Call for Industrial IoT Articles

The IEEE Internet of Things Magazine (IEEE IoTM) is currently soliciting articles for its vertical area on the Industrial IoT (IIoT), which is the direct consequence of what is commonly known as the fourth industrial revolution. Under this framework, complementary technologies like Cloud Computing, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data Analytics are requested to cooperate to transform old-style IoT devices and services into innovative, always more intelligent, and autonomous elements of wider cyber-physical systems. More connected devices correspond to higher volumes of data, exacerbating the challenges of traditional IoT devices, such as their limited energy, network bandwidth, storage, and computational capabilities. For this reason, novel architectures, computing paradigms, services, and distributed applications are the need of the hour and the core of this vertical area that includes but not limited to  smart factory/manufacturing, connected robots, enterprise, smart-agriculture, energy-grids among others.

Submissions to this vertical area should present real-world experiences with IIoT applications, including preliminary testbeds covering at least one of the following topics:

• Novel computing and architectural paradigms:
  • Is it possible to overcome the cloud-centric approach in industrial-grade applications?
  • How to design more sustainable manufacturing and process industries?
  • Will the distributed paradigms like Edge/Fog computing be the keystones to improve the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of industrial production and services?
• Steps forward towards the full decentralization of the IoT:
  • Are distributed ledger technologies and blockchains loyal allies in the attempt of transforming heterogeneous IIoT actors into trustless and autonomous entities of a truly global cyber-physical system?
• Fusion of Artificial Intelligence with the IoT:
  • How to design greener AI processes, improving data and energy efficiency?
  • How to leverage less data-intensive and energy-consuming models?
  • Is it possible to adopt more efficient learning processes that require less input to properly work?
  • How to distribute classical machine learning workflows on complex technology stacks, maintaining the cloud-to-thing continuum?
• Novel surveys on the IIoT state-of-the-art and tutorials presenting and elaborating recent general IIoT business use cases (e.g. deployments, applications, persisting challenges, etc). Such articles need to clearly outline answers to important questions including but not limited to:
  • Who were the stakeholders?
  • What benefits were anticipated and received from the solution? How were the benefits measured?
  • What were the key lessons learned?
  • Can this experience contribute to defining best practices?
  • What were the risks and rewards?

Authors should keep in mind that the intended audience consists of all the members of the IoT community. Hence, articles must be understandable by the general IoT practitioner/researcher, independent of technical or business specialty and are expected to add to the knowledge base or best practices of the IoT community. Mathematical material should be avoided; instead, references to papers containing the relevant mathematics should be provided when applicable.

In addition to the above, the IEEE IoTM general author guidelines for manuscript development and submission over manuscript central must be carefully abided by.

Note: IoTM does not have a specific template and does not require manuscripts to be submitted in any specific layout. However, authors can use the template for IEEE Transactions to get a rough estimate of the page count.