The continuously increasing complexity of modern and sustainable power and energy systems leads to a wide range of solutions developed by industry and academia. To manage such complex system-of-systems, proper engineering and validation approaches, methods, concepts, and corresponding tools are necessary. The Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM), an approach that has been developed during the last couple of years, provides a very good and structured basis for the design, development, and validation of new solutions and technologies. This review therefore provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art and related work for the theory, distribution, and use of the aforementioned architectural concept. The article itself provides an overview of the overall method and introduces the theoretical fundamentals behind this approach. Its usage is demonstrated in several European and national research and development projects. Finally, an outlook about future trends, potential adaptations, and extensions is provided as well.

Applying the Smart Grid Architecture Model for Designing and Validating System-of-Systems in the Power and Energy Domain: A European Perspective

Even though various commercial Smart City solutions are widely available on the market, we are still witnessing their rather limited adoption, where solutions are typically bound to specific verticals or remain in pilot stages. In this paper we argue that the lack of a Smart City regulatory framework is one of the major obstacles for a wider adoption of Smart City services in practice. Such framework should be accompanied by examples of good practice which stress the necessity of adopting interoperable Smart City services. Development and deployment of Smart City services can incur significant costs to cities, service providers and sensor manufacturers, and thus it is vital to adjust national legislation to ensure legal certainty to all stakeholders, and at the same time to protect interests of the citizens and the state. Additionally, due to a vast number of heterogeneous devices and Smart City services, both existing and future, their interoperability becomes vital for service replicability and massive deployment leading to digital transformation of future cities. The paper provides a classification of technical and regulatory characteristics of IoT services for Smart Cities which are mapped to corresponding roles in the IoT value chain. Four example use cases are chosen—Smart Parking, Smart Metering, Smart Street Lighting and Mobile Crowd Sensing—to showcase the legal implications relevant to each service. Based on the analysis, we propose a set of recommendations for each role in the value chain related to regulatory requirements of the aforementioned Smart City services. The analysis and recommendations serve as examples of good practice in hope that they will facilitate a wider adoption and longevity of IoT-based Smart City services.

A Regulatory View on Smart City Services

The rollout of smart grid solutions has already started and new methods are deployed to the power systems of today. However, complexity is still increasing as focus is moving from a single system, to a system of systems perspective. The results are increasing engineering efforts and escalating costs. For this reason, new and automated engineering methods are necessary. This paper addresses these needs with a rapid engineering methodology that covers the overall engineering process for smart grid applications—from use case design to deployment. Based on a model-driven development approach, the methodology consists of three main parts: use case modeling, code generation, and deployment. A domain-specific language is introduced supporting the use case design according to the Smart Grid Architecture Model. It is combined with the IEC 61499 distributed control model to improve the function layer design. After a completed use case design, executable code and communication configurations (e.g., IEC 61850) are generated and deployed onto compatible field devices. This paper covers the proposed rapid engineering methodology and a corresponding prototypical implementation which is validated in a laboratory experiment. Compared to other methods the proposed methodology decreases the number of engineering steps and reduces the use case design and implementation complexity.

Engineering Smart Grids: Applying Model-Driven Development from Use Case Design to Deployment

Humanity is currently experiencing one of the short periods of transition thanks to novel sensing solutions for smart cities that bring the future to today. Overpopulation of cities demands the development of solid strategic plannings that uses infrastructure, innovation, and technology to adapt to rapid changes. To improve mobility in cities with a larger and larger vehicle fleet, a novel sensing solution that is the cornerstone of a smart parking system, the smart vehicular presence sensor (SPIN-V, in its Spanish abbreviation), is presented. The SPIN-V is composed of a small single-board computer, distance sensor, camera, LED indicator, buzzer, and battery and devoted to obtain the status of a parking space. This smart mobility project involves three main elements, namely the SPIN-V, a mobile application, and a monitoring center, working together to monitor, control, process, and display the parking space information in real-time to the drivers. In addition, the design and implementation of the three elements of the complete architecture are presented.

IoT Smart Parking System Based on the Visual-Aided Smart Vehicle Presence Sensor: SPIN-V.

The increasing interconnections of city services, the explosion of available urban data, and the need for multidisciplinary analysis and decision making for city sustainability require new technological solutions to cope with such complexity. Ontologies have become viable and effective tools to practitioners for developing applications requiring data and process interoperability, big data management, and automated reasoning on knowledge. We investigate how and to what extent ontologies have been used to support smart city services and we provide a comprehensive reference on what problems have been addressed and what has been achieved so far with ontology-based applications. To this purpose, we conducted a systematic literature review finalized to presenting the ontologies, and the methods and technological systems where ontologies play a relevant role in shaping current smart cities. Based on the result of the review process, we also propose a classification of the sub-domains of the city addressed by the ontologies we found, and the research issues that have been considered so far by the scientific community. We highlight those for which semantic technologies have been mostly demonstrated to be effective to enhance the smart city concept and, finally, discuss in more details about some open problems.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5578/pdf

Smart City Ontologies and Their Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

The development of our cities towards the Smart City paradigm is one of the challenges facing today’s society. This means, among other things, continuously developing and adopting ICT technologies in order to create platforms on which governments, businesses and citizens can communicate and work together and providing the necessary connections between the networks (of people, businesses, technologies, infrastructures, energy and spaces) that are the base for the services of the city. The incredible vastness and diversity of applications that are emerging in this context generates an enormous amount of data of different types and from heterogeneous sources to be shared and exchanged. In this article we propose an approach and describe a methodology and a modular and scalable multi-layered ICT platform to address the problem of cross-domain interoperability in the context of Smart City applications.

Smart City Platform Specification: A Modular Approach to Achieve Interoperability in Smart Cities

Smart City projects are moving from trials to complete Smart City realizations. Smart Cities must work as complex ecosystems of interoperable and composable services yet there is currently a proliferation of less than interoperable and portable vertical services. To diminish the barriers among these silos different approaches have been attempted but no single one of them has garnered general acceptance and adoption. The international initiative Internet of Things Enabled Smart City Framework (IES-City) convenes a broad set of stakeholders to build a consensus foundation of architectural principles for interoperable Smart Cities. IES-City evaluates global existing frameworks, tools and applications to distil a common set of Pivotal Points of Interoperability (PPI). PPI have the potential to enable both interoperability and suitable variation and reduce barriers to composable Smart City deployments. The IES-City concept is that such PPI exist in practice and need only be discovered. This paper describes the IES-City methodology.

An Approach to Provide Shared Architectural Principles for Interoperable Smart Cities

The current investments for smart infrastructure development in cities result in the proliferation of self-consistent and closed applications (often called “silos”), which provide services with strong vertical integration but without ease of mutual horizontal integration. This paper investigates the state of several initiatives addressing this problem. It arrives at a proposal for diminishing and, ideally, breaking down these silos. This vision can be achieved by introducing the idea of building Smart Cities on a common set of architectural principles, Pivotal Points of Interoperability (PPI), and by applying these principles to the definition of a set of open Smart City Platform Specifications.

A minimum set of common principles for enabling Smart City Interoperability

The Smart City paradigm is nowadays the main reference for a sustainable and efficient development of our cities. This development requires the creation of ICT infrastructures and applications for the management of the wide amount of data related to many different sectors like Energy, Transport, Safety, Governance, and many others. Thus, the ability to communicate and exchange data is critical for the realization of Smart City. The risk on the other side is the emerging, from different actors, of a plethora of isolated and closed software solutions not able to communicate each other and to collaborate. In this article we present our semantic approach to enable interoperability between cross-domain Smart City applications. It is the result of a path that applied theoretical principles of interoperability to real requirements and opportunities detected in Smart City scenarios.

Angelo Frascella

Papers

Smart City Platform Specification: A Modular Approach to Achieve Interoperability in Smart Cities

An Approach to Provide Shared Architectural Principles for Interoperable Smart Cities

A minimum set of common principles for enabling Smart City Interoperability

Interoperability in the Smart City: A Semantic Approach for Merging Flexibility with Strictness

Standard creation and adoption for SME networks.