Parking Service

This conceptual example describes the River City initiative related to the e-parking service for its citizens as shown in the Fig 1. Which depicts how citizens of the city can park their vehicles in advance by using an online app which would save their time and reduce the traffic in that location. With the help of the app provided, firstly users need to provide required information for booking the parking location in advance. The app should be able to use the provided information by the users such as the registration plate number, payment details, location for parking, duration of parking etc.

Fig. 1 Conceptual Example Diagram

The goal of the smart city manager in river city is to benefit the citizens and the city in terms of average CO2 reduction, travel distance saved, petrol usage and cost saved by city and by the individuals, by providing smart parking system in the city.

The smart city manager and the service providers of the project need to understand the requirements and the quality factors of the services, and how it could be fulfilled with the proposed design solution. In order to verify that the service meets its quality factors and requirements, and the end users are satisfied with the service provided, a feedback is necessary for further improvement to the services. For instance, once e-parking service is live for the end users, it is necessary that we obtain users feedback and their experience regarding the usage of the service.

There is a possibility that the app which has been developed to support the e-parking service would not work properly due to some technical or operational issues, and at the end service won’t be available for the citizens to use in order to park their vehicles, and ultimately the availability of the service would be impacted which is also a quality factor of the service. This type of information could be obtained after the deployment of the services to analyse whether the services are working fine as per the given requirement and quality factors of the services. Thus, the feedback given by the end users of the service, could help smart city manager and the service providers to improve its quality by enhancing its design at application level.

The Open Group

Keynote at The Open Group Conference, Dublin, Ireland.

Prof Markus Helfert and Dr Zohreh Pourzolfaghar presented the Reference Methodology for Developing and Transforming Public Services at the Open Group Dublin Event.  They presented how Enterprise Architecture Management can be applied in Smart Cities context to provide the services that citizens need, based on the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM).

Environmentally Friendly Routes

This conceptual example describes the River City initiative related to the environmentally friendly routes for its citizens as follows. Fig 1 depicts how for someone who is planning a road trip, the system should merge the planned trip information with the weather forecast and air quality data, consequently suggesting that the user bring an umbrella and take the route with the least air pollution.

Fig 1. Conceptual Example Diagram

The Head of the Smart City Strategy in River City plans to improve the use of data for informed decision making and for supporting innovation. He decides to implement a Smart City initiative related to the most environmentally friendly routes.

The Enterprise Architect of the project needs to understand the initiative and align a technological solution with the strategic plan. The architect also must identify the main stakeholders and their requirements to design the solution. He is concerned with architecture issues, such as (i) how smart services support city goals and objectives (ii) how smart services are deployed onto application components (e.g. information services, application modules, or other deployable components of functionality) (iii) how are application components deployed onto technology components (iv) how to integrate the different platforms and technologies, etc.

Citizens are the final users of the services. They concern on specific issues, such as (i) find in their mobile applications the best route to walk and commute in the city (ii) improve their health and in general the quality of life.

Ariel University

Research Collaboration for the Smart City Project with Ariel University, Israel. We started a research collaboration project with Professor Iris Reychav from the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management at Ariel University.

The research collaboration focuses on the development of different case studies on modelling services in various municipalities of Israel. We visited different city councils where we presented our Smart City Enterprise Architecture Framework and Methodology. We conducted a case study in Netanya Municipality to improve the current state of a Waste Management Service, Read more .

related articles

  • Architecture Requirements for Modelling Alignment in Smart City Architectures by Viviana Bastidas (Maynooth University), Markus Helfert (Maynooth University) and Iris Reychav (Ariel University). The 21st National Conference on Industrial Engineering and Management in the year of innovation in the era of digital transformation, Tel-Aviv, Israel,  April 2019. Read more

+CityxChange

+CityxChange is a Smart City project focuses on Positive Energy Blocks (PEBs) to reduce emissions in cities and communities for implementing the The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

We used our Smart City Enterprise Architecture Framework to develop the layered Enterprise Architecture Framework for the +CityxChange project. This framework supports the creation of value added services that leverage available data and services. The +CityxChange DataxChange is at the heart of the proposed framework, through which relevant data and systems are used. The proposed framework is used for modelling sustainable solutions, where several organisations collaborate and a variety of data from diverse sources may be used. Read the full +CityxChange context.

Key publications

Petersen, S.A., Pourzolfaghar, Z., Alloush, I., Ahlers, D., Krogstie, J. and Helfert, M., 2019, September. Value-added services, virtual enterprises and data spaces inspired Enterprise architecture for smart cities. In Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises (pp. 393-402). Springer, Cham.

related articles

  • ERCIM News 121, April 2020: Fostering Smart Cities based on an Enterprise Architecture Approach, by Bokolo Anthony Jnr. (NTNU), Sobah Abbas Petersen (NTNU) and Markus Helfert (Maynooth University). Read the article here

Limerick Enterprise Architecture

This project is the adoption of Enterprise Architecture best practices to provide a set of Enterprise Architecture guidelines for any local government-related project in Limerick that guide its involvement with business processes, application, data, and technology architectures in the region. Limerick Enterprise Architecture (LEA) project focuses on different Case Studies to illustrate how EA can be applied to add value to Limerick City and County Council’s services.

We developed The Architecture Repository for Urban Enterprise Architecture following the Architecture Development Method (ADM) of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and its Enterprise Modelling Language ArchiMate. A footfall-counter service was selected for one of the case studies. This service provides information on the number of people in various places of interest in the city. With this information, the main stakeholders of the city make informed decisions related to the planning of the city environments and the improvement of smart travel initiatives.

With this project we developed the foundations for “Insight Limerick” – the portal for information sharing, open data and data visualisation while analytics will be used to gain insights leading to value services. See more information.

This project is part of a research programme developed by Limerick City and County Council in collaboration with LERO, the Irish Software Research Centre (https://www.lero.ie/). Photograph: Denis Tierney.