Smart cities that exploit connected smart sensors and IoT devices and adopt edge computing schemes, is in line with recent technological advances for improving citizen’s life, security and safety.
In S4AllCities, the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS) leads the WP5 where a novel smart cities edge computing platform called Distributed Edge Computing IoT Platform (DECIoT) is being designed, implemented and validated. The DECIoT enables the seamless integration of several intelligent and legacy systems and provides aggregation and filtering of data, interaction with the IoT devices, security and system management, alerts and notifications, execution of commands, temporary storage for local persistence, transformation/processing of data, in various formats and structures for information sharing with other platforms. The implementation is based on open source microservices and frameworks that are state of the art in the area of distributed edge IoT solutions.
An example of the use of DECIoT in S4AllCities, is the integration with the real time legacy weather monitoring system of the region of Trikala, Greece. Several distributed weather sensors that measure temperature, humidity, daily rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, gust speed, light intensity value, uv power, and pressure were placed from e-trikala partner in two sub-regions of Trikala area. DECIoT has integrated all these data to the S4ALLCities Platform via an API addressing among others the collection, filtering and aggregation of such information accompanied with the corresponding geographic location of the installed sensors. DECIoT publishes all the aforementioned information to the S4AllCities’s middleware in order to be displayed and visualized on the Common Operation Picture (COP) designed by our partner CSGROUP. In the figure x, the corresponding high level flow of integration of the weather data is presented. It should be noted that the edge computing capabilities of DECIoT have been utilized and integrated in real operational environment for several components and solutions of S4ALLCities. This include the integration of sensors and novel IoT devices for real time services, as well as the integration with other legacy systems e.g. from Metro Bilbao partner (Spain) associated with environmental and weather data.
Figure. Exploitation of the real time legacy weather monitoring system of Trikala (Greece) via the DECIoT
This integrated legacy system in the city of Trikala will improve citizens’ quality of life by offering an upgraded solution on weather monitoring for the everyday life in the city or industrial and agricultural use. Eventually it could serve as the basis of an alert system on weather-related events, such as floods and hail, and even contributing towards the improvement of air quality as more connected smart sensors and IoT devices are deployed.