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This paper summarizes a series of research studies relating to the systematic development of urban ICT and smart cities. It presents the activities and developments necessary to achieve a resilient, standardized smart city, based on Open Urban Platforms (OUP) and the way these serve as a blueprint for each city/community towards the establishment of a sustainable and resilient ICT backbone.
Given the fundamental role of ICT in cities in the near future, this paper aims to lay the ground for a sustainable and reliable ICT infrastructure, which can enable a city/community to respond in a resilient way to upcoming challenges, whilst increasing the quality of life for its citizens. A key goal of this paper is to combine the reasonable features from multiple approaches to ICT reference architectures and to show how these can be used to define a sustainable and resilient ICT infrastructure. In this context, the authors discuss the quality assurance approach oupPLUS and detail the way it can be used to provide an interoperable, secure and resilient ICT. They also outline key technological pillars which should be considered in each smart city development plan and for which oupPLUS provides the means for quality assurance, resilience and sustainability.
This paper takes various aspects from current theoretical smart city frameworks as an input, including blueprints for ICT reference architectures and belonging standards, various views and dimensions of the sustainability topic, theoretical foundations from the domain of dependable ICT systems, state-of-the-art and emerging technologies as well as theoretical artifacts from the area of quality assurance and testing for communication-based systems. All these inputs are combined in order to provide an overall approach for a resilient and sustainable ICT-based smart city. According to the authors, this resilient and sustainable smart city should build on three main pillars: the design principles for developing sustainable and resilient ICT for smart cities, concrete recommendations for next steps on technological and organizational level, as well as the concept for continuous quality assurance and certification processes for the establishment of high quality and secure critical IT and data communication infrastructures within an urban environment.
The authors start the analysis with a review of various related research and development activities, including long-term initiatives such as FI-WARE or European projects such as Triangulum and Espresso. Afterwards, they define the terms sustainability, smart cities and sustainable smart cities according to which they develop a set of relevant concepts on reliability and dependability. In order to systematically approach the topic of resilient and trustworthy urban ICT for sustainable smart cities, they introduced the concept of Open Urban Platforms and corresponding reference architecture models.
With oupPLUS, the authors highlight the quality assurance requirements for urban ICT, which are central for high quality reliable ICT infrastructure as a backbone for smart city processes. Selected examples for methods and tools are provided and current and upcoming technologies are discussed in the context of Smart Cities. Based on lessons learned in numerous practical smart city projects, the authors provide concrete recommendations for achieving reliable and trustworthy urban ICT and sustainable smart cities within the scope of the oupPLUS Open Urban Platform.
Based on this research, the authors are establishing further standardization activities within the German DIN Smart City Forum towards better sustainable and resilient ICT-based smart cities. Fraunhofer FOKUS’”together with industrial partners’”has kick-started organizational and technical efforts to establish the discussed oupPLUS-based certification and recertification scheme.
You can find the paper here.