International Transportation (67) 1 | 2015 52 SCIENCE & RESEARCH Smart Rural Areas Villages on the road to the future with Smart Ecosystems Smart rural areas, Smart Ecosystems, digital villages, demographic change Germany has the largest and most successful economy in Europe. However, we will only be able to keep this leading role if we also maintain a strong and efective infrastructure. The towns and municipalities have a special role in this endeavor, as there are many areas in which they are the providers and operators of such infrastructure systems. This does not only include schools, swimming pools and city halls (whose condition often leaves much to be desired) - but also a suitable digital infrastructure for an elementary pillar of public service provision: transport of people and goods. Authors: Mario Trapp, Gerald Swarat T he Internet and the ubiquitous digitalization of our lives will not go away anymore. Rather, they are rapidly expanding and increasingly shape our professional and social environments. And yes, we are indeed experiencing a digital transformation. We are experiencing how IT is becoming a crucial driver for innovations. Digital services and applications ofer invaluable possibilities for improving the quality of work and life in rural areas and thus for embarking on a path where the future focus will not only be on the marketing term Smart City, but also on Smart Rural Areas. And there is good reason for this. A closer look reveals that 56 million Germans (75 %) are living in cities and towns with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants. In states with large areas and low population density such as Rhineland-Palatinate, the part of the population living in communities with fewer than seven thousand inhabitants even reaches 50 % (figure 1). The two meta-trends for villages For Germany as a whole, the forecasts regarding demographic development paint a similar picture as for other industrialized countries: fewer people overall 1 , higher average age, and a more international population in the metropolises. If we leave the national level and look at the regions, we can clearly see the dramatic consequences of demographic change. Low population density and decreasing population igures are not really a surprise or new development in peripheral areas, but the simultaneous grip exerted by an aging population and the rural exodus seems to literally wrest the life from the villages. If these efects meet weak economic and social structures, as in the case of many rural regions, the demographic factor becomes an accelerator of the downward spiral. In these regions, the question then arises if and to which extent it will even possible at all to maintain a public infrastructure that does at least partial justice to the constitutional right to equal living conditions for all. But that is not all. In addition to the demographic factor, the digital revolution is the second major trend. The challenge is to shape this trend actively and ill it with life! Digital services and applications ofer invaluable possibilities for improving the quality of work and life in rural areas. However, one particular challenge - both when it comes to ensuring public services and infrastructures and establishing innovative business models - is the regions’ sparse population. Compared to cities, very large areas must be covered to reach a comparatively small number of citizens. This is an enormous task, particularly for the transportation of goods and people. Digital villages as an alternative to the city? When faced with the choice of moving either to the countryside or to the city, every young family has to decide whether the natural environment, the animals, the open spaces, the fresh air and a carefree childhood for their children are enough to ofset the concerns. Are there jobs in the countryside, respectively is the daily commute during rush hour worth it? Is it worth wasting valuable time every day in traic jams? Is it worth for a family having a second car for the marriage partner who works part-time, picks up the daughter from the daycare center and goes shopping at a supermarket 15 km away, since the smaller, local stores have already given up? Is it worth moving to the countryside knowing that the nearest connection to the public transport system is unsatisfactory because bus service is no longer feasible due to the decreasing population? Here, digitalization can lead to decisive progress, as our lives, our work, our education, and our spare time are increasingly determined by the Internet. Industry 4.0, Cloud Computing, Big Data, security and safety are becoming more and more intertwined and extend their reach into our immediate surroundings; new technologies are being integrated into our daily lives to an ever greater extent. The mass customization of the Fourth Industrial Revolution ensures that products and services are tailored to individual needs and usage conditions. Highly automated or even completely autonomous systems perform tasks and optimize life in every situation. Autonomy and lexibility are the guiding values that pervade society and production. Rural solutions So what will the technical architecture of the world of tomorrow look like? How will the special requirements of rural areas be taken into account? Quite clearly, more than a minimum basic supply must be ensured; new and lexible jobs and work models must be created; school education for children must be ensured on a high level through innovative concepts, and much more. This also involves challenges such as autonomous driving or the possibilities of sharing concepts or on-demand citizen buses that double as delivery services for goods and medication. Many visits to specialist doctors in the city could become superluous if the local physician were to use state-of-the-art technology to consult the specialist in the International Transportation (67) 1 | 2015 53 Smart Rural Areas SCIENCE & RESEARCH city and get a remote diagnosis. A rural scenario shows that the mobility of the future does not appear to be very far of anymore: Mrs. Smith is working in a nearby city. The on-demand commute to her place of work using the mobility service via car-sharing, bus or share taxi is cheaper than going by car. She can book a monthly lat rate, which becomes even more afordable if she schedules her times in advance. But she also uses the slightly more expensive adhoc services for booking her trips. The mobility billing system is coupled with the logistics billing system, which the family uses quite often to transport packages for neighbors from a logistics cell near the gas station to the village. The best feature of the mobility service is that Mrs. Smith does not have to take the wheel anymore and can use the commute much more eiciently. Sometimes she works, sometimes she enjoys the start of the day with a cup of cofee and reads the newspaper; sometimes she coordinates her family’s weekly plan or their activities. During her commute she orders fruit and cheese from a regional store and from a farm, which are then delivered at the desired time, fresh and individually, by a delivery drone owned jointly by the vendors. This is an example of how a smart logistics system can ensure that the residents of rural areas can aford delivery of their goods, as door-to-door delivery will soon cease to be economically feasible. Information technology will thus occupy a key role in diferent areas. The greatest challenge, however, will arise when systems have to collaborate across traditional industry barriers. Particularly in the countryside, economically viable solutions will only be made possible by the eicient, joint use of resources across the boundaries of established silos. This is true for the crowd transportation/ logistics issues mentioned above, if, for example, packages are no longer transported only via package delivery services, but are taken along in public transport vehicles and even in private vehicles - similar to the way that digital car-sharing services have taken hitchhiking to the future as a safe and comfortable transport option. To make this a reality, a wide variety of systems must communicate with each other, from smart address labels and reading devices in the car via smartphone apps to higher-level coordination and optimization in the interaction between logistics systems and passenger transport systems ofered by many diferent providers. This allows eicient use of the two resources ‘vehicle’ and ‘driver’ so that economically attractive business models can be developed despite the low customer density in rural areas: A sharedmobility platform coordinated via an app integrates citizen buses, private vehicles and public transport systems, calculates the best connection, and ensures that service is provided at the desired time. The result is a realtime schedule and a transport planning system all rolled in one, which allows the customers to plan their way to work. Here, science can develop visions for the future and point to solutions, since new infrastructures and transport options need to be created in the country - through citizen buses or, in the future, also with the help of autonomous driving. IT solutions in Smart Rural Areas therefore adapt the transport ecosystem optimally and individually to the people in order to create a customized and still economically viable transport option for people and their goods. Another important step is for the Internet to also reach the road. Vehicles are becoming interconnected with each other, but also with the smartphone, and can even be controlled in this way. Parts that need to be repaired or replaced generate an automatic alert and trigger a process aimed at the garage. The self-driving car also ofers new potential in terms of organizing commutes or optimizing traic, such as avoidance of traic jams; and vehicle-to-vehicle networks will dramatically reduce the number of accidents. IT-based technologies already provide support today in inding a parking space and calculate the most eicient route, but autonomous driving will not only make traveling more comfortable, but can also keep sick or elderly citizens mobile. Soon cars will be communicating with each other, which will make traic management a whole lot easier. Passengers in vehicles are already using the Internet, but in the future, the car itself will be ofering services and information. The vehicles will communicate with each other and with the traic infrastructure via sensor data and information and will trigger alerts regarding traic jams, accidents, ice and slippery roads, or obstacles behind a curve - all in real time. Smart Ecosystems The basis of all this are Smart Ecosystems. Whereas smartphones and the Internet represent the tip of the iceberg of a digital society and economy, software forms the central nervous system that will combine all systems across industries and technologies in a smart collective encompassing everything from sensors and actuators to the Cloud. Smart Ecosystems are the necessary next step in the evolution and create a bridge between system classes. There is an urgent need for action with regard to the combination of application areas, for instance in the crossdomain value chains of Industry 4.0, in the Figure 1: Networking to facilitate future development - issues and mutual dependencies International Transportation (67) 1 | 2015 54 SCIENCE & RESEARCH Smart Rural Areas interaction between diferent areas of the economy (logistics, commerce, energy supply), or in the all-encompassing use of data and services in everyday life (Smart Home, eCommerce, eHealth). The term ecosystem is well known from biology, where it denotes a system that results from the interaction between organisms and their environment. A Smart Ecosystem consists of diferent systems that interact with each other like biological organisms in order to achieve speciic goals while taking into account inluences originating from their environment. Smart Ecosystems in the technical sense typically encompass both information systems and technical systems, which are interconnected with their environment in numerous ways, for example via sensors and actuators, and which interact with the people in their environment. Consequently, the most important challenges that Smart Ecosystems have to face primarily result from mastering the complexity of the services and the heterogeneity of the systems. Furthermore, the crossdivisional, modular solutions must fulill all requirements regarding quality, security and safety, and must create a positive user experience for interactive systems. In carto-car communication, the speed of the data exchange obviously plays an important role. Communication between systems that were developed independently also requires the development of communication standards and rules. In addition to realizing functionality, ensuring end-to-end quality across all systems and all domains in the process chain is a central challenge. Security versus safety Until quite recently, safety was the primary concern in vehicles. Safety is deined under aspects of functional safety, whereas security is aimed primarily at data security from an IT perspective. Opening vehicles to the outside to enable Car2X communication makes them vulnerable to attacks. Security can then become a weak point for safety. All of a sudden, a lack of security can endanger not only our data, i.e. our digital selves, but also our physical selves. At the same time, our cars will transmit a huge amount of data about us. Who owns these data? How can we prevent misuse while still enabling new business models? As these two areas, security and safety, are now coming together in the above described interconnected scenarios, new solutions are called for, since a security problem may now directly afect safety issues. In order to better understand these mutual efects, a lot of research and development is still needed, says Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Liggesmeyer, institute director of Fraunhofer IESE, “since otherwise, the whole issue of Industry 4.0 will not be safe either.” Industry 4.0 concepts only work if the customers continue to feed their personal data such as shopping behavior, consumer wishes, occupation and maybe even health data into the large pool of Big Data - because these are the data that Industry 4.0 needs to mass-produce customized products. A future in and for rural areas The Smart Rural Areas initiative of Fraunhofer IESE demonstrates that rural areas can create and maintain very livable local conditions also in the future. The issue is participation in society in all phases of life. The provision of public infrastructure, health care, mobility, logistics and ageappropriate services must be adapted to changed social structures, must be interconnected and re-designed to make this a reality. “Ultimately,” says Dr. Mario Trapp from Fraunhofer IESE, “there are a lot of things that do not need to be re-invented. Rather, the challenge is to interconnect existing systems with each other in a smart way so that added value is created.” If young families and skilled employees recognize these opportunities and opt for a life in the countryside, rural areas will become attractive (again) also for small and medium-sized enterprises and factories. The downward spiral can be stopped and the region will experience a renaissance. In order to make this vision a reality, Fraunhofer IESE is developing an open platform “Smart Rural Areas”, which develops future concepts for rural regions in collaboration with partners from research and industry. In this context, a so-called Living Lab is being created at the Fraunhofer Institute. As a development and evaluation platform, it will provide the necessary infrastructure for developing new ideas for innovative products for “Smart Rural Areas” and thus for demonstrating the overall potential. The Living Lab will ofer companies the opportunity to test their business models for rural areas on the basis of a life-like simulation - without having to repeatedly reprogram the application for their purposes (figure 2). This is how already tested good examples can be made visible, how they can have an impact and create pressure to act in order to give rural areas a future. Revitalization of the villages and collective creation of a new dynamism as a joint efort of government, public administration, business, research and citizens are crucial for a positive prognosis of our future. ■ 1 The prognosis of the Federal Oice of Statistics assumes a decrease to 65-70 million by the year 2060. https: / / www. destatis.de/ DE/ Publikationen/ Thematisch/ Bevoelkerung/ Vo ra u s b e re c h n u n g B evo e l ke r u n g / B evo e l ke r u n g - D e u t s c h l a n d 2 0 6 0 P r e s s e 5 1 2 4 2 0 4 0 9 9 0 0 4 . p d f ? _ _ blob=publicationFile Mario Trapp, Dr.-Ing. Division Head Embedded Systems, Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE, Kaiserslautern (DE) mario.trapp@iese.fraunhofer.de Gerald Swarat, M.A. Coordinator Smart Rural Areas, Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE, Kaiserslautern (DE) gerald.swarat@iese.fraunhofer.de BACKGROUND INFORMATION Further information can be found at http: / / www.iese.fraunhofer.de/ de/ competencies.html The Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering enjoys a worldwide reputation for its work in the area of methods and processes for industrial software and systems development based on empirical evidence. The Smart Rural Areas initiative is one the central research programs of Fraunhofer IESE. Get in touch with us and join us in actively working at the interface between research, business, politics and civil society - for the future of rural areas. Contact: Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE; Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663 Kaiserslautern (DE) http: / / www.iese. fraunhofer.de/ Additional links: Research initiative “Smart Rural Areas”: http: / / www.iese.fraunhofer.de/ de/ innovation_trends/ sra.html Project “Digital Villages” in collaboration with the state of Rhineland-Palatinate: http: / / www.iese.fraunhofer.de/ de/ innovation_trends/ sra/ digitale_doerfer.html Twitter: http: / / www.twitter.com/ SmartRuralAreas Figure 2: The SMART Rural Areas logo