Electronic Smart Systems

- Overview 

A smart system typically refers to a system that incorporates sensors, connectivity, and intelligence to interact with the environment, adapt to changes, and provide enhanced functionality or services. Smart systems often leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to collect data from the physical world, analyze it, and take actions autonomously or with minimal human intervention.

A smart system is a computer or electronic system that uses data to analyze situations and make decisions. Smart systems can sense, actuate, and control, and they can be autonomous based on closed loop control, resource management, and networking capabilities. They can also incorporate ICT functionality into traditional technologies to provide advanced control and amenability functions. 

Smart systems can describe, diagnose, and qualify complex environmental situations based on data acquired via sensors. They can then make predictive or adaptive decisions and take smart actions that can augment user actions and decisions. These actions can vary from user to user depending on their needs and characteristics. 

Smart systems are a key driving force for a range of emerging intelligent and autonomous systems and objects, such as: self-driving cars, artificial pancreas, Internet of Things (IoT), M2M-enabled advanced manufacturing robots, and wearable health monitors. 

Smart systems address environmental, societal, and economic challenges like limited resources, climate change, population ageing, and globalization. They are for that reason increasingly used in a large number of sectors. Key sectors in this context are transportation, healthcare, energy, safety and security, logistics, ICT, and manufacturing.

Smart systems can be supported by machine learning, optimization algorithms, closed loop control, energy efficiency, and networking capabilities.

Please refer to the following for more information:

• Wikipedia: Smart Systems

- The Electronic Smart Systems

The Electronic Smart Systems (ESSs) technology field focuses on the challenges posed by the ongoing digitalization of society due to the deep penetration of embedded sensing, motion, and communication electronics in our environment.

Things become smart and connected, sensor systems and smart things provide the sensing and interacting edges that are bringing the entire world online. Embedded electronics become more pervasive and provide an opportunity for a disruptive wave of innovation of our daily living.   

Smart systems are a key factor in the development of many new intelligent and autonomous systems. Smart systems incorporate functions of sensing, actuation, and control in order to describe and analyze a situation, and make decisions based on the available data in a predictive or adaptive manner, thereby performing smart actions. In most cases the “smartness” of the system can be attributed to autonomous operation based on closed loop control, energy efficiency, and networking capabilities. 

A lot of smart systems evolved from microsystems. They combine technologies and components from microsystems technology (miniaturized electric, mechanical, optical, and fluidic devices) with other disciplines like biology, chemistry, nanoscience, or cognitive sciences. 

- Heterogeneous Components and Subsystems

Electronic smart systems (ESSs) identify a broad class of intelligent and miniaturized devices that are usually energy-autonomous and ubiquitously connected. 

In order to support these functions like sensing, actuation, and control, electronic smart systems must include sophisticated and heterogeneous components and subsystems, such as digital signal processing devices, analog devices for RF and wireless communication, discrete elements, application-specific sensors and actuators, energy sources, and energy storage devices. 

These systems take advantage of the progress achieved in miniaturization of electronic systems, and are highly energy-efficient and increasingly often energy-autonomous, and can communicate with their environment. 

Thanks to their heterogeneous nature, smart embedded and cyber-physical applications are able to deliver a wide range of services, and their application may lead to provide solutions to address the grand social, economic, and environmental challenges such as environmental and pollution control, energy efficiency at various scales, aging populations and demographic change, risk of industrial decline, security from micro- to macro-level, safety in transportation, increased needs for the mobility of people and goods, health and lifestyle improvements, just to name the most relevant.

[Iceland - Janis R.]

- The Objectives of ESS Technologies

The goals is to develop and validate a new generation of cost-effective Electronic Smart System (ESS) technologies integrating hardware technologies across multiple fields. 

This massive integration of electronics everywhere introduces challenges like: integration, miniaturization, building practice, new sensors, low energy consumption, electromagnetic interference (EMI), architectures for high performance computing, resource efficient communication and affordable components. 

ESSs are capable of independently sensing a complex environment, analyzing it based on knowledge, and making appropriate decisions and predictions. This makes them particularly valuable for a wide variety of application areas.

- Smart System Integration

Smart system integration is a collection of technologies that build products from components, combine functions in products and systems, connect systems to other systems and through networks, and more importantly, enable systems to receive and store "Knowledge base"-make them "smart". 

Smart systems include the intelligence to perceive and understand situations. They will make predictive and adaptive data-driven decisions and execute informed actions. The cognitive intelligence of such systems is based on energy-efficient autonomous operation, closed-loop control and communication capabilities.

A major challenge was integrating many different components that combined different technologies and materials. The focus is on services for specific applications, such as healthcare and automotive.

The term “smart” reflects the embedded processing capabilities and comprehensive awareness of the environment made possible by the introduction of sensing capabilities, thus bringing together interdisciplinary technologies and solutions.

[More to come ...]