Today many cities find themselves unable to truly harness the potential of the smart city technologies available. In order to maintain the orientation and focus on a practical way to make cities smarter it can help to focus on five distinct layers of the smart city that need to be understood and managed.
Sensative take:
Cities often start with a vertical use case, for instance, building systems for smart lighting. This could be considered “easier” since it is controlled by one internal department and you could let one supplier deliver all HW and SW for an immediate effect. However, this is not necessarily the best approach to build a foundation for a Smart City. It just solves one of the thousands of imaginable use cases in a city.
The city should start with a Smart Architecture like the one discussed in this article. Then it becomes much clearer what requirements to put on the different suppliers. This architecture must be open, based on standards, and horizontal to cover all use cases, departments, suppliers, and technologies. This enables data sharing between use cases and departments and opens up for the reusing of taken investments in many new use cases.
When selecting the IoT platform that perfectly fits in this architecture it is not that easy. How to select a platform that doesn’t lock you in? Where you retain complete control over all data, where you easily can add new technologies, new data-flows, new vendors, mix cloud providers, and add new internal or 3rd party services that are cross-organizational. Where you also can integrate your city with your neighbors to share services, data, and cost.
It is based upon these requirements we’ve developed the Yggio IoT integration platform.
