Page 40 - Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

5.1 Architectural requirements

A useful way to consider the key set of architectural requirements needed to ensure the development
of practical and effective smart city architectures was developed by the SynchroniCity Project. As
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mentioned in section 4.3, the project analysed 12 reference models and architectures from a range
of relevant international standards organizations. While the solutions proposed by these initiatives
had clear differences, it was clear that there are large areas in common relating to basic concepts
and functionalities. Specifically, the main logical layers are relatively similar in many architectures,
which provides confidence that there is a basic consensus on what these should be. The reference
architecture of eight cities was also reviewed to ensure that the reality of city was fully taken into
consideration.

This section uses the learning gained from this extensive research based on international standards
work to review the system requirements, data management and service requirements and the
requirements for security and privacy management of a smart city platform architecture.

5.2 System requirements

5.2.1 Loosely coupled and distributed components

The increasing investment in IoT technology results in a fast and dynamic advancement of solutions
available in the market. Current IoT technologies can quickly become old and be replaced by better
candidates. For this reason, the system should support deployment through a modular and flexible
approach, thus every component can be replaced easily and with a very limited impact on other
components and infrastructure. In turn, this will increase the chances of services being adopted
by cities and communities by reducing the risk associated with deployment of monolithic or turn-
key systems, while also improving the development life cycle. Moreover, designing distributed
components ensures that they can run on multiple machines thus easily scaling up the running
environment of a component.

30 Redefining smart city platforms: Setting the stage for Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms