Universality and Interoperability Across Smart City Ecosystems

Contemporary smart cities involve a very high number of software applications and hardware devices that connect to the physical and social space of cities and form complex global ecosystems in different knowledge and activity domains (transportation, logistics, healthcare, local communities, industry, governance, social care and many more). In this context, smart cities can be considered multi-layered complex systems, systems of systems, that provide ubiquitous access to services, applications, platforms, and infrastructures. Although the inherent heterogeneity of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and their platforms, is one of the challenges smart city ecosystems face, several implementations promote digital transformation methodologies that attempt to bridge the different domains. Multiple IoT and software platforms, ranging from open source to proprietary solutions, implement different architectures and communication protocols for exchanging data streams. The diversity of these platforms though disrupts the creation of smart city ecosystems and prohibits the establishment of holistic and universal access models.