Our smart part in Europe’s Ideal Cities project

We are part of IDEAL CITIES, an EU-sponsored smart cities project to develop a state-of-the-art, open and extensible platform for securely gathering and sharing environmental and sociological data.

The goals of the project are to improve the well-being of citizens, respond more effectively to crime, fire, car accidents, and other emergencies, and to make the cities of Europe smarter, by making them safer and more secure for their citizens, both physically and digitally.

The project will enable the secure sharing of information collected by citizens and authorities, and will encompass technologies such as IoT, environmental sensors, big data, and cloud platforms.

The project also allows for the development, run-time operation, and management of different cloud-hosted IoT environmental sensing applications offering these core capabilities:

• connectivity;
• security;
• monitoring; and,
• locating all IoT devices reliably.

The project’s Ideal Cities Platform is a showcase project for the integration of the modern web, mobile, and IoT technologies in a living cities environment, and needs a generic method of deployment. For this reason, Kubernetes was chosen for orchestration. It is the most popular among the orchestration projects, and can be run on bare private clouds and most public clouds. The Ideal Cities platform, planned as a deliverable of this project, has a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 4/5. This encourages us to use a basic orchestrator rather than a commercial ready-to-use deployment platform. Using Kubernetes lets us demonstrate the scalability of the Ideal Cities Platform, and guarantees it can be deployed on every cloud provider supporting Docker and Kubernetes.

The consortium also identified these detailed IoT sensor use cases:

• Wi-Fi location technology used instead of the previously proposed camera marker identification solution.
• The Wi-Fi solution provides extremely accurate results (a 2-metre accuracy) by using close to 300 devices located in BU’s Talbot campus, and had the following key advantages:
  • Overcomes problems of mobile phone camera levelling;
  • Overcomes privacy issues with mobile cameras recording other users faces, thus potentially invading their privacy;
  • Faster and more accurate results than camera-based solutions.
  • A more versatile and feasible solution in critical situations.
  • A hybrid solution (radio and visual) may also be considered. Cablenet proposed that the camera may be used to capture critical events such as a fire—a sensor’s alert for detected smoke or increased temperature in an area could lead to an early detection of fire.

Status of the project:

• BlueSoft’s participation in the preparation of the Ideal Cities paper.
• Detailed development of use-cases.
• Platform requirements.
• Architectural design.
• Mobile application prototyping.

For more information, please contact the author.