The State and Future of Ambient Intelligence in Industrial IoT Environments

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The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought about the drive toward integrating systems and processes through the Internet of Things (IoT) in industrial environments. The major objective of introducing IoT into these environments is to realize dynamic optimization of productivity and efficiency and to mitigate the risks affecting financial loss and safety of personnel. Recent proliferation of sensors and smart embedded devices capable of communicating with each other offers industry the possibility of ubiquitous computing. Other distributed computing paradigms such as cloud computing are also helping to achieve the said objective. The next evolutionary step for ubiquitous computing in relation to industrial environments is the deployment of ambient intelligence (AmI) within the smart devices to bring about seamless integration of the personnel and environmental factors as well as equipment in the workplace. In this chapter, we look at how the application of AmI in the industrial sector has sought progress, and attempt to extricate the past and current challenges in terms to context, architecture, security, and uptake of relevant technologies. A bottom-up approach is taken in reviewing the key technological constituencies of AmI in Industrial IoT (IIoT) from the sensing technologies and communication to overall architectural developments and limitations. Some examples of future application scenarios of AmI in mining, manufacturing, and construction are also presented that offer high-level depictions of how the different aspects of AmI could potentially be brought together to benefit these industrial settings. Ultimately, this work aims to provide stakeholders with an understanding of the possibilities of AmI in IIoT environments through equipping them with knowledge of the state-of-the-art, technological limitations/barriers, and future developments encompassing this application area.