AbstractNowadays, pricing strategies for insured clients are supported on general statistics and driver personnel conditions (historic driver activity, age, gender, and address). Cutting-edge technologies such as IoT, AI, and big data have converted current vehicles on a plethora of available real-world and real-time data, leading to novel alternatives of car insurance policies and services such as personalized enhanced products based on their driving profile and evolved services related to the insured context, driver profile, environment, etc. like fraud detection and accident resolution.

Worldwide cities are involved in a digital transformation phase. More sustainable cities and improving citizen’s quality of life are the leit motiv of such transformation. However, such aims are difficult to achieve if the migration of the urban processes are not carried out following a common approach. Optimizing the behavior of any specific urban service needs to be performed taking into consideration both the service itself as well as its interaction with adjacent services. This means that any solution aiming to achieve the autonomous city management paradigm is tightly related to the adoption of common frameworks which are able to guarantee interoperability with other systems. Furthermore, cities themselves are not isolated systems. Well the opposite, cities interact one to the each other depending on different attributes. This implies that sooner or later optimizing some processes in one city without having in mind the adjacency to others might not be efficient enough. Hence, interoperability among cities will become a must, not just in terms of optimization but also replicability. Based on this boundary conditions this paper describes a framework aimed to ensure interoperability and replicability among cities. Some of the tools for assessing compliance with specific standardization activities are also presented.

Smart cities solutions are often monolithically implemented, from sensors data handling through to the provided services. The same challenges are regularly faced by different developers, for every new solution in a new city. Expertise and know-how can be re-used and the effort shared. In this article we present the methodologies to minimize the efforts of implementing new smart city solutions and maximizing the sharing of components. The final target is to have a live technical community of smart city application developers. The results of this activity comes from the implementation of 35 city services in 27 cities between Europe and South Korea. To share efforts, we encourage developers to devise applications using a modular approach. Single-function components that are re-usable by other city services are packaged and published as standalone components, named Atomic Services. We identify 15 atomic services addressing smart city challenges in data analytics, data evaluation, data integration, data validation, and visualization. 38 instances of the atomic services are already operational in several smart city services. We detail in this article, as atomic service examples, some data predictor components. Furthermore, we describe real-world atomic services usage in the scenarios of Santander and three Danish cities. The resulting atomic services also generate a side market for smart city solutions, allowing expertise and know-how to be re-used by different stakeholders.

New technologies have been progressively integrated into vehicles during the last thirty years. Commercial vehicles today can be seen as 2 tonne IoT devices on wheels that continuously collect high-quality information not only from the internal performance and behaviour of the vehicle but also from the external environment. The adoption of cutting-edge technologies like 5G, Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be essential pillars for the actual implementation of new Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) leveraging Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) paradigm. This paper is focused on the design and implementation of a connected vehicle-based system to enable new services and applications to be developed, by exploiting high-quality data collected from onboard sensors and ECUs and leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning technologies.

In a world with an ever increasing urbanization, governance is investigating innovative solutions to sustain the society evolution. Internet-of-Things promises huge benefits for cities and the proliferation of smart city deployments demonstrates the common acceptance of IoT as basis for many solutions. The city pilots developments occurred in parallel and with different designs thus creating fragmentation of IoT. The European project SynchroniCity aims to synchronize 8 smart cities to establish a shared environment fostering a self-sustained business growth. In this article we present the collaborative methodology and shared efforts spent towards the creation of a common ecosystem for the development of smart city services. Our design evolves around the concept of ”atomic services” that implements a single functional block to be composed for full-fledged smart city services. This creates opportunities for diverse stakeholders to participate to a global smart cities market. The methodology and outcome of our efforts will be followed by 10 new cities globally, thus expanding the market range for IoT stakeholders.

This article identifies the main challenges of the National Health Service of Spain and proposes its transformation into a Learning Health System. For this purpose, the main indicators and reports published by the Spanish Ministries of Health and Finance, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and World Health Organization (WHO) were reviewed. The Learning Health System proposal is based on some sections of an unpublished report, written by two of the authors under request of the Ministry of Health of Spain on Big Data for the National Health System. The main challenges identified are the rising old age dependency ratio; health expenditure pressures and the likely increase of out-of-pocket expenditure; drug expenditures, both retail and consumed in hospitals; waiting lists for surgery; potentially preventable hospital admissions; and the use of electronic health record (EHR) data to fulfil national health information and research objectives. To improve its efficacy, efficiency, and quality, the National Health Service of Spain should be transformed into a Learning Health System. Information and communication technologies (IT) enablers are a fundamental tool to address the complexity and vastness of health data as well as the urgency that clinical and management decisions require. Big Data solutions are a perfect match for that problem in health systems.

Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and it is foreseen as one of the technologies that will leverage the Future Internet. It is seen as a major enabler of novel applications and services that will foster efficiency and will ease every day’s life. However, current IoT solutions are mainly focusing on the development of centralized solutions that do not promote the democratization of the IoT but rather concentrate the IoT around a set of cloud-based platforms which pretend to be open but limit the capacity of the people to tailor their Personal and Communal IoT. This paper describes a software platform based on available generic enablers as defined by the FIWARE initiative. It extends the existing architecture models to accommodate the requirements stemming from the vision of people-sourced IoT devices which are shared to create applications and services in smart communities where the owners of the shared devices are always empowered to control who, and in which circumstances, has access to the shared information.

This paper presents the development and architecture of the SocIoTal platform. SocIoTal is a European FP7 project which aims to create a socially-aware citizen-centric Internet of Things infrastructure. The aim of the project is to put trust, user-control and transparency at the heart of the system in order to gain the confidence of everyday users and developers. By providing adequate tools and mechanisms that simplify complexity and lower the barriers of entry, it will encourage citizen participation in the Internet of Things. This adds a novel and rich dimension to the emerging IoT ecosystem, providing a wealth of opportunities for the creation of new services and applications. These services and applications will be able to address the needs of society therefore improving the quality of life in cities and communities. In addition to technological innovation, the SocIoTal project sought to innovate the way in which users and developers interact and shape the direction of the project. The project worked on new formats in obtaining data, information and knowledge. The first step consisted of gaining input, feedback and information on IoT as a reality in business. This led to a validated iterative methodology which formed part of the SocIoTal toolkit and a best practices guide for local policy makers and cities.

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. This paper describes a field trial that instantiates a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm. The trial has been executed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. The trial takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utility as well as of the Internet of Things infrastructure belonging to the city municipality to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The main contribution presented in the paper is, indeed, the assessment of the energy savings achieved during the field trials and the study of key performance indicators analyzed during the trial. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution, which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Finally, the trial is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture.

Contrary to the general approach of creating Internet of Things (IoT) services from a business perspective, the SOCIOTAL project addresses the design of citizen centered IoT solutions. For this, it is required to create new IoT solutions from the citizens’ point of view and for the immediate benefit of the citizens without necessarily involving city or commercial service providers. A co-creation approach towards definition of user scenarios is adopted by the EU project SOCIOTAL, resulting in a series of workshops with groups of citizens in two cities, where the issues they face and how IoT could help and improve the citizen quality of life were discussed. The drivers and barriers for IoT as well as the results of these workshops are presented in this paper, among which we highlight the main requirements for defining effective user-centric services.

Improving efficiency of city services and facilitating a more sustainable development of cities are the main drivers of the smart city concept. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) play a crucial role in making cities smarter, more accessible and more open. In this paper we present a novel architecture exploiting major concepts from the Future Internet (FI) paradigm addressing the challenges that need to be overcome when creating smarter cities. This architecture takes advantage of both the critical communications infrastructures already in place and owned by the utilities as well as of the infrastructure belonging to the city municipalities to accelerate efficient provision of existing and new city services. The paper highlights how FI technologies create the necessary glue and logic that allows the integration of current vertical and isolated city services into a holistic solution, which enables a huge forward leap for the efficiency and sustainability of our cities. Moreover, the paper describes a real-world prototype, that instantiates the aforementioned architecture, deployed in one of the parks of the city of Santander providing an autonomous public street lighting adaptation service. This prototype is a showcase on how added-value services can be seamlessly created on top of the proposed architecture.