Research

Nordic Industrial IoT Roadmap: Research And Innovation For The Green Transition

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Abstract

The Nordic Industrial IoT (IIoT) Roadmap has been developed by five Nordic universities to complement existing roadmaps and research agendas, such as the European initiatives on Green Deal, Smart Everything Anywhere, and Autonomous systems—see the section “Related roadmaps & agendas”. A long-term focus on sustainability has provided the Nordic countries with significant advantages. For example, the CO2 intensity (gCO2/KWh) of power and district heating production amounts to only 14% of the EU25 average and transport’s total energy use decreased by over 20% compared with 2000, despite a 70% increase in overall passenger and freight activity. Many of these results have been achieved by a long-term focus on digitalization—in fact the four Nordic countries are ranked on the top four places in EU’s 2020 “Digital Economy and Society Index”. Thus, the Nordic countries are good at both sustainability and digitalization! The Nordic countries are also strong in trustworthiness and cyber-physical systems. We believe that there is now a unique opportunity to leverage these competences (trustworthiness, digitalization—AI, 5G, cloud and edge computing, and the IoT—and CPS) to enable and promote sustainability and a circular economy. However, this requires a much stronger emphasis on multidisciplinary research, networking and testbeds to establish the collaboration and new methodologies and technologies needed for a humancentered and sustainable future. The Nordic IIoT Roadmap outlines several research areas where progress is needed to enable these directions. Examples include: Automated driving for sustainable mobility & transport, Selfpowering systems for IoT & energyefficient sensor networks, Safety, security, and privacy by design, Reduction of the energy consumption of HPC and datacenters and wearables for healthcare and wellbeing. Several private and governmental R&D programs are supporting this Nordic longterm transition, with contributions of more than 100 MEUR per year. The Nordic network demonstrates the value of multidisciplinary collaboration to stimulate research that deals with sustainability challenges and leverages digitalization to provide solutions. However, the complexity of the challenges and the resulting interconnected & smart cyber-physical systems-of-systems is growing, involving more stakeholders, and forming new innovation ecosystems, necessitating further action. To maintain and strengthen the Nordic leading position, we recommend establishing a joint Nordic Center doing research in trustworthy methodologies for the implementation of sustainable IIoT, and specific actions for training the next generation of students in both digitalization and the green transition.