Page 49 - Reference framework for integrated management of an SSC - A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

The reality of cities is complex and heterogeneous in terms of their own urban nature, degree of
technological development and available resources. The path towards a technological architecture
of reference that allows the rapid development of applications, and the sharing of resources is a
medium to long-term task that must consider the new technological paradigms, sustainability, re-
usability and interoperability with other external actors.

The greatest difficulty for this transformation is to identify elements that already exist (e.g., sensors,
services, and social networks), define how to share resources and data, so that they can interact to
create or improve the services of the city and finally, to have a unified technological infrastructure
that allows interoperation with different types of existing legacy platforms.

This situation has worsened as citizens have demanded increasingly complex services that often
require the sharing of information in real time among different internal departments and external
actors.

It has been considered convenient to describe a target technological architecture through an ideal
abstraction of a city ecosystem based on elements and interactions, and then, a real ICT ecosystem
with the different components that exist or may exist (administrative systems, databases, geographic
information system, smart city platform, etc.) on which services and applications of value for citizens
and process improvement are built.

In the Report of the ITU Secretary-General for the Sixth World Telecommunication/ Information and
Communication Technology Policy Forum 2021 (WTPF-21), ITU-T defined six priorities, solutions
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and technologies that have the potential to transform areas as diverse and critical as education,
health care, finance, mobility, agriculture, energy, accessibility, and connectivity. These are: Artificial
Intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G, Big Data, OTTs and finally, the development of new solutions
for connectivity. Cities will be major beneficiaries of these developments as five of the six priorities
are directly applicable in an SSC.

In this context, new paradigms such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, 5G, Big Data
and advanced connectivity offer high-impact solutions, but also entail new challenges that must
be faced in an organized way under a consistent technological architecture.

Under this prism, facing the above challenges and obtaining the value of these technologies
requires a macro approach that allows the user to:

• Define a conceptual model that semantically describes the relationships between people and
the physical world.

• Provide intelligence to different managed objects, physical and logical infrastructures, distributed
throughout the city.
• Transmit the data of these infrastructures with guarantees of security and reliability.

• Collect large amounts of heterogeneous information, mostly in real time.

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