This includes sensors generating and sending data over belonging gateways, which in turn forward the sensor data over telecom/Internet type of networks to data nodes at the network edge or data centers in the cloud. In order to facilitate such a data driven approach, various components, network segments, and computing nodes from different silos and domains need to interplay efficiently towards enabling a data driven smart city. Indeed, the data sources can be versatile, including static data-e.g., governmental data, Open Data in general, and any sort of city data and information that do not constantly change in value/parameters-and dynamic data, e.g., continuous real-time data like sensor/Internet of Things (IoT) data, global positioning data, etc. A smart city naturally emerges around an urban data platform, which consolidates various data sources across an urban eco-system. Thereby, ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) plays a vital role in enabling such eco-systems, given that they will emerge around the notion of data and information gathering, and making these data and information available across multiple domains towards the combination and exploitation of synergies amongst various aspects of urban business and everyday life. Hence, there is an urgent need to optimize the processes within a city/community and to push for new eco-systems generating novel business and operational models for increasing the quality of life for citizens, whilst at the same time reducing costs and improving the city/community processes and operations. As of 2020, more than 50% of the world population lives in cities, with predictions for a dramatic increase in the percentage of urban populations in the coming years. Subsequently, we use the term smart city as shorthand for smart city and community. Smart cities and communities are at the forefront of innovation, research and development in modern societies. Therefore, the current article presents the activities and developments necessary to achieve a resilient, standardized smart city, based on Open Urban Platforms (OUP) and the way these serve as a blueprint for each city/community towards the establishment of a sustainable and resilient ICT backbone. A structured way of providing and maintaining an open and resilient ICT backbone for a city/community is constituted by the concept of an Open Urban Platform. Hence, given the fundamental role of ICT in cities in the near future, it is of paramount importance to lay the ground for a sustainable and reliable ICT infrastructure, which can enable a city/community to respond in a resilient way to upcoming challenges, whilst increasing the quality of life for its citizens. Thereby, ICT serves as the gluing component enabling different domains to interact with each other and facilitating the management and processing of vast amounts of data and information towards intelligently steering the cities’ infrastructure and processes, engaging the citizens and facilitating new services and applications in various aspects of urban life-e.g., supply chains, mobility, transportation, energy, citizens’ participation, public safety, interactions between citizens and the public administration, water management, parking and many other cases and domains. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is at the heart of the smart city approach, which constitutes the next level of cities’ and communities’ development across the globe.
0 kommentar(er)
