Elsevier

Future Generation Computer Systems

Volume 76, November 2017, Pages 106-118
Future Generation Computer Systems

An edge-based platform for dynamic Smart City applications

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.05.034Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The iSapiens platform for Smart City application development is proposed.

  • Methodological guidelines for proper design of iSapiens applications are shown.

  • The design and implementation of a real Smart City prototype in Cosenza, Italy, is presented.

Abstract

A Smart City is a cyber–physical system improving urban behavior and capabilities by providing ICT-based functionalities. An infrastructure for Smart City has to be geographically and functionally extensible, as it requires both to grow up with the physical environment and to meet the increasing in needs and demands of city users/inhabitants. In this paper, we propose iSapiens, an IoT-based platform for the development of general cyber–physical systems suitable for the design and implementation of smart city services and applications. As distinguishing features, the iSapiens platform implements the edge computing paradigm through both the exploitation of the agent metaphor and a distributed network of computing nodes directly scattered in the urban environment. The platform promotes the dynamic deployment of new computing nodes as well as software agents for addressing geographical and functional extensibility. iSapiens provides a set of abstractions suitable to hide the heterogeneity of the physical sensing/actuator devices embedded in the system, and to support the development of complex applications. The paper also furnishes a set of methodological guidelines exploitable for the design and implementation of smart city applications by properly using iSapiens. As a significant case study, the design and implementation of a real Smart Street in the city of Cosenza (Italy) are shown, which provides decentralized urban intelligence services to citizens.

Introduction

A Smart City is an urban environment made smart by using ICT technologies, so as to improve the quality of life of the inhabitants and the efficiency of the city infrastructures, and provide enhanced services to citizens [1].

A lot of applications are compliant with the smart city vision and comprehend structural health of buildings, waste management, air quality and noise monitoring, traffic congestion management, city energy consumption optimization, smart parking, smart lighting, automation and salubrity of public buildings, urban drainage systems, emergency detection and so forth [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7].

The realization of Smart City is a hot topic in the current research landscape [8], [9], and many city administrations are interested in solutions for enhancing their cities with smart services. The European Union is also supporting a big amount of projects on Smart Cities1 and several cities around the world are boosting politics to exploit smart technologies. Valuable examples in this direction are the cities of Amsterdam,2 San Francisco,3 Barcelona,4 and Copenhagen5 that are creating versatile ecosystems for comprehensive Smart Cities realization.

Smart Cities development introduces several challenges, which are shared with the Internet of Things, Cyber–Physical Systems, and Smart Environments [10], [11], [12], [13]. Such challenges include issues like the integration of heterogeneous systems and technologies, scalability, fault tolerance, system maintenance [14], geographical and functional extensibility. In particular, geographical extensibility refers to the problem of the dynamic extension of existing Smart City services to areas not previously covered, or to new urban areas (e.g., related to the city growth), while functional extensibility refers to the problem of adding new services to the set of the existing ones.

Despite the big interest around Smart Cities, the currently adopted solutions lack in design and development guidelines, approaches for the integration of heterogeneous services and infrastructures, as well as ICT solutions allowing a holistic Smart City development. Furthermore, even though urban environments are naturally distributed, most of the actual Smart City implementations relies on centralized approaches, where a big amount of data flow in a common data center that processes them and provides services to the citizens, or schedules actuations on physical infrastructures [8]. Finally, many realized services are developed as independent monolithic blocks, and the interaction among them is not considered.2

In this paper it is argued that benefits arise from the exploitation of the edge (fog) computing paradigm [15], [16], [17]. The edge computing paradigm has the aim to push the computation on acquired data away from the core of data centers to the outer edges of a network, close to the data sources. Side benefits of such computing paradigm include: (i) a faster reactivity to events which can be managed where they occur, (ii) a better exploitation of communication bandwidth, as data are locally processed and only the aggregated required information are propagated across the system, (iii) an increase of reliability and scalability, since the paradigm fosters the use of distributed algorithms.

The contributions of the paper are manifold. Firstly, the iSapiens platform is proposed [18] as an agent-based [19], [20], [21] distributed platform for the management of a network of computing nodes spread over a city area. In iSapiens, the computation is executed both on the edge of the network, by the agents residing in each computational node, and in the Cloud for computation demanding tasks. The iSapiens platform is able to manage physical devices (i.e., sensors, actuators, or even complex objects) connected to its network nodes so as to hide their heterogeneity and specific communication protocols. As a second contribution, a set of design guidelines are provided which favors the realization of scalable and dynamically-extensible Smart City services. Moreover, the paper discusses about the advantages in using iSapiens, which provides important benefits such as extensibility, distributed computing, fault tolerance, heterogeneity management, and support for hardware/software maintenance. As a final contribution, the paper shows the realization of a Smart City prototype in the city of Cosenza (Italy), which provides decentralized urban intelligence services to citizens. The developed Smart City highlights how the proposed platform and guidelines can be applied for an effective Smart City prototyping. Geographical and functional extensibility issues are also taken into account within the case study.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses some related works in the context of Smart City; Section 3 describes the iSapiens platform and provides the methodological guidelines for the design of smart city services. Such Section also discusses about the benefits of the iSapiens platform coupled with the provided design guidelines; Section 4 shows the design and the realization of the Cosenza Smart Street. Finally, conclusions are drawn and the directions of ongoing work are portrayed.

Section snippets

Related work

Cyber–Physical Systems and Smart Environments have been widely studied in literature so far [12], [22]. The most important goal of such systems is the improvement of the user experience in traditional environments under different points of view. In the context of urban environments, there is a growing number of Smart Cities whose final aim is to make an optimized use of the public resources, together with increasing the quality of the offered services still reducing the operational costs that

iSapiens: a platform for Smart Cities

iSapiens is an agent-based platform providing useful features for designing and implementing distributed cyber–physical systems [3], [32], [33] and smart environments [18], [34], [35], [36], [37] whose functionalities are realized by exploiting edge computing [15], internet of things [10], [38] and out-of-the-edge computing services. Such systems are characterized by the combined exploitation of software components with heterogeneous physical devices and protocols, so as to furnish final users

Design and implementation of the Smart Street Cosenza

This section describes the design and implementation of a real case study which is realized by using the iSapiens platform. Such case study is the Smart Street that has been developed in the town of Cosenza (Italy). The purpose of the implemented smart street is to offer a set of services aiming at improving the quality-of-life of the citizens and favoring the interactions between the citizens themselves and the offered services. The realized Smart Street Cosenza (SSC), furthermore, offers an

Conclusions and future work

In this paper we proposed the iSapiens edge-based platform as an effective IoT tool for the implementation of distributed Smart City applications. Edge computing is implemented by using the agent metaphor natively supported by iSapiens. The platform is able to hide the heterogeneity of the involved physical devices and protocols. A set of design guidelines were also proposed. Such guidelines support an effective exploitation of the offered iSapiens features and allow to reach useful benefits in

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Antonio Francesco Gentile, Luigi Porto, and Davide Macrí for their valuable contributions to the development and deployment of the presented use case. The authors are also grateful to the administrators of the town of Cosenza for their support in the realization of the Smart Street.

This work has been partially supported by RES-NOVAE - “Buildings, roads, networks, new virtuous targets for the Environment and Energy” project, funded by the Italian Government (PON 04a2_E

Franco Cicirelli, Ph.D, is a researcher at ICAR-CNR (Italy) since December 2015. He earned a Ph.D. in System Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Calabria (Italy). He was a researcher fellow at the University of Calabria (Italy) from 2006 to 2015. His research work mainly focuses on Software Engineering tools and methodologies for the modeling, analysis and implementation of complex time-dependent systems. Research topics are agent-based systems, distributed simulation,

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    Franco Cicirelli, Ph.D, is a researcher at ICAR-CNR (Italy) since December 2015. He earned a Ph.D. in System Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Calabria (Italy). He was a researcher fellow at the University of Calabria (Italy) from 2006 to 2015. His research work mainly focuses on Software Engineering tools and methodologies for the modeling, analysis and implementation of complex time-dependent systems. Research topics are agent-based systems, distributed simulation, parallel and distributed systems, real-time systems, workflow management systems, Internet of Things and cyber–physical systems. His research activities involve also Petri Nets, Timed Automata and the DEVS formalism.

    Antonio Guerrieri received the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Calabria, Italy, in 2012. He is currently serving as Researcher at ICAR-CNR, Italy. He spent six months as researcher at the Telecom Italia WSN Lab at Berkeley, California, and one year at the Clarity Centre, UCD (University College Dublin), Ireland. He has been involved in several research projects and is co-founder of SenSysCal S.r.l. His research interests are focused on high-level programming methodologies and frameworks for wireless sensor and actuator networks, building monitoring and control, body sensor networks, design and development of smart environments, smart objects, Internet of Things.

    Giandomenico Spezzano is a Research Director at the Institute of High Performance Computing and Networking of the Italian National Research Council (ICAR-CNR) Rende, Italy. His research interests include parallel architectures, grid computing, peer-to-peer computing, parallel and distributed data mining, pervasive computing and Internet of Things.

    Andrea Vinci, Ph.D., is a researcher at ICAR-CNR, Italy, where he has worked in various positions since 2012. He earned a Ph.D. in System Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Calabria (Italy). His research work mainly focuses on Internet of Things and Cyber–Physical Systems. In these areas, he has published works on the definitions of platforms and methodologies for the design and implementation of cyber–physical systems, on distributed algorithms for the efficient control of urban drainage networks, based on swarm intelligence and peer-to-peer techniques, and on Data Mining techniques for Ambient Intelligence.

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