Cities are homes to a wide range of connected assets supplied by many different vendors. This is a challenging setting for deploying IoT-based smart city services without locking into proprietary technologies or the data governance contracts associated with single-vendor platforms. Municipal agencies need a strategy to phase procurement so that legacy systems can work with new infrastructure.
By Ken Figueredo
Emerging from pandemic conditions, many municipal bodies are emphasizing investments in sustainability and citizen-centered services, subject to spending constraints. The pandemic has demonstrated the capacity for organizations and operational procedures to change abruptly and to deploy city resources more responsively. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are set to play an important role in making this a self-sustaining dynamic. That is because of the value they deliver through remote connectivity and access to continuous-time data, which allow for data-enabled insights and better-informed decision making. Implementation practicalities, however, are not so straightforward.
Legacy Systems and New Suppliers
Over a period of many years, cities have accumulated numerous assets across their municipal footprint. Among others, these include streetlights, public buildings, waste bins, and vehicle fleets for repair and welfare services. These are typical of the legacy assets that require connectivity for remote monitoring and control purposes.
There is also a need to deploy new equipment, either replacing old items or complementing long service life ones. Cities also need to develop ways of adding new service providers that can help in delivering new and data-intensive services.
These requirements call for an approach that preserves the value of legacy assets while making it easy to add new capabilities and bring in new service-provider partners. As pioneering experiments in North American cities have demonstrated, procurement should minimize the risks of locking into proprietary technologies and single-vendor platforms that centralize city data and its governance.
Phased Procurement and Interoperability
The procurement challenge breaks down into several phases. The first involves selecting a vendor to enable connectivity in existing assets. Then, there is a need to send a signal to the wider vendor community concerning the scope to add new assets over time. This must be on the condition that new equipment can interoperate with the installed base and support data sharing with operational applications—most likely provided by third-parties or the municipality’s IT department.
Through such an approach, a municipality can phase large-scale investments over several spending cycles. One benefit is that it does not need to commit the full budget for a given project to a single supplier. This is where standardization is important because it allows other, standards-compliant vendors to compete for later stage deployments.
A waste collection example illustrates both the procurement and technical complexities in a relatively simple scenario and the value of standardization. Consider an opening situation where a municipality attaches sensors to waste bins to monitor fill levels. It can use data from these sensors to implement a waste collection service that comprises timed collections and occasional trips for fast-filling bins that might result in spillages and litter.
Over time, city planners might collect data about litter hot spots from social media reports or the need for additional waste collection in streets that are experiencing a higher footfall. The city might procure a less expensive waste bin from a different vendor to install in these locations. In some locations, they might wish to procure waste bins with built-in digital displays, for advertising and public announcement purposes, from a third vendor.
It is possible to implement this scenario using oneM2M standards. oneM2M is an international standardization body focusing on scalable and interoperable IoT systems. This is made possible by standardizing a middleware capability that sits between an upper layer, comprising IoT applications, and a lower layer, comprising connected devices and their communications networks.
Each connected object or application endpoint contains a oneM2M agent, which enables communications via the oneM2M middleware layer. This architecture makes it straightforward to add new devices and applications, potentially involving different vendors, over different procurement phases. In cases where the system includes a legacy system or a proprietary, fleet-management application, this is possible by using an interworking proxy entity (IPE), which functions as a bi-directional translator between oneM2M and non-oneM2M domains.
Common Framework for Multiple Applications
oneM2M standards were conceived for use in multiple applications. They do not only apply to waste collection or smart city systems. oneM2M is just as applicable for smart street lighting, which can involve different supplier and coordination of lighting schemes at the boundary with neighboring cities. oneM2M can also support services that span city infrastructure, environmental sensing and public
transport systems.
As illustrated by these examples, the general applicability of oneM2M standards carries over into smart buildings and industrial sites, which are characterized by the need to connect many different types of devices to multiple applications sourced from a wide range of vendors.
Connected Assets
Cities are homes to a wide range of connected assets supplied by many different vendors. This is a challenging setting for deploying IoT-based smart city services without locking into proprietary technologies or the data governance contracts associated with single-vendor platforms. Municipal agencies also need a strategy to phase procurement so that legacy systems can work with new infrastructure. This is possible using oneM2M, the open standard for IoT systems. Its design mimics the mobile phone industry model where different vendor devices are able to operate on different networks and to roam seamlessly across international borders. | WA
Ken Figueredo is Senior Representative at oneM2M, a global standards initiative that covers requirements, architecture, API specifications, security solutions and interoperability for Machine-to-Machine and IoT technologies. oneM2M was formed in 2012 and consists of eight of the world’s preeminent standards development organizations: ARIB (Japan), ATIS (U.S.), CCSA (China), ETSI (Europe), TIA (U.S.), TSDSI (India), TTA (Korea), and TTC (Japan), together with industry fora and consortia (GlobalPlatform) and more than 200 member organizations. oneM2M specifications provide a framework to support applications and services such as the smart grid, connected car, home automation, public safety and health. oneM2M actively encourages industry associations and forums with specific application requirements to participate in oneM2M, in order to ensure that the solutions developed support their specific needs. For more information, including how to join and participate in oneM2M, visit www.onem2m.org.