Fostering inter-operable urban ecosystems through the adoption of common frameworks

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase. More sustainable cities and improving citizen’s quality of life are the leit motiv of such transformation. However, such aims are difficult to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not carried out following a common approach. Optimizing the behavior of any specific urban service needs to be performed taking into consideration both the service itself as well as its interaction with adjacent services. This means that any solution aiming to achieve the autonomous city management paradigm is tightly related to the adoption of common frameworks which are able to guarantee interoperability with other systems. Furthermore, cities themselves are not isolated systems. Well the opposite, cities interact one to the each other depending on different attributes. This implies that sooner or later optimizing some processes in one city without having in mind the adjacency to others might not be efficient enough. Hence, interoperability among cities will become a must, not just in terms of optimization but also replicability. Based on this boundary conditions this paper describes a framework aimed to ensure interoperability and replicability among cities. Some of the tools for assessing compliance with specific standardization activities are also presented.This work has been partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme under Grant Agreement No. 732240 SynchroniCity (Delivering an IoT enabled Digital Single Market for Europe and Beyond). The content of this paper does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors. In addition, this work has been also partially funded by the Spanish Government (MINECO) under Grant Agreement No. RTI2018-093475-AI00 FIERCE (Future Internet Enabled Resilient smart CitiEs

On the energy savings achieved through an internet of things enabled smart city trial

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. This paper describes a field trial that instantiates a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm. The trial has been executed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. The trial takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utility as well as of the Internet of Things infrastructure belonging to the city municipality to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The main contribution presented in the paper is, indeed, the assessment of the energy savings achieved during the field trials and the study of key performance indicators analyzed during the trial. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution. , which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Finally, the trial is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture

Integration of utilities infrastructures in a future internet enabled smart city framework

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a crucial role in making cities smarter, more accessible and more open. In this paper we present a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm addressing the challenges that need to be overcome when creating smarter cities. This architecture takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utilities as well as of the infrastructure belonging to the city municipalities to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution, which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Moreover, the paper describes a real-world prototype, that instantiates the aforementioned architecture, deployed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. This prototype is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture.The work described in this paper has been carried out under the framework of the OUTSMART project which has been partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number FP7-ICT-28503

Design and implementation of a cloud-based platform for unleashing the personal and communal Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and it is foreseen as one of the technologies that will leverage the Future Internet. It is seen as a major enabler of novel applications and services that will foster efficiency and will ease every day´s life. However, current IoT solutions are mainly focusing on the development of centralized solutions that do not promote the democratization of the IoT but rather concentrate the IoT around a set of cloud-based platforms which pretend to be open but limit the capacity of the people to tailor their Personal and Communal IoT. This paper describes a software platform based on available generic enablers as defined by the FIWARE initiative. It extends the existing architecture models to accommodate the requirements stemming from the vision of people-sourced IoT devices which are shared to create applications and services in smart communities where the owners of the shared devices are always empowered to control who, and in which circumstances, has access to the shared information.This work has been partially funded by the research project SOCIOTAL, under FP7-ICT-2013.1.4 (ref. 609112) of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. This work has been also supported by the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE “Dynamic Provisioning of Connectivity in High Density 5G Wireless Scenarios” (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R)

SocIoTal - The development and architecture of a social IoT framework

In this paper the development and architecture of the SocIoTal platform is presented. SocIoTal is a European FP7 project which aims to create a socially-aware citizen-centric Internet of Things infrastructure. The aim of the project is to put trust, user-control and transparency at the heart of the system in order to gain the confidence of everyday users and developers. By providing adequate tools and mechanisms that simplify complexity and lower the barriers of entry, it will encourage citizen participation in the Internet of Things. This adds a novel and rich dimension to the emerging IoT ecosystem, providing a wealth of opportunities for the creation of new services and applications. These services and applications will be able to address the needs of society therefore improving the quality of life in cities and communities. In addition to technological innovation, the SocIoTal project sought to innovate the way in which users and developers interact and shape the direction of the project. The project worked on new formats in obtaining data, information and knowledge. The first step consisted of gaining input, feedback and information on IoT as a reality in business. This led to a validated iterative methodology which formed part of the SocIoTal toolkit.This work was supported by the SocIoTal project under grant agreement No 609112