16-12-2019
From December 10th to 13th, Catania hosted the first field test campaign for the European innovation project “SCENE - Smart City on the Edge Network Enhancements” (Call H2020-EIC-FTI-2018-2020, FTI - FAST TRACK TO INNOVATION FTI) partnered by AlmavivA.
The consortium met in the offices of the project’s partner AMT (Metropolitan Transport Company).
The project’s ambitious goal is to create an innovative IoT platform for Mobile Edge Computing, in which a set of intelligent gateway devices (IGW) are positioned in vehicles driving through the city and interact along the route with different sensors scattered all around, both to collect data for sending to the service center (the SCENE Service Platform) and to remotely configure the sensors themselves. Another important objective is to create SCENE as an open platform, in which third parties (typically Smart City Service providers) can install their own applications on the Gateway, so as to bring data processing directly to the suburbs, close to the sensors positioned according to an Edge Computing approach. Enabling the use of low-cost sensors is another important aim of the project which, it is believed, may be a driving factor for the creation of an ecosystem encompassing new services and startups.
AlmavivA makes an important contribution to the project: the design and creation of the Service Platform, namely the control center that controls the entire platform. Some of the most innovative aspects include the use of the GIoTTO® platform as a “Backend as Service” for SCENE, the creation of an analytics system and a control dashboard, besides the definition of the communication protocol with all components of the SCENE platform.
During the pilot test in Catania, version 1.0 was tested of the SCENE platform, created during the first year of the project and used for the Italian Use Case, which involves the monitoring of infrastructures and buildings by means of motion and vibration sensors.
Six different sensors were positioned on certain internal and external walls of a historical AMT building. They included 4 Bluetooth beacon commercial accelerometers and 2 sensors designed and manufactured entirely by AlmavivA, equipped with an accelerometer, gyroscope and thermometer. The latter are low-cost wireless prototypes based on the Raspberry technology and allow for collecting, in an extremely flexible way, multiple performance parameters of the SCENE platform.
The data generated by all the sensors were sent to the IGW units installed in three AMT buses which periodically transited near the monitored building.
Inside one of these buses, the project team also conducted a series of tests on the Internet and Content Delivery Management functions offered by the IGW (intelligent Gateway) unit installed on board.
During the tests, hundreds of thousands of events were recorded by the platform which are currently being analyzed by researchers of the SCENE project.
The forthcoming pilot tests will take place in January in Porto (Portugal) and February in Rennes (France) to validate the SCENE platform in the Portuguese and French Use Cases respectively.
