SCENE – IoT platform for smart city applications

SCENE is a novel concept of a secure mobile IoT platform for smart city applications based on vehicular networks and targeting at mid-sized municipalities. It offers synergies among public projects and decreases costs of smart city initiatives.

OBJECTIVES

Objective 1 – Design and implementation of an integrated IoT platform for smart city applications

SCENE aims to develop an integrated solution that supports wide variety of IoT and mobile applications. The open platform concept is adopted. This will encourage the smart application implementation of third parties to use SCENE for both prototyping and final implementation of new services. The platform will be tested through testing applications during the field trial. The proposed test/case study applications are based on real world requirements for the field trial in cooperation with potential customers. The success of the field trials to meet the technical expectation, in terms of security, system reliability, transmission latency, data availability, user experience, etc; should be guaranteed within the planned budget and time to market.

SCENE solution for smart applications should support existing and future smart cities services through its open interface. An end-to-end security layer will be supported between gateways. Over and above, a linked layer security mechanism will be deployed for IoT devices.

 

Objective 2: System integration and Deploy a “Living Lab” pilot to validate user acceptance and a business model

SCENE Living lab objective is to benefit from the ecosystem prior and during the field trial for co-creation of new ideas and scenarios. Innovative ideas/scenarios will be explored by the multidisciplinary teams of partners, potential customers and other stakeholders prior to the field trials. Selected scenarios and implemented services will be examined and evaluated during the field trial with high level of agility. The sustainability of the deployed living lab will be ensured for sake of both technical and business contentious evolution. The pilots will also serve to validate the assumed applicable business models and draft ideas for the evolution of the solution in the future.

The main assumptions behind the SCENE project idea are:

Most smart-city applications do not require immediate “real-time” sensor communication and can function well with a time delay between the event and the communication to the central command & control infrastructure. On the other hand, the capacity to transmit high volumes of data with a relative low cost is more important in smart-city applications than low-latency or real-time processing of events.

The publication of content within the public transports can be leveraged to provide advertisements and public interest information. The revenue from this service will compensate the cost of the gateways and support infrastructure. The content delivery part of SCENE gives access to content like videos, music, tourist information even offline or when connectivity is sporadic. This part of SCENE can be effectively monetised by the transport companies or municipalities as advertising space. The revenue from this service will compensate the cost of the gateways and support infrastructure.

There is a business need for higher upstream communication bandwidth, allowing for the deployment of hundreds of smart sensors that may each send large amounts of data to command & control systems, including hi-res photos. By reducing the infrastructure costs of the smart city deployment and the cost of each individual sensor, SCENE will lower the entry cost of smart-city solutions, allowing them to be suitable for smaller cities.

SCENE PARTNERS

The SCENE consortium consists of 3 industry partners: AlmaViva, a large system integrator from Italy, JCP-Connect, a French SME and VisionWare, a Portuguese SME, as well as an academic partner, CEA from France and a Public Transport Company, Azienda Metropolitana Trasporti Catania, from Italy This interdisciplinary consortium brings complementary expertise for the successful commercialisation of SCENE.

SOLUTION

SCENE consists of intelligent gateways embarked on vehicles that integrate content delivery and sensors information collection/processing and a service platform that implements additional processing logic, manages the intelligent gateways and interacts with external services like smart city applications and access networks. SCENE will be built on top of a solution for content delivery in transport, developed in a Eurostars program.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and   innovation program under grant agreement n° 831138