Atomic Services: sustainable ecosystem of smart city services through pan-European collaboration

Abstract

In a world with an ever increasing urbanization, governance is investigating innovative solutions to sustain the society evolution. Internet-of-Things promises huge benefits for cities and the proliferation of smart city deployments demonstrates the common acceptance of IoT as basis for many solutions. The city pilots developments occurred in parallel and with different designs thus creating fragmentation of IoT. The European project SynchroniCity aims to synchronize 8 smart cities to establish a shared environment fostering a self-sustained business growth. In this article we present the collaborative methodology and shared efforts spent towards the creation of a common ecosystem for the development of smart city services. Our design evolves around the concept of "atomic services" that implements a single functional block to be composed for full-fledged smart city services. This creates opportunities for diverse stakeholders to participate to a global smart cities market. The methodology and outcome of our efforts will be followed by 10 new cities globally, thus expanding the market range for IoT stakeholders.

Smart City IoT Services Creation Through Large-Scale Collaboration

“…The requirements are, then, defined by means of a questionnaire. The synthesis from all the answered questionnaires [12] brings the identification of an initial set of atomic services. The questionnaire aims to: 1) prioritize application requirements for each city; 2) identify available re-usable software components; 3) identify available know-how by developer teams.…”

“…In [12], we introduced the legacy solution for predicting parking area availability and traffic flow based on time-series data. These services expose HTTP interfaces for providing data prediction based on machine learning (ML).…”

“…Fig. 3 shows the current architecture that is easier to configure/deploy/use from the previous version [12] and, at the same time, more scalable, flexible and stable. Following the data flow, underlying IoT infrastructures (i.e., FIWARE-based Synchronicity Framework) feed the entry point of the atomic service, so called IoT Data Manager.…”

“…In this article we present the process of giving rise to 15 atomic services during 22 months (from Jan 2018 till Oct 2019) in parallel with the implementation of 35 smart city services. A bootstrap phase comprises a static analysis of use case requirements from RZs [12] and of available off-theshelf services. During a second phase, 12 RZs' city services architectures are analyzed to identify common challenges and building blocks.…”

A Standard-Based Open Source IoT Platform: FIWARE

“…The SynchroniCity project demonstrates the feasibility of such an approach by harmonizing eight cities (Antwerp, Carouge, Eindhoven, Helsinki, Manchester, Milan, Porto, and Santander). The final goal is the co-design of IoT services [2] and IoT applications, and the establishment of a shared market fostering economic growth.…”