An Approach to Provide Shared Architectural Principles for Interoperable Smart Cities

Smart City projects are moving from trials to complete Smart City realizations. Smart Cities must work as complex ecosystems of interoperable and composable services yet there is currently a proliferation of less than interoperable and portable vertical services. To diminish the barriers among these silos different approaches have been attempted but no single one of them has garnered general acceptance and adoption. The international initiative Internet of Things Enabled Smart City Framework (IES-City) convenes a broad set of stakeholders to build a consensus foundation of architectural principles for interoperable Smart Cities. IES-City evaluates global existing frameworks, tools and applications to distil a common set of Pivotal Points of Interoperability (PPI). PPI have the potential to enable both interoperability and suitable variation and reduce barriers to composable Smart City deployments. The IES-City concept is that such PPI exist in practice and need only be discovered. This paper describes the IES-City methodology.