Towards a Federation of Smart City Services

The emergence of the Internet of Things has accelerated the development of smart cities. Currently, an increasing number of smart city applications comprising various scenarios and use cases is being deployed and tested. However, to realize a smart city, it is necessary to have converging solutions as opposed to niche, detached solutions. Smart city platforms need to take into account existing services and infrastructures. Furthermore, in the context of a smart city it is important to account for various kinds of stakeholders with a variety of requirements with regard to data ownership, legal and organizational frameworks as well as commercial interests. We present the ALMANAC Smart City Platform as a solution which handles the described heterogeneity. Firstly, the platform allows the development of smart city applications by creating interoperability among devices and services. Secondly, the platform is deployed in a de-centralized, federated way that allows to map the organizational requirements to the deployed city systems. We introduce the concept of federation for smart cities and describe its implementation in the ALMANAC Platform through a case study which simulates a scenario in the waste management domain. This scenario models real-world requirements of a waste management company and the municipality of Turin.