Page 20 - Digital solutions for integrated city management and use cases: A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

6 Reuse: The development of a largely or entirely new platform is a complicated and time-
consuming effort. In contrast, the reuse and customization of old functionalities denote greater
development efficiency.

3 The need for smart city platforms

The different systems in a city context can be classified as internal systems (mostly related to
traditional community services), like waste management, lighting, parking, and traffic control,
and external systems, such as transport companies, ports, airports, buildings, hotels, and social
networks .
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These systems could give useful information about the state of a city and be managed through
different types of control tools (IoT platforms, SCADA, non-IoT platforms, Big Data processors,
etc.). However, as the challenges outlined in the previous section highlight, most of the time these
control tools, where they exist, are independent, non-standard and without the possibility of sharing
resources and data .
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A general smart city platform solution is the answer to the need for an integrated and managed
system that assures seamless communication between heterogeneous systems and technologies.
It is typically built on some common enabling subsystems. The four main ones used by platforms
for smart cities being: Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Cloud
Computing (see Figure 4). The type of technology also dictates the requirements that the platform
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must address.

Figure 4: Smart city platform enabling technologies

8 U4SSC: Digital solutions for integrated city management & use cases