IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework Takes Shape during GCTC Expo Week

As the hundreds of attendees and action cluster members were packing up at the end of the GCTC Expo, a smaller group of over two dozen experts convened for an intense two-day workshop of the IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework (IES-City Framework) international technical working group (June 15-16, 2016).  The meeting, organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), brought together the three working groups who are engaged in identifying pivotal points of interoperability (PPI) that are common to the dozens of smart city frameworks and platforms being developed by organizations around the world.

IES-City Framework, an outgrowth of the GCTC, aims to distill common features from the many participating clusters. This technical analytical activity assesses the broad scope of GCTC-participating technologies and stakeholders by discovering the alignment, gaps, and overlaps of solutions.  From this analysis, NIST anticipates interoperable and composable smart city applications to emerge.  Ultimately, as described in a recent article from the Smart Cities Council, this effort “will help local officials deliver the benefits of livable, economically vibrant, sustainable smart cities.”

According to Dr. Martin Burns, who is leading the program for NIST, the three working groups have been making excellent progress since the beginning of the effort in March 2016.  At the workshop this month in Austin, they shared preliminary results and developed an integrated outline for the final report, which they expect to be published this autumn.

The IES-City Framework project, launched just three months ago, with kickoff events in North America (Gaithersburg, Maryland) and Europe (Rome, Italy), will:

• Describe the landscape of smart city applications and requirements for readiness of cities and municipalities to absorb them
• Compare and distill current architectural efforts
• Identify pivotal points of interoperability (PPI) across the many existing and deployed architectures
• Produce a consensus framework document of common architectural features.

This framework document will help cities deploy interoperable and scalable smart city solutions that will meet the needs of their communities. It will help cities plan roadmaps to acquire these solutions for their citizens. It will help SDOs converge their efforts on Smart Cities and IoT. Finally, it will help vendors of products and solutions meld their offerings to allow for composable smart city deployments in the future.

Participation in the working groups and framework activity is open to anyone. For additional details, see https://pages.nist.gov/smartcitiesarchitecture/.