Angelo Frascella

Smart City Platform Specification: A Modular Approach to Achieve Interoperability in Smart Cities

The development of our cities towards the Smart City paradigm is one of the challenges facing today’s society. This means, among other things, continuously developing and adopting ICT technologies in order to create platforms on which governments, businesses and citizens can communicate and work together and providing the necessary connections between the networks (of people, businesses, technologies, infrastructures, energy and spaces) that are the base for the services of the city. The incredible vastness and diversity of applications that are emerging in this context generates an enormous amount of data of different types and from heterogeneous sources to be shared and exchanged. In this article we propose an approach and describe a methodology and a modular and scalable multi-layered ICT platform to address the problem of cross-domain interoperability in the context of Smart City applications.

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.

Energy saving and efficiency tool: A sectorial decision support model for energy consumption reduction in manufacturing SMEs

The problem of Energy Efficiency in industry is a hot topic but companies are not still implementing, on a mass scale, energy efficiency actions. One of the most important barriers is that companies are scarcely aware of their consumptions and consider energy as a fixed cost and not as a resource to be managed. In this paper it is proposed a model, based on self-analysis of consumptions, for facing this barrier. On the base of this model, a software tool, Energy Saving and Efficiency Tool (ESET), was designed as a starting point of an energy diagnosis path for SMEs. ESET was developed for textile/clothing sector but the model is general and, starting from it, similar sectorial tools can be developed. The tool provides different kinds of outputs: best practices, for helping companies to improve its own energy performances; energy efficiency indices, compared with reference values; energy use behaviours. Particularly, best practices are selected using a large set of rules, distilled from the experience of professional energy auditors. The analysis of the accuracy and completeness of ESET results was performed on six companies selected among all those involved in ESET testing and application. The results of this evaluation are very encouraging.

Looking for the unified classification and evaluation approach of SG interface standards for the purposes of ELECTRA IRP

A huge set of Smart Grid related standards already exist and is continuously being updated in various technical working groups in various parts of the world. Ongoing EU-funded ELECTRA Integrated Research Programme (IRP) on Smart Grids [1] aims to re-use the existing standards within its in progress activities considering to be in compliance with the standardization groups like CEN/CENELEC/ETSI, NIST and others. Moving towards the implementation of the functional architecture, it is important to be aware of the information to be exchanged and how communication protocols can be used in support of Smart Grid information exchange. Therefore, a reference method needs to be developed for assessing and classifying the ICT interoperability standards and specifications. The existing Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specifications (CAMSS) is thought to be a tool for Public Administration choices of standards, especially for e-government and e-procurement in EU. Despite CAMSS defines an evaluation schema for standards and specifications via an Excel tool, this paper shows that the CAMSS approach needs to be modified and adapted for the goals of ELECTRA IRP. Moreover, the elaborated tool would not only be useful for ELECTRA purposes but it would be used in a broader Smart Grid (SG) perspective as well and also, with some slight adaptations, more in general, for all complex contexts involving a high number of standards (e.g. the Smart City context).