Lately, the introduction of ICT technologies in our daily tasks has opened up new pathways of cooperation and organization. Our society is evolving towards a new digital era in which citizens will become more and more connected to their surrounding environment. Cities are the core of our society and so they will need to embrace and support this evolution of their citizens. As a consequence of this process and thanks to new technological improvements, a considerable number of research projects and laboratory pilots have been deployed to study how to deal with problems such as traffic, pollution, mobility, energy consumption, etc.
A complete digital ecosystem is growing within the smart city concept which has an estimated market worth of $1,134.84 billion by 2019. However, along with the variety of services, technologies and protocols being utilized in smart cities, service development and service deployment in the context of smart city monitoring and control is likely to be problematic for companies, city councils and citizens. The absence of a common platform with advanced services and tools for the smart city is hindering the effective development of the associated ecosystem. This type of ICT platform, also called the e-infrastructure, will be as important a regulator for the future development of cities as energy infrastructure and transport infrastructure have been in past decades. Under this context, CitiSim´s project main goal is devoted to the design and implementation of a new generation platform for the smart city ecosystem.
This platform will provide a powerful monitoring and control infrastructure to enable planners to make critical management decisions on tactical and strategic levels based on the knowledge provided by the specific platform developed. For a natural interaction and better understanding of the events that happen in the city, 3D visualization techniques as augmented virtuality and augmented reality will be explored. CitiSim will provide service developers with a set of services, standards and tools for the development of applications for the smart city. The major expected technical outcomes in CitiSim are:
The CitiSim consortium includes partners from two European countries with relevant experience and results in the disciplines required for the design, implementation and validation of the project. The areas of expertise are simulation (e.g. Answare in Spain), Big Data analytics (e.g. Abalia and Taiger in Spain), middleware integration and services (e.g. Prodevelop and Abalia in Spain), physical to virtual world interconnections and 3D AR-VR (e.g. Alfactor from Romania), Wireless Sensor Networks (e.g. Abalia) and semantics web (e.g. Taiger).
The partners grouped by country will propose a use case of interest for a city, that can be used to guide the design and implementation of CitiSim and that will be deployed on the dveloped platform. Thus, two use cases will be proposed.