EU – SmartSantander

Overall Scope

Key Information

Runs from: Sept. 2010 – Sept. 2013 (36 months)

Website(s): http://www.smartsantander.eu

Summary

SmartSantander proposes a unique in the world city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city. Tangible results are expected to greatly influence definition and specification of Future Internet architecture design from viewpoints of Internet of Things and Internet of Services. This unique experimental facility will be sufficiently large, open and flexible to enable horizontal and vertical federation with other experimental facilities and stimulate the development of new applications by users of various types including experimental advanced research on IoT technologies and realistic assessment of users’ acceptability tests. The facility will comprise of more than 20,000 IoT devices (sensors, nodes, etc), 12,000 of them deployed in the city of Santander and its surroundings, and the rest in the locations of Lübeck, Guildford, Belgrade, Århus, and Melbourne. SmartSantander will enable Future Internet of Things and Services become a reality.

Objectives

• An architectural reference model for open real-world Internet-of-Things experimentation facilities
• A scalable, heterogeneous and trustable large-scale real-world experimental facility
• A representative set of implemented use cases for the experimental facility, and a large set of Future Internet experiments and results.

Highlights

Successful evaluation and validation of suitable technologies for the IoT requires experimental facilities that allow open experimentation with the key enabling IoT device technologies from heterogeneous application domains at adequate scale in realistic settings, with the potential of involving real end-users in the experimentation process.

The core of the facility will be located in the city of Santander and its surroundings. The project has reserved a total budget of 1,000,000 €, of which, 500,000 € will be coming from the Regional and Local Authorities, for purchasing the IoT devices that will be deployed in Santander and surroundings. Thus, the number of devices to be deployed in Santander and its surroundings is foreseen to climb up to 12,000 devices, thus creating the basis for development of a future Smart City. Nevertheless, it is expected that the overall foreseen number of devices taking into account other locations (Lübeck, Guildford, Belgrade, Århus, and Melbourne) will reach 20,000 IoT devices.

An important number of contacts are being held with other smart-city initiatives, and the model is being shared with several stakeholders and local authorities, to promote its dissemination. Active participation and cooperation with FIREball and FIREstation Coordination Actions is being maintained both at national and European levels. During the execution of the project, SmartSantander will issue two Open Calls to fund external researchers performing selected experiments.

Sustainability and exploitation of the deployed infrastructure are both committed outcomes and are closely bound. The lifetime of the infrastructure should go longer beyond the duration of the project. This requirement will be achieved by implementing a sustainable maintenance procedure, an exploitation plan, and by allowing a flexible evolution of the facility.

The list of potential applications identified so far by the City of Santander and Cantabria Regional Government as suitable to being developed within the execution of the project is long, and only some of them will be finally deployed. Most of them offer a big environmental and social potential: public installations monitoring and management (heating, A/C, lighting, etc.), parks and gardens control (irrigation, etc), social assistance (elderly, disabled, etc.), public transportation, traffic control and parking spaces, and environmental management and monitoring (pollution, C02 levels, noise, etc.)

R&D Scope

The project anticipates a dialogue between cities, businesses, citizens and ICT researchers and developers using user driven innovation methodologies mediated by expert ethnographers to transform prototyped applications into a smart city collective service offering that is useful and accepted by the stakeholders on top of a common IoT infrastructure closely linked to the (Future) Internet and web. The applications and services for the smart city are to be used by real users, making the user part of the experimental research facility not only for testing applications and services, but indirectly using the infrastructure and components and most importantly involving the users in the design processes.

Existing facilities are usually not very large in scale and, more importantly, are not intended to be an open experimental research platform for the Future Internet. SmartSantander will overcome this by allowing every interested research groups to run their experiments on its truly large-scale platform.

Other of the most challenging goals of SmartSantander will be to provide means for the exposure of service assets to third parties. The diverse procedures for discovering and accessing services that are currently been proposed will be analyzed in order to include in the project the means to allow external users to experiment with accessing remotely to the facilities.

So far, no secure dynamic reprogramming mechanism exists that is suitable for heterogeneous systems, and this will be also developed within the project. Finally, deployed facility will be IPv6 aware, what is mandatory nowadays in real case settings.

Expected Impact

SmartSantander aims at optimizing the societal benefits of investing to build up such a city-scale infrastructure, so its been designed to support real life services, useful to the citizen, at the same time it copes with its primary target of providing an ambitious experimentation platform for the research community. E.g. first cycle deployment will consist of a big number of traffic sensors able to provide support for experimentation of multi-hop techniques on different topologies, and will also provide the City Council means to control the proper use of the parking slots reserved to disabled.

Besides, SmartSantander will increase European competitiveness by shortening required R&D cycles and providing faster end-user feedback for assessment of socio-economic impact for European researchers and service developers making technology more visible to the EU citizens. This is facilitated by deployment of novel IoT solutions and application pilots on a realistic target environment involving real end-users. Early exposure to the benefits of IoT technology can encourage adoption of the IoT technology and lower the boundaries of social acceptance by the public, which often acts as an inhibitor of technological advances.

The facility deployed will enable a wide range of experimentations, supporting different technology aspects and catering for different user groups (researchers, service providers, and end users). Furthermore the project will collaborate with other FIRE projects by federating with their experimental facilities through FIRESTATION CA.

SmartSantander promotes an open model, suitable for replication, in order to ease the expansion of the deployed infrastructure by adding new distributed facilities from other cities across Europe.

Involved Constituency

The SmartSantander consortium involves the required multi-disciplinary expertise to create a European city-scale test facility that will support real life services and research experimentation at the same time. It is constituted by 15 partners from 8 European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Spain and United Kingdom; in addition to a partner from Australia.

Participation of the regional and local authorities is of utmost importance when targeting such a large-scale deployment. For this reason, the Santander City Council, and the Industry and Technological Development Regional Ministry (through ‘Sociedad para el Desarrollo de Cantabria’, an industrial promotion entity) have become members of the consortium, and demonstrated their interest on backing the proposal by making an important funds reservation as well as supporting the experimental facility deployment logistically, technically and organizationally.

The consortium consists of:

• 2 regional/local administrations:

• Santander City Council, at a local level,
• Sociedad para el Desarrollo de Cantabria (SODERCAN), at a regional level.

• 6 industrial partners:

• Telefonica I+D, Alcatel-Lucent Italy, Alcatel-Lucent Spain, Ericsson.
• 2 SMEs with strong R&D activities: Alexandra Institute, TTI Norte.

• 2 research centres: Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, Computer Technology Institute.
• 5 universities: U. of Cantabria, U. of Surrey, U. of Lübeck, U. of Lancaster, U. of Melbourne.

Apart from researchers, citizens are also represented in the project in twofold:

• Through the City Council, that will assist in the definition of the use cases (services) to be implemented in order to validate the usefulness of the deployed facility and,
• By the Advisory Board, composed of people with visionary perspective, vast experience in accessibility and disabled people organizations, etc.

Moreover, User Driven Innovation methodologies will be applied to actively engage end users in the design process of the future services, and ethnographers will assist on the field in the definition and evaluation of use cases.