Data value chains and their associated applications and services have become an important strategic research direction for the Center’s current and future work and are at the heart of the proposed research plan. In particular, ATHENA R.C. proposes to perform advanced work on data value chains in the context of three of the specified thematic areas of the call, i.e., energy, industry, and urban development. Each one is a different data value chain with its own scientific and technical challenges in each stage, but they are all based on the same underlying conception depicted in the earlier figure. The first and third chains are both studied in a city environment; hence, they are part of a unified subproject called CitySense. The second chain is studied exclusively in an industrial environment and is the object of the second subproject of the proposal, called PALMIS.
CitySense falls under the thematic areas of "Energy" and "Infrastructures, Urban Development and Environment" and targets smart cities & intelligent communities. The infrastructures and services a city provides to its officials, policy makers, inhabitants and visitors are critical factors for the quality of life of its citizens, the local economy, and the environment. The Open Data initiative, the rise of high quality crowdsource data (e.g., Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap), and the proliferation of Social Media have changed this landscape by making available for the first time previously unattainable native data sources, which encompass our daily activities and can shed light across the complete spectrum of urban life. In this context, the proposed research focuses on all aspects of harvesting, management, analysis, adaptation, and intelligent decision-making that will enable us to leverage these new data sources as instruments for analyzing and facilitating the way people commute, interact, and utilize urban environments and resources.
PALMIS falls under the thematic area of "Industry" and targets active lifecycle management of products and assets. The goal is to deliver industrial information and service integration in order to close the loop between lower level production shop floor functions and higher-level decision-making, and to drive the latter on the basis of evidence, rather than pure planning. Evidence is driving both lower-level monitoring and higher-level decision making by integrating Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) technologies, with smart data processing and management.