Sensors, Networks and Applications for Intelligent Services: Territory monitoring, Driver’s support, and Emergency

Dear Colleagues,

In the last years the deployment of networks of sensors for providing intelligent services, such as the monitoring of territory, support to vehicles drivers and emergency, have become an indispensable necessity for almost every country. An advanced system for providing intelligent and integrated services integrates data originated from the different networks of sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices spared over the territory. Usually, each sensor network is tailored for the observation of one or a specific subset of phenomena to be kept under control i.e., we have networks for monitoring landslides and/or floods from rivers, earthquakes, volcanoes activity, etc. In  general,  the collecting sites  including  dataloggers,  mediators, servers in the cloud have just one group of data. Future applications (for vehicle drivers, for supporting emergency, for monitoring large areas or infrastructures) may be enabled by the integration of more than group of data such as weather and traffic data or user position and swelling of rivers. In each site, the single datalogger uses wired and/or local radio technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, ZigBee, etc.), to communicate with sensors acquiring the environmental data. In turn, the datalogger connects to the (specific) communication infrastructure serving the connecting network for the transfer of environmental as well as further data to one or more territorial control centers (TCCs). Due to the relatively small amount of data to be collected on a periodical basis, existing monitoring networks are characterized by very low transmission bit rates towards the TCC (i.e., from bit/s to some kbit/s) and we can refer to them as “narrowband” monitoring networks. The possibility of providing the TCC with environmental audio, FHD/4K/8K videos and/or images (in the visible and/or infrared ranges) from the observation sites would require a design of new sensor devices as well as to re-think the communication infrastructure to be associated with the innovative “broadband” monitoring network. The availability of these “new” types of data allow to improve the performance of the analysis and prediction algorithms used to assess the status of the environment and to ease the detection of anomalous/critical/emergency situations. Furthermore, “multimedia” information on the occurrence of anomalous events, provided by people recording video/audio contents with their smartphones has now become customary and could be seen as a sort of “casual” additional source of information on the environment to be exploited in some way.  In particular, innovative Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms should integrate information from “social networks” (when available) with those from the narrowband/broadband monitoring networks in order to further support the detection of anomalous situations in a specific area. In addition, when properly managed and checked, information from “socials” could provide authorities with a preliminary view on the status of a declared emergency area even before the arrival of first responders. In the case of emergency, communications from authorities and organizations to individuals, groups or the general public are based on the emergency warning systems including a multitude of technologies such as: mobile phones, location-based alerting using short message service, email, TV, radio etc. Integration of the TCCs with the emergency warning system for fast alerting the population is an important aspect involving many technical and organizational issues.

Potential topics in this special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Innovative, collaborative and advanced “broadband” monitoring networks for territory including, water monitoring, glacier monitoring, landslide monitoring, atmosphere monitoring and so on.
• Aerial monitoring solutions including unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
• Solutions for communication networks for the transport of monitored data on a local, regional, national scale: public and private terrestrial networks, LEO/MEO/GEO satellites.
• Reliability, planning and dimensioning of innovative monitoring networks.
• Technologies for sensors, IoT devices and UAS for the acquisition of environmental data even including multimedia data formats and/or information from social networks and social media.
• Services and technologies for improve the drivers’ and pedestrians’ safety. Quality assurance and quality control of measurements.
• GNSS accurate localization techniques for geo-tagging and for timestamp of data.
• Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data algorithms for environmental data analysis and for reliable detection of anomalous and critical situations.
• Expert systems and Decision Support Systems (DSS) for Emergency Warning.
• Network reconfigurability for emergency support.
• Cost analysis of innovative and advanced monitoring networks and applications. Innovative business models.
• Security aspects of monitoring networks and their applications.

Prof. Franco Mazzenga
Prof. Romeo Giuliano
Dr. Alessandro Vizzarri
Guest Editors

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• environmental sensors
• Internet of Things
• intelligent monitoring of territory
• broadband communication networks
• emergency warning systems