Physical and cyber systems for smart environments: IoT and Digital Twins

This PhD thesis investigates new solutions for the setup of Physical and Cyber Systems in Smart Environments aimed at the evolution of Smart Cities. The objective of this thesis is to propose innovative strategies based on the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Digital Twins (DT) for optimizing the services offered to citizens. Par- ticular attention has been paid to the reliability of the data acquired by IoT devices and the effects due to the ageing of the sensors. A fundamental aspect has concerned the certification methods of IoT devices, which allow the creation of Trusted Edge/Cloud environments. To have trusted ecosystems, innovative techniques have been analyzed and developed to guarantee the secure transfer of data in distributed systems based on the IoT. With the spread of the Metaverse and technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and AI, it was necessary to consider solutions that allow the interconnection between the physical environment and Digital Twins. Furthermore, AI models can be applied to improve the user quality of experience, such as by optimizing user interaction with the Virtual Environment, and supporting the document workflows to speed up users’ document management processes in a smart city. As a whole, this research thesis presents several results which respond to the different prob- lems of technologies applied in a smart city context. Every achieved solution comes from an in-depth analysis of the state of the art and is vali- dated through experimental evaluations.