Atomic Services: sustainable ecosystem of smart city services through pan-European collaboration

TL;DR

This paper presents the Atomic Services approach, a collaborative framework for developing modular, composable IoT-based smart city services across Europe, aiming to reduce fragmentation and foster sustainable growth in urban environments.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of atomic services as modular functional blocks for smart city solutions, enabling cross-city collaboration and market expansion.

Findings

Established a shared ecosystem for smart city services across 8 European cities.

Demonstrated the feasibility of atomic services for modular smart city applications.

Laid groundwork for 10 additional cities to adopt and expand the ecosystem.

Abstract

In a world with an ever increasing urbanization, governance is investigating innovative solutions to sustain the society evolution. Internet-of-Things promises huge benefits for cities and the proliferation of smart city deployments demonstrates the common acceptance of IoT as basis for many solutions. The city pilots developments occurred in parallel and with different designs thus creating fragmentation of IoT. The European project SynchroniCity aims to synchronize 8 smart cities to establish a shared environment fostering a self-sustained business growth. In this article we present the collaborative methodology and shared efforts spent towards the creation of a common ecosystem for the development of smart city services. Our design evolves around the concept of "atomic services" that implements a single functional block to be composed for full-fledged smart city services. This creates opportunities for diverse stakeholders to participate to a global smart cities market. The methodology and outcome of our efforts will be followed by 10 new cities globally, thus expanding the market range for IoT stakeholders