Smart city applications require pervasive and large-scale infrastructures, which include heterogeneous IoT devices and distributed information systems, thus posing interoperability and cost challenges. Interoperable solutions, exploiting fog/edge/cloud computing resources, are fundamental for fair competition, especially in public procurements, while costs savings are necessary to speed up the smart city innovation pace, by enabling more stakeholders to easily enter the market, especially SMEs. The Fed4IoT project faces the interoperability issue, focusing on large scale environments and addressing the problem at different and synergic levels: device, platform and information. The goal of the project is “Federating IoT and Cloud Infrastructures to Provide Scalable and Interoperable Smart Cities Applications by introducing novel IoT virtualization technologies” and will be pursued through the following steps: 1) select/integrate/improve existing IoT and cloud platforms, including oneM2M, FIWARE and 5G ETSI MEC, so as to establish a reference interoperability solution; 2) use such reference solution to build up a pool of federated IoT and fog/edge/cloud resources; 3) design novel device-level IoT virtualization technologies to create "IoT slices" formed by virtual IoT devices and computing resources, exploiting the federated resource pool; 4) support orchestration and programmability for optimal IoT virtual function deployment and Big Data processing; 5) integrate information coming from different IoT domains and other city sources; 6) integrate the system components. The project solutions will be technically validated by implementing four specific smart city applications, based on a federated EU/JP platform, deployed in real life systems in two EU and two JP cities. The Fed4IoT consortium will also actively support standardization activities (ETSI, oneM2M, ITU, ISO, etc.) and EU/JP initiatives (e.g., AIOTI and ITAC), where consortium members are already involved.

Data has been termed to be the „oil of the 21st century“. Data will also be what the smart city of the future runs on. To make this a reality, cities need a platform where data from a variety of sources – IoT and sensor data, open government data, social media, and other 3rd party data providers – can be processed, linked, and analysed in order to extract valuable information that in turn can also be provided as linked open data, and with which new types of services are created and provisioned. Both cities as well as private service providers can build novel applications and services on top of this platform; the platform thus becomes an economically valuable driver for Smart City Innovation. The main goal of this project is to develop such a City Platform as a Service (CPaaS) that can be federated to support regional or even global applications, and that forms the basis for a smart city data infrastructure. Technical challenges that need to be addressed include data provenance, data quality, adaptive privacy levels, policies and adaptive processes for distributing and deploying processing intelligence to the cloud or to the edge. Other important aspects include data governance, data management and the empowerment of the citizen to control access and sharing of data about her using a MyData approach. In addition to the development of the platform, several use cases in the domains of event and transport management, water management, and health emergency services will be implemented and validated with cities in Europe and Japan. Blue prints – both from a technical as well as from a process perspective – for these domains that can easily be transferred and adapted from one region to another will be developed. This will for example allow transferring the learnings from the Asian Winter Games 2017 to the Tokyo Olympics 2020. And finally, the results from the project are used to develop standardisation proposals in the related areas to ensure impact beyond the project.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is rapidly heading for large scale meaning that all mechanisms and features for the future IoT need to be especially designed and duly tested/certified for large-scale conditions. Also, Security, Privacy and Trust are critical elements of the IoT where inadequacy of these is a barrier to the deployment of IoT systems and to broad adoption of IoT technologies. Suitable duly tested solutions are then needed to cope with security, privacy and safety in the large scale IoT. Interestingly, world-class European research on IoT Security & Trust exists in European companies (especially SME) and academia where even there are available technologies that were proven to work adequately in the lab and/or small-scale pilots. More, unique experimental IoT facilities exist in the EU FIRE initiative that make possible large-scale experimentally-driven research but that are not well equipped to support IoT Security & Trust experiments. But notably, Europe is a leader in IoT Security & Trust testing solutions (e.g. RASEN toolbox, ETSI Security TC, etc.) that can be extended to large-scale testing environments and be integrated in FIRE IoT testbeds for supporting experimentations. The ARMOUR project is aimed at providing duly tested, benchmarked and certified Security & Trust technological solutions for large-scale IoT using upgraded FIRE large-scale IoT/Cloud testbeds properly-equipped for Security & Trust experimentations. To this, ARMOUR will: (1) Enhance two outstanding FIRE testbeds (> 2700nodes; ~500users) with the ARMOUR experimentation toolbox for enabling large-scale IoT Security & Trust experiments; (2) Deliver six properly experimented, suitably validated and duly benchmarked methods and technologies for enabling Security & Trust in the large-scale IoT; and (3) Define a framework to support the design of Secure & Trusted IoT applications as well as establishing a certification scheme for setting confidence on Security & Trust IoT solutions.

In HYPER-AI, we work with smart virtual computing entities (nodes) that come from a variety of infrastructures that span all three of the so-called computing continuum's layers: the Cloud, the Edge, and IoT. It focuses on intensive data-processing applications that present the potential to improve their footprint when hyper-distributed in an optimized manner. In order to give targeted applications access to computational, storage, or network services, HYPER-AI implements the idea of computing swarms as autonomous, self-organized, and opportunistic networks of smart nodes. These networks may offer a diverse and heterogeneous set of resources processing, storage, data, communication) at all levels and have the ability to dynamically connect, interact, and cooperate. HYPER-AI proposes semantic representation concepts to enable heterogeneous resources’ abstraction in a homogeneous way, under a common annotation (computing node), across the whole range of network infrastructures. The main orchestration and control concept of HYPER-AI is inspired by autonomic systems (self-CHOP principles) which employ swarmed computing schemes. Its objective is to make smart multi-node (swarm) deployment scenario design, execution, and monitoring easier, through appropriate AIs for self-configuration (nodes assigned resources), self-healing (swarmed nodes lifecycle), self-optimizing (exploiting built-in situation awareness mechanisms) and self-protecting (intrusion detection, privacy, security, encryption and identity management) at application runtime. In order to support dynamic and data-driven application workflows, HYPER-AI suggests the flexible integration of resources at the edge, the core cloud, and along the big data processing and communication channel, enabling their energy, time and cost-efficient execution. Finally, distributed ledger concepts for security, privacy, and encryption as well as AI-based intrusion detection are also considered.

SMART2B aims to 1) upgrade smartness levels of existing buildings through coordinated control of legacy equipment and smart appliances, 2) implement interoperability in two existing cloud-based platforms that are currently available in the European market and, as a result of this project, will be integrated into a single building management platform, 3) create a user-centric ecosystem that empowers citizens by simplifying equipment and device control and providing information about overall energy performance. The cloud-based platform will facilitate smartness upgrades of existing buildings, enabling their transition from passive buildings to active elements of the energy system by offering new energy and non-energy services such as increased energy efficiency, improved indoor comfort to the occupants and flexibility to various stakeholders including DSOs, building managers and other third-parties. Thereupon, specifically tailored to the needs of the user, SMART2B will provide new business models for the building energy market combining the savings from energy efficiency measures and gains from the active contribution of the building through flexibility services by exploiting the maximum level of smartness. The experience and maturity of solutions from the consortium partners will ensure market uptake through sound exploitation and replication activities carried out by the strong commercial backbone of SMART2B. SMART2B will develop and deploy non-intrusive IoT sensors and actuators in existing buildings aiming to solve one of the main problems of improving buildings’ indoor comfort and energy efficiency: the structural (physical and financial) limits of installing, monitoring, automating and control existing devices in buildings, by proposing plug & play devices able to interact with the appliances and legacy equipment already installed and communicate the collected data to the cloud for remote monitoring, data analysis based on AI and machine learning and control.