The ESPRESSO - Project – A European Approach for Smart City Standards

Abstract

Smart Cities are a trend topic in urban planning as well as in the ICT sector. The cities integrate physical, digital and human systems to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens. Many of these innovative solutions will be based on technological complexity, as well as the complexity of the various sectoral services involved within a Smart City, and require a system approach to standardization. Such an approach must promote the greatest possible reuse of existing open standards to accelerate the Smart City deployment. In an effort to tackle this issue, the Horizon 2020-project ESPRESSO (systEmic standardisation apPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities) will focus on the development of a conceptual Smart City Information Framework based on open standards within Europe. A further goal of ESPRESSO will be to envisage the impact of those technologies for urban planning and in societal terms. The partner cities will be engaged to analyze how their services can be improved and improved through large-scale use of standards. This will be done by analyzing, the downstream changes that the new scenarios enabled by large-scale interoperability and how they can be integrated in a future Smart City. Based on a detailed requirements-engineering campaign executed in close cooperation with cities, standardization organizations, administrative bodies, and private industry, the project will identify open standards matching the elicited requirements and will establish a baseline for interoperability between the various sectoral data sources and the Smart City enterprise application platform. In a comprehensive set of coordination, support and networking activities, the project will engage a very large number of stakeholders, such as Smart Cities (both existing and those with aspirations), European Standardization Organizations (ESOs), National Standardization Bodies (NSBs), Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), public administrations, industries, SMEs, and other institutions.