Exploring the impact, challenges and opportunities of the internet of things in systems engineering

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A digital revolution is in course with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). It consists of devices or objects (things) possessing the ability to communicate using unique addressing schemes when interacting, and to cooperate to reach common goals. The IoT is the result of a trend of convergence among several digital technologies. From the ability to add digital content to an ordinary physical object to the ability of measuring real-time flow of products and people virtually anywhere, IoT technologies bring several opportunities to transform and disrupt businesses. However, the exploitation of this potential is still in its infancy, partially due to the novelty of the concept, of course, but also because it requires synergetic activities conducted in different fields of knowledge, such as telecommunications, informatics, electronics and industrial engineering, among others. This program's goal is to understand the particularities and challenges for the integration of IoT technologies for new product, service and process development, from the systems engineering perspective, so to propose a comprehensive set of tools and methods to support technology companies to adopt IoT systems.***This is program aims to tackle three IoT-based system design issues: (a) assess technology-based issues, such as the tradeoffs from the choice of technologies, standards or protocols; (b) integrate IoT analytics into systems' design and; (c) integrate creativity methods to IoT-system design. This is to be done through experimental research within real cases, using intervention research methods, along three distinct axes: (i) product, (ii) process and (iii) service system design.***The emerging literature on IoT is very prolific in comparing IoT technologies, and in proposing solutions for specific technical issues, but, currently, there are no practical guidelines for systems engineers to lead them throughout the technological decision process.***The benefits of this research program include the systematic framing and analysis of important aspects to be considered during IoT-system design, including interoperability, privacy and security, to name a few. Besides, the integration of the data analytics protocol design as a concurrent activity to hardware and software design, as well as the integration of creativity methods to maximize the exploration of the IoT potentialities, will lead to the evolution of systems engineering frameworks and reference models. This is needed to adapt existing frameworks to the reality of IoT-system design, characterized by rapidly evolving technologies and fairly distributed and decentralized IoT systems, which would require the combination of agile and lean techniques, while keeping its robustness and reliability.