Snap4City: A Scalable IOT/IOE Platform for Developing Smart City Applications

Abstract

Smart City solutions, initially started with open data, are evolving towards data aggregation and semantics. Recently, some of them are also offering IOT support. The combination of IOT and smart city is not an easy task, the data volumes are much higher than those addressed for industrial IOT. The complexity of IOT smart city solutions have been identified by a number of actors. The European commission started to set up the EIP project for stimulating and concerting actions. The Select4Cities project of the European Commission and associated community http://www.select4cities.eu/ created a challenge to find research solutions satisfying a formalized set of functional and nonfunctional requirements. Snap4City presented in this paper is one of the solutions developed in response to that challenge. The solution proposed offers a platform where sophisticated IOT applications for controlling city dashboards as well as IOT mobile applications can be developed in few steps. Moreover, a number of development and monitoring tools have been developed. Among them, in this paper, a special attention is given to the tools and solutions for monitoring communication performance and to perform the assessment of scalability.

Explora: Interactive Querying of Multidimensional Data in the Context of Smart Cities

“…Badii et al [32,33] introduce Snap4City, a visual programming environment along with a suite of microservices allowing users to create event-driven IoT applications in the context of smart cities. The platform runs on top of Node-RED [34] and offers a comprehensive set of visual constructs through which users can assemble complex data flows supporting smart city applications (dashboards, route planning, data analytics, etc.).…”

TRAFAIR: Understanding Traffic Flow to Improve Air Quality

“…4 low costs devices for air quality monitoring to be distributed opportunely in different areas in the three cities of Florence, Pisa and Livorno. The technical infrastructure for the data acquisition, storage, and big data analysis is Snap4City, the Open Urban Platform for a Sentient Smart City 3 developed by the DISIT Lab of UNIFI ( [3], [4]). Snap4City yet ingests and manages environmental data coming from a restricted number of environmental stations in the regional territory and aggregates the data provided by the 800 traffic sensors.…”

“…For the scope of the project, we intend to catch real-time traffic information. In Florence, UNIFI has experience in real time traffic reconstruction map 4 for the main streets of Florence.The map is constructed based on the data collected from 60 sensors. The model is able to manage the two-way roads (with a higher resolution than Google traffic).…”

Evidence-driven policy-making using heterogeneous data sources—The case of a controlled parking system in Thessaloniki

“…In what refers to system architectures supporting the analysis of heterogeneous sources of data, a very interesting framework is presented in Puiu et al (2016), that supports smart city service creation integrating a multimodal, heterogeneous, often incomplete dataset, and data analytics modules for the easy development of custom-made applications for citizens. Similarly, in Badii et al (2018), the authors present the Snap4City solution that aims to develop sophisticated Internet-of-Things (IOT) applications that can control the city dashboards, as well as IOT mobile applications. The City Enabler presented by Evertzen et al (2019) is another conceptual model for the creation of smart cities that discusses how to address a number of critical challenges and argues that citizen involvement, business collaboration, and strong leadership prove to be key success factors in the Smart City development process.…”