Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - BigClouT (Big data meeting Cloud and IoT for empowering the citizen clout in smart cities)

Teaser

As we enter 2016, the world is facing a number of critical challenges such as global warming, economic crisis, security threats, inequality, natural disasters and ageing society. Urban areas are particularly affected, given that the world population is increasingly...

Summary

As we enter 2016, the world is facing a number of critical challenges such as global warming, economic crisis, security threats, inequality, natural disasters and ageing society. Urban areas are particularly affected, given that the world population is increasingly concentrated in those areas. IoT, cloud and big data are today’s key enablers for increasing the efficiency in using shared urban infrastructure, economic and natural resources. The overall concept of the BigClouT project is to give an analytic mind to the city by creating distributed intelligence that can be implanted in the whole city network. The unprecedented number of connected things and the associated big data naturally raise new technical challenges in terms of interoperability, scalable and online data processing, actionable knowledge extraction, self-management, security and privacy. The BigClouT project brought together resources and knowledge necessary from prestigious European and Japanese institutions for tackling those challenges. As a joint effort, BigClouT built a city data collection, processing and redistribution platform, data lake and associated tools to face the aforementioned chalenges. The platform and tools have been deployed and validated in 4 pilot cities in the project, Grenoble, Bristol, Tsukuba and Fujisawa, with real-life applications with real end-users. BigClouT gave a particular importance to the involvement of citizens during the whole lifetime of the project, from use case definitions to validation. BigClouT has also the ambitious objective of creating a community of external end-users to build their own applications/business on top of BigClouT tools and platform, and to maintain alive this community during the project and beyond, which will ensure the sustainability of the results of the ClouT and BigClouT projects. For this purpose, a global alliance has been created, namely Urban Technology Alliance, to sustain the results of the project and replicate them in other cities worldwide.

Work performed

The first year year of the project had a particular focus on identifying the BigClouT pilot city use cases, extracting functional and non-functional requirements (Deliverable 1.2) in order to build the BigClouT platform architecture (Deliverable 1.3). In parallel, the project built the BigClouT baseline composed of a set of existing reusable European and Japanese assets (Deliverable 1.1).

The focus in the 2nd year of the project had been, firstly, to finalise building the architecture of the overall BigClouT platform, which had been achieved in the WP1 with the delivery of the Deliverable 1.4.
The architectural guidelines provided by the WP1 had been followed by the WP2 and WP3, which focused on finalising the development work of the components developed by the partners. A total of 13 components have been developped and adapted for BigClouT. The results of the developments had been reported in the Deliverables D2.3 and D3.2. Concrete demonstrations of the first integration work among the components had been realised and reported on the Deliverables D2.4, D2.5 and D3.3.

The focus of the third year has been the finalisation of the integration work and using the integrated BigClouT platform in the project field trials. A total of about 22 integration has been realised among the BigClouT components and reported in the DEliverbale 4.3. While in the Japanese cities some first trials had been already conducted in the 2nd year, European cities had finalised the trials execution in the final year of the project (repoorted in D4.5).

In terms of dissemination and exploitation activities, from the first days of the project, we have worked on creating the communication materials such as BigClouT logo, website, flyer, roll-up, as well as a comic book illustrating the use cases of the project have bene provided to increase the project awareness in the community. The project consortium participated to numerous events, workshops, congresses to disseminate the project to the smart city, IoT cloud ad big data community.
One of the main objectives of the BigClouT is to create a community of users and developers around the BigClouT outcomes. For the purpose of building a large international ecosystem, as one of the main outcomes of the ClouT and BigClouT projects, we have created the Urban Technology Alliance, a global smart city initiative, which will bring the BigClouT outcomes beyond the project lifetime and allow us to replicate BigClouT methodology, technical results in other cities world wide.
iance, a global smart city initiative, which will bring the BigClouT outcomes beyond the project lifetime and allow us to replicate BigClouT methodology, technical results in other cities world wide.d the project lifetime and allow us to replicate BigClouT methodology, technical results in other cities world wide.

Final results

BigClouT provides a modular framework to build customised solutions for today’s smart city challenges including concerns in interoperability and big data. BigClouT is composed of various components developed by its partners, each one contributing to provide BigClouT main features that can be summarised as follows:
1. BigClouT platform facilitates rapid and flexible collection of a variety of city data (citizens, sensors, web pages, legacy platforms, ...)
2. BigClouT provides high level programming tools for rapid prototyping of smart city applications
3. BigClouT provides easy-to-use tools to extract value from the raw city data
4. BigClouT maintains a data lake with real-life data useful for building and experimenting on city and citizen services
5. BigClouT is based on a modular architecture that can be instantiated and customised according to specific city needs

To move beyond the state of the art, the project also investigated new methods, programming models and frameworks devoted to IoT platforms for self-management, self-adaptation and elastic deployment, BigClouT also realised developments of novel frameworks for distributed computing and storage, in accordance with specific requirements (such as latency and power). This is about the possibility to dynamically choose the processing or storage location choosing the optimum trade-off between performance and capabilities requirements.


TThe main tangible outcomes generated by the BigClouT project are :
• A reference architecture of an integrated platform incorporating Big Data + IoT + Cloud advantages, as well as its reference implementation will made publicly available to the EU and Japanese research community, will be made sustainable in standardisation groups and Alliances;
• About 10 smart city use case scenarios with related business models compliant with European cities and/or Japanese local governments legal framework;
• A total of 13 components, with TRL levels in average between 4 and 6 have been developped/adapted in the project.
• About 20 integration work among the developed components have been performed.
• About 10 field trial deployments performed in the 4 pilot cities with important citizen participation, involving technical components from European and Japanese partners, in addition to replication of scenarios in cross-borders.
• A global smart city alliance, The Urban Technology Alliance, has been created to sustain the BigClouT outcomes.

More details about the expected socio-economic impacts of the project technical outcomes can be found in the Deliverable 6.5

Website & more info

More info: http://bigclout.eu.