River City established a plan to provide citizens with better, more cost-effective, and quicker digital services. It uses Enterprise Architecture to guide this transformation and facilitate the multi-domain platform in order to enhance city-level operations.
River City Services
River City uses an integrated sensor platform that enhances public services, planning, and security, at a national level. It systematically uses data and sensors to better urban planning, builds more reliable and responsive public transport, and improve health care, and administrative services. The transformation and digitalization of these services are represented by using the following architecture viewpoints.
| City Service | Architecture Layer | Viewpoint |
|---|---|---|
| Air quality Service and Road-monitoring Service | Context and Service Layers | City Service Indicators Viewpoint |
| Healthcare Service | Service and Information (Data) Layers | Information Structure Viewpoint |
| Car Parking Service | Service and Information (Application) Layers | Application Usage Viewpoint |
| Footfall-counter Service | Service, Information, and Technology Layers | Current State – Solution Concept Viewpoint |
River City Datasets
River City is committed to improving the services offered to its citizens and tourists, but at the same time wants to help other cities to be empowered by data and to promote transparency, therefore it is publishing its datasets as open data, hence anyone can reuse it.
| Domain | City Service | Datasets Description | Datasets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Environment | Air quality | An observation of air quality conditions at a specific place and time. | Air quality Data (JSON Sample) |
| Transport and Mobility | Car Parking | Information regarding the availability of the parking spaces in different zones. | Carpark Data |
| Living | Healthcare | Dataset containing summary on health and health care over the last few years. | Healthcare Data |
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
| Domain | City Service | APIs Description | APIs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Environment | Air quality | Air Quality Observed API based on FIWARE Data Models for Smart Cities. | Air quality API (Documentation) |
| Transport and Mobility | Car Parking | Car parking API based on FIWARE Data Models to monitor the status of parking spots independently. | Car Parking API (Documentation) |
Conceptual Examples
River City represents its main Smart City initiatives through conceptual examples, making River City a natural testing ground for new and smarter services in different domains (e.g. smart mobility, health care, smart parking, environment) as outlined below.
The footfall-counter service represents a public service of River City which aims to collect the number of people in various places of a city in order to improve the environments of the city.
The current state of this city service indicates that there is a data integration issue due to the lack of a common data format. Each user downloads the information from diverse sources with different data formats what causes information silos. Information is not adequately shared but rather remains stored within each system. The stakeholders of the smart city do not perceive the real value of the information collected through this city service and the intelligent decision making is not supported properly.
This conceptual example describes the River City initiative with regard to the healthcare service as follows. Figure 1 shows that to provide better patient care to the citizens of River City, the system uses IoT to provide data to the connected hospitals, which in turn will provide information to the hospital staff.
The smart city manager plans to improve the usage of data in order to improve the services provided by the hospitals to the citizens, therefore, he has decided to implement a smart health initiative in the city.
To implement this idea, the data manager of the project needs to understand the requirements, such as:
- What services will be provided
- What data is necessary for each service
- What are the necessary steps to process the relevant data
- What are the stakeholders involved
In order to address the requirements above, the data manager has decided to use a data lifecycle, which is a framework that contains the stages/activities that data has to go through from its creation to disposal. With the framework, the manager will be able to know what data will be collected, what are the requirements to process it and relevant stakeholders involved, therefore to ensure that data is collected and prepared for the intended usage and end users.
His main concerns related to architecture issues are:
- How to design service as per the given requirement
- How to process data and be in compliance with the relevant regulations
- How to integrate the different platforms and technologies
Citizens are the final users of the services. They concern about specific issues, such as (i) having a smooth hospital experience (ii) receive effective diagnosis and treatment.
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.
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.
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.
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.