Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - bIoTope (Building an IoT OPen innovation Ecosystem for connected smart objects)

Teaser

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings opportunities to create new services and products, reducing costs for societies, and changing how services are sold and consumed. A critical obstacle to further IoT innovation are the “vertical silos” that shape today\'s IoT landscape...

Summary

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings opportunities to create new services and products, reducing costs for societies, and changing how services are sold and consumed. A critical obstacle to further IoT innovation are the “vertical silos” that shape today\'s IoT landscape. These silos impede the creation of cross-industry, cross-platform and cross-organisational services due to their lack of interoperability and openness.
bIoTope lays the foundation for creating open innovation ecosystems that enables companies to easily create new IoT systems and to rapidly harness available information using advanced Systems-of-Systems (SoS) capabilities for Connected Smart Objects – with minimal investment.
Project Objectives
• Provide the necessary standardised Open APIs to enable interoperability between today’s vertical IoT silos
• Enable new forms of co-creation of services ranging from simple data collection and processing, to intelligent, situation aware and self-adaptive support of everyday work and life
• Establish a robust IoT framework for security, privacy & trust that facilitates the responsible access and ownership of data
• Develop large-scale pilots in smart cities to provide proofs-of-concept of bIoTope enabled SoS ecosystems
• Maintain, grow and sustain the socio-technical and business models of bIoTope ecosystems by establishing a governance roadmap for ecosystem evolution

Standards for IoT and Technology Innovations
bIoTope technologies enable the publication, consumption and composition of heterogeneous information sources and services from across multiple systems (OpenIoT, FIWARE, city dashboards…). Full advantage is taken of recent IoT standards, notably the O-MI (Open Messaging Interface) and O-DF (Open Data Format) standards, while an “Everything as a Service” design enables rapid development of new IoT systems and reduced development costs. 
Large-Scale Pilots
Various smart city pilots will be deployed in three distinct European cities/regions. Two categories of pilots will be used to validate the effectiveness of the bIoTope SoS platform for IoT:
• Domain-specific pilots – ensure industrial impact through the well-established customer networks of bIoTope partners addressing electric car charging stations, self-managing buildings and equipment, smart air quality and others.
• Cross-domain smart city pilots –  provide concrete proofs-of-concept of IoT system composition and interoperability scenarios in smart city environments including shared electric vehicles, safe commute for school children, hyper-local weather data, waste management, and many more.
Benefits for IoT Companies and Projects
The bIoTope platform enables IoT product and service providers to quickly develop and deploy IoT solutions utilising diverse information sources, which are easily integrated to compose more advanced and higher value solutions without substantial development costs. The project will use an open call process to involve IoT companies that want to be the first to exploit these time-to-market and development cost advantages.

Work performed

All Work Packages fulfilled their objectives set up for the period. The beneficiaries participated on the deliverables drafting and internal reviewing as planned in the Description of Action. The resources planned for the tasks and deliverables have been used with respect to efficiency and objectives set forth in the Description of Action.
The project has reached its first milestone MS1 – “Project Architecture Specified and OSS Project Established”- in M09 (September 2016), being verified by the availability of deliverable D2.4 “bIotope SoS Reference Platform Specifications v1”.
End of period (M18), the milestones MS2 and 3 were reached:
• MS2 – “First Publication of bIoTope Component Suite based on OSS Project Specifications” is based on the D2.5 deliverable and presents the bIoTope Software Suite which resulted from the technical work done in WP3, 4 and 5.
• MS3 – “First domain-specific proof-of-concepts” are available and described in D6.1, D6.2 and D6.3.
During the first 18 months of the project, the core components and assets have been built in WP3 (the IoT platform based on the O-MI/O-DF standards), WP4 (Context-aware services), and WP5 (user-interfaces and dashboards), while WP2 finalised the pilot specifications. These components were used in WP6 for the first proof-of-concepts of the domain-specific pilots, while WP7 prepared the “open calls” to enrich the final city pilots. Lastly, WP8 laid down the external governance for bIoTope regarding IPR, data management and IoT standardisation and established the project dissemination via different channels.

Final results

bIoTope made a substantial start for integrated IoT systems and platforms with identified players capable of acting as technology and infrastructure integrators across multiple application sectors. Availability of architectures and methodologies that can be used by integrators and SME’s to provide IoT turnkey solutions in a variety of application fields was reached with open access technologies and tools for service design. The take up by SMEs has already begun in the preliminary discussion with SMEs partners within bIoTope Consortium and in the Open Calls. Dissemination and availability of results for technology transfer and pre-normative activities focuses on the dissemination of materials and events for different identified stakeholders on European, local and at industry level. Facilitation of platforms for co-creation of products and services in open innovation ecosystems for all relevant stakeholders are within reach to be put in place.
At the political level, the bIoTope Consortium includes 22 partners (19 from member states besides EPLF (Switzerland), CSIRO (Australia) and ITMO (Russia, joined the project via a recent amendment), so the team work involves discussions on various economical, ethical, technical and social issues. Economically, the bIoTope ecosystem building methodology will improve productivity, uptake and the deployment of IoT technologies across multiple industries.
Since many bIoTope use cases and pilots involve human users, it is believed that societal benefits of deploying bIoTope ecosystem will occur. Pilots in Brussels region, Greater Lyon and Helsinki will improve the quality of services and life for citizens and demonstrate the benefits of IoT to the society. bIoTope will contribute in the state-of-the-art technological solutions and thus advance knowledge society in Europe and beyond. bIoTope will strengthen standards for interconnecting smart objects, namely by O-MI and O-DF proposed by The Open Group and strongly supported by the bIoTope Consortium in the software, which is reasoned by previous EC project results, e.g., PROMISE and others...

Website & more info

More info: http://biotope-project.eu.