Plataforma para la provisión de servicios inteligentes basados en el internet de las cosas aplicada al ámbito de las ciudades inteligentes
- Autores: Pablo Sotres García
- Directores de la Tesis: Luis Sánchez González (dir. tes.), Jorge Lanza Calderón (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad de Cantabria ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Títulos paralelos:
- Internet-of-Things based service provision platform in the context of smart cities
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Luis Muñoz Gutiérrez (presid.), Ingrid Moerman (secret.), Noël Crespi (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicaciones en Redes Móviles / Mobile Network Information and Communication Technologies por la Universidad de A Coruña; la Universidad de Cantabria; la Universidad de Oviedo; la Universidad de Zaragoza y la Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Resumen
The popularity and interest around the smart city concept have rapidly grown in recent years. The fact that more than half of the world's population resides in urban areas and the predictions that this percentage will increase to 67% in 2050 have been and are a stimulus for both the scientific community and companies to focus their efforts in the search for new solutions that guarantee the sustainability and efficiency of these complex ecosystems. Aspects such as pollution control, urban transport management or energy management, among others, have become a fundamental challenge of today’s research. For this reason, international organizations such as the European Commission consider innovation in smart cities as a crucial pillar to be considered in Future Internet (FI) research and innovation.
In this sense, the smart city concept is being developed from diverse perspectives, encompassing multiple areas of experimental sciences and humanities. However, something that remains constant in the different approaches is the central role played by the ability to share the generated information. Consequently, it is clear that the so-called Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are seen as an essential enabler of the transformation of current urban areas into smart cities. Among all of them, it is worth highlighting the predominant role played by the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data. The ability to "sense the city" and enable the necessary mechanisms to access all this information with which to provide value-added services based on the knowledge derived from it is critical in achieving the objectives pursued by a smart city.
However, this revolution is still in very early stages of its development, and that is why investments in the deployment of this type of infrastructures only date back to the last decade. Therefore, the main challenges in dealing with real IoT deployments and how to efficiently manage them in a global context have not yet been fully resolved.
Back in 2010, the Spanish city of Santander anticipated the potential of the application of IoT solutions in urban scenarios. Therefore, they were determined to be one of the front-runners of this technological trend and, as a result, a large-scale FI smart city facility known as SmartSantander was deployed in the city. By that time, commercial IoT platforms landscape was almost empty and the few existing ones did not met the requirements that such a facility needed. Consequently, it was decided to develop a tailored IoT platform to manage the deployed IoT infrastructure.
With time, this platform showed some shortcomings that could affect the future evolution and scalability of the Santander Smart City ecosystem, so the need to deprecate it in favour of an alternative solution was identified.
In addition, effective approaches to address interoperability among heterogeneous solutions have not yet reached a critical mass and it is impacting the adoption of IoT technology in the cities. Indeed, while last ten years have seen the blooming of commercial IoT platforms, this has contributed to an even more fragmented landscape, laying the foundations for the emergence of non-interoperable IoT solutions that have often derived in siloed approaches. As a result, two major concerns, the vendor lock-in and the city lock-in, are hindering the applicability of smart city services at a global scale.
For the IoT market uptake to take place in urban scenarios, it seems clear that real interoperability between IoT solutions deployed in different cities needs to be ensured. On the one hand, cities need to be able to define their own smart city agenda without being constrained by commercial interests which might prevent the replication of successful experiences from other locations. On the other hand, smart city solution vendors need to be able to capitalize on economies of scale and take advantage of “build once, deploy anywhere” patterns to avoid reinventing the wheel based on the particularities of individual smart city ecosystems.
This PhD Thesis targets, in accordance with these facts, the design and implementation of a comprehensive solution for the management of large-scale IoT infrastructures. The resulting IoT platform has been validated under real-life conditions by applying it to the management of the Santander Smart City infrastructure, but it can be generally applied to infrastructure-agnostic scenarios. Besides, it encompasses the fundamental compatibility layer based in standard or generally-accepted principles aiming to enable interoperable smart city solutions to flourish as well as the combination of multiple facilities from heterogeneous FI domains to foster innovation.
To that end, our research study starts by establishing the general framework emerging from the work already carried out as part of the SmartSantander facility deployment. We assess its original management platform and elicit a set of requirements that must be considered for the design of the new IoT Data Management Platform. Based on them, we conceptualize the common information and functional models and, afterwards, we characterize the proposed IoT platform. In that regard, we thoroughly describe the architectural work and the implementation details of its different subsystems.
In addition, interoperability solutions have been an essential piece of the work carried out during this PhD Thesis. The implemented IoT Data Management Platform has been extended to support its intra-domain and inter-domain federation with other FI facilities.
The solutions proposed for intra-domain federation are particularly relevant to counteract the fear of vendor lock-in and city lock in at smart city scenarios. Specifically, this dissertation covers the adoption of standardized IoT interfaces, in particular NGSIv2 and oneM2M, as well as the adoption of interworking solutions between them. Besides, it also tackles the application of semantic web technologies and IoT ontologies in federated scenarios. As a result, the combination of all these intra-domain interoperability contributions lay down a framework for the provision of Global IoT Services applicable to multiple locations.
In contrast, the solutions proposed for inter-domain federation enable smart city scenarios to be combined with diverse research infrastructures from different experimentation domains. This can lead to a significant increase of the achieved impact and set the grounds for novel solutions. The considered technologies in this context are in line with generally-accepted principles to establish interoperability among heterogeneous FI facilities at a global scope. In this sense, two orthogonal inter-domain federation approaches are proposed, considering the kind of functionality the underlying IoT Data Management Platform can offer in different experimentation setups.
The dissertation contributions conclude with the proposal of an integrated use case to demonstrate the feasibility of the Global IoT Services paradigm. In this sense, we define and implement an urban mobility field trial that results in an IoT service that transparently integrates data from three different IoT platforms. This service provides parking and mobility related advice to citizens from five different cities in Korea and Spain.
At the same time, this use case also serves as validation for some of the components and concepts proposed in this Thesis in a real urban scenario, as it considers all the elements involved in a smart city solution. In this sense, we have conducted activities ranging from the deployment of a smart parking sensor infrastructure to the development of a user application providing value-added services on top of IoT data. In between, we have also rolled-out a LPWAN communication network infrastructure and the IoT platform to capture sensor information and expose it to enable the provision of intelligent services based on the IoT. Therefore, we have acquired a holistic view of all the elements involved in a smart city solution, adopting the perspective of different stakeholders from a smart city ecosystem.
