Support AENOR's standard UNE-178104 about Intelligent City Comprehensive Platforms
Intro
In the context of Intelligent City Normalizatoin Strategy, the Technical Committee for the Normalization on Intelligent Cities (AEN/CTN 178) published a set of regulations and standards including UNE 178104 (Intelligent City Management Comprehensive Systems)
This standard aims to define the capabilities, components and requirements of a City Comprehensive Platform, including information centralized system and its interoperability requirements, where it establishes the need for a city platform or operating system that facilitates services to the citizens while at the same time seeks the maximum efficiency and an easy integration with the environment.
As we will see, onesait Platform is certified under this UNE standard.
The standard focuses in describing:
Functional view of the intelligent city comprehensive platform.
Technological view of the intelligent city comprehensive platform.
Metrics of the comprehensive platform.
Functional view of the intelligent city comprehensive platform
The evolution of cities toward the Intelligent City model has, as its main goals, a greater sustainability (both social, economical and environmental), a greater efficiency and an improvement in the citizen's life quality throughout the use of technology.
The platform comes into existence as the main element in an Intelligent City, because it is the component orchestrating all of these functionalities and goals.
A Comprehensive Platform's goal is providing a comprehensive view of the city, so that its evolution contributes to consolidate as the city's nervous system, helping in the integration of the pre-existing and future vertical systems tending to the city's needs (such as mobility, environmental, governance, people...) in a single transversal city system that generates a true intelligent city by operating as an integrated whole.
Technological view of the intelligent city comprehensive platform
We must take into consideration that the Comprehensive Platform is supporting the Intelligent City, and thus the Platform's technical requirements must be thorough and demanding.
In the Technological View, we have a set of Technical Requirements to be met by a Comprehensive Platform, being those:
Horizontality: ability to support different areas of application, so that simultaneous implementation of multiple service in a single infrastructure is possible.
Interoperabilty: ability to support different data collection mechanisms, technologies, devices and communication standards, along with other information systems, both internal/corporate and/or external.
Performance: ability of the system to handle, in real time, a high number of devices, services and processes in an efficient way.
Escalability: ability to increase processing and storage capacity without modifying the structure.
Robustness and Resilience: ability to keep on working with problems.
Security: system guarantees on security, privacy and trust.
Modularity: the platform must have a modular approach allowing to deploy it easily and one thing at a time.
Operational continuity, or availability: the system's capacity to remain operational at any time.
Recovery capacity: capacity to efficiently manage failures that may affect availability.
Suppleness: the platform's ability to work with the different intelligent services in the city.
Expandability: the platform's capacity to be increased so that it can support new needs.
Semantics: the use of semantic concepts in the platform allows for the interoperability with other platforms, thus with other cities.
Big Data Capacities: to integrate a huge amount of data, generated from several sources and with different structures.
Based on open standards: meaning that integration with other platform and development of application on the platform allows for them to be reusable and portable to different platforms.
Evolution: easing its future extension capacity using widely adopted standards.
Comprehensive: the platform must work as a whole, not as decoupled pieces that are not ready to work together.
Operable and manageable: the platform can be managed, operated, maintained and installed in an easy way
Platform Layer View
The layer model helps establishing each level's functional responsibilities:
This allows to model the Comprehensive Platform in the following Layers that logically describe information treatment, disregarding the infrastructure:
Collection Systems: these are made up by both city-managed networks of sensors/actuators (traffic lights, park irrigation, etc.) along with citizen devices (smartphones, etc.), external IT systems, social networks, etc.
Acquisition/Interconnection Layer: offers the mechanisms to collect data from the Collection Systems. It is also in charge of allownig interconnection with other external systems that are merely data consumers. It abstracts the Collection System information with a standard semantic approach.
Knowledge Layer: it offers support to process data, add value and transform services. It receives data both from the Acquisition Layer (sensors) and from the Interoperability Layer. This layer includes the functionalities allowing scalable data movement (with a set of unified APIs to allow the interaction of every element) and the remaining data analysis and treatment functionalities to generate new datasets or modified/complete the existing ones.
Interoperability Layer: it eases providing services in the Intelligent City area. It offers interfaces on the Knowledge Layer, establishing security policies. It offers connectors so that external systems can access the platform and vice versa. It allows building services from the platform's data. To do this, one of the APIs offered to developers must be the knowledge layer data accss native API (e.g., the data broker API described in the previous point).
Intelligent Service Layer: it deals with city services connected throughout the interoperability platform and the provided APIs. These applications can run on the platform or be external services publishing or consuming information. They can be developed by the same agents or by other agents. It can offer supplementary APIs to the developers, beyond those previously described.
Support Layer: this transversal layer supports the other functionalities by offering services such as auditing, monitoring, security, etc.
Comprehensive Platform Metrics
A platform's metrics must include:
The model platform's degree of adaptation to the layer model and functionalities to operate the city's intelligent services.
Platform's modularity: ability to install some initial modules at a given time, then expand components and functionalities later.
Integration with other platforms: capacity to import or export data to other platforms.
Based on open standards: all the platform must be sustained by open standards to guarantee scalability and modularity. This criteria can include both open-source and commercial products.
Supported IoT protocols: it must be based on standrad technologies and protocols, as opposed to proprietary technologies.
Extension capacity: technology changes very quickly in this field, so the platform must allow to be extended to add new capacities, protocols, etc.
Big Data Approach Support: an intelligent city generates a colossal volume of data, so this support is essential. In this point, aspects such as differentiation between real-time and historical data, or Hadoop support, may be assessed.
Open Data approach support: The Platform must include access to open data following open standards. Metrics must assess, e.g., aspects such as support to standards including rdf, oData, XML, and use of products such as CKAN.
The platform can provide service in the On Premise and/on Cloud, depending on the client's requirements. The metrics can include assessing the standard-based cloud approach support.
Including GIS capabilities, allowing for a georreferenciation of information and queries and representations of it.
Including tools that allow working with the Platform, and configuring it, in an easy and productive way.
Levels of availability and of service: RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and other parameters that can be considered.
Platform's guarantee, support and roadmap to ensure its present and future productive use.