, these errors are not affecting overall system performance because simulated and actual (taken in state-of-the-art) data variations are negligible.

Smart transportation network development with environmental issues into consideration has brought Industry 4.0 based solutions on priority. In this direction, battery-powered electric bus systems have been considered widely for ensuring flexibility, operation cost, and lesser pollutants emission. Industry 4.0 provides automation through a cyber-physical system (CPS), the interconnection of bus system entities with industrial internet-of-things (IIoT), remote information availability through cloud computing and scientific disciplines (human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, machine learning etc.) integration. In this work, a discrete event-based simulation-optimization approach is integrated that take care of bus energy consumption according to real-time city’s passenger needs and on-road friction levels. The proposed simulation optimization methodology utilizes multi-objective with dependent and independent variables for optimizing the overall system performance. In simulation optimization, objective functions are designed to tackle battery consumption, Internet-of-Thing (IoT) network performance, cloud operations efficiency and smart scientific discipline integration. Simulation parameters are based on a real-time bus system which is further analyzed, filtered and adapted as per the needs of the system. In another analysis, supercharger’s capacities are varied to evaluate the performance of the proposed system and identify the low cost and efficient smart transportation system. Simulation results show different scenarios for variations in the number of buses, charging stations, bus-depots, mobile charging facilities, and bus-schedules. Simulation results show that the average passenger’s waiting time in the waiting is (after ticket booking) varies between 0.2 minutes to 0.7 minutes in real-time traffic conditions. In similar traffic conditions, total passenger’s time in system (ticket booking to travel) varies between 41.6 minutes (for 24 hours) to 45.5 minutes (for 1 year). In the simulation, priorities are given to those dependent and independent variables which save the battery consumption and elongate the utilization of buses. Lastly, it is also observed that the proposed system is suitable for resource-constraint devices because Gate Equivalent (GE) calculation shows that the proposed system can be implemented between 1986 GEs (communicational cost without confidentiality and authentication) and 7939 GEs (computational cost with HMAC for authentication in data storage). This ensures varies security primitivs such as confidentiality, availability and authentication.