IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework
Overview
Two barriers currently exist to effective and powerful smart city solutions. First, many current smart city ICT deployments are based on custom systems that are not interoperable, portable across cities, extensible, or cost-effective. Second, a number of architectural design efforts are currently underway (e.g. ISO/IEC JTC1, IEC, IEEE, ITU and consortia) but have not yet converged, creating uncertainty among stakeholders. There is a lack of consensus on both a common language/taxonomy and smart city architectural principles. The result is that these groups are likely to generate standards outputs, including standards that are divergent, perhaps even contradictory, which does not serve the global smart city community well. To remove these barriers, NIST and its partners are convening an international public working group to compare and distill from these architectural efforts and city stakeholders a consensus framework of common architectural features to enable smart city solutions that meet the needs of modern communities. The output of the working group will be a white paper providing a common, voluntary, consensus foundation of language/taxonomy and common architectural principles that can align these existing efforts to produce complementary, coherent, language/taxonomy and common architectural principles that will support interoperable and portable smart applications. Thus, the working group effort will facilitate the work being done by the various standards organizations, consortia, and others.
What
A smart city is a moniker that inspires a vision of a city where key components of infrastructure and services – environmental, emergency response, traffic and energy management to name a few – are integrated in such a way that features and applications can easily be combined with whatever capability existed before. Achieving that vision requires moving beyond many current implementations in which the degree of integration of core subsystems within smart cities is often limited by patchworks of legacy and fixed solutions connected by custom integrations. The public working group seeks to benefit from lessons learned by pioneers of smart city implementations to distill a composable Smart City Framework.
By “composable,” we imply that continuous integration and improvement would be achieved through graceful addition of functions as opposed to wholesale replacement or retrofitting. Cities integrating
