“Our EU-Japanese collaboration built a platform that provides secure access to real-time and historical data with easy-to-use tools that enable municipalities, citizens, service developers and application integrators to rapidly create, deploy and manage smart city applications,” said Levent Gürgen, the coordinator of the ClouT EU consortium. “And our applications, ranging from environmental monitoring, context aware coupons, citizen safety and elderly care social networks, were validated via field trials in the four ClouT cities: Santander; Genova; Fujisawa and Mitaka.”
ClouT’s European participation was coordinated by Leti, an institute of CEA Tech. It began in 2013 to develop infrastructure, services, tools and applications for cities to create, deploy and manage user-centric applications that capitalize on the latest advances in IoT and cloud computing. Its achievements include a virtualisation framework that provides a uniform way of representing various city data sources, such as IoT devices, legacy devices, social networks and mobile applications.
Leti has built an IoT platform, sensiNact, that provides access via generic application programming interfaces to thousands of physical and virtual devices deployed in the ClouT cities, which use different protocols. With a PC-based configuration, the sensiNact platform is said to handle more than 10 protocols and simultaneous connections to more than 10,000 devices. sensiNact is part of the European open platforms initiative and will soon be released as open source.
Some of the smart city tools developed and tried so far are:
The ‘Sensorised garbage cars’ application which aims to collect atmospheric information via a mobile sensor system installed on garbage collection cars in Fujisawa, Japan. Functionalities have been implemented for dynamically changing sensing parameters, such as the sampling rate of some specific air pollution sensor data.
The Smiley Coupon in Santander. The application provides customized coupons for citizens and tourists, according to their degree of smile: “your smile has a reward”.
This intercontinental field trial gathers information from the different applications developed in the first two years. It is a competition comparing similar data gathered from each city.Specific indexes related to environment, transport or quality of life have been defined and included in a city dashboard available for public display and smartphones.
(For more on Bristol smart city, see http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-technology/beyond-the-laboratory-the-smart-city-playground/143378/)