Platform to enable self-sufficient smart city initiatives moves towards deployment

A TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept is developing an interoperable, commercial data platform to enable new business models for sustainable smart cities. The drive toward smart cities has resulted in proliferation of digital technologies and solutions addressing cities’ concerns such as parking, lighting and waste. However, lack of interoperability and data silos often prevent projects from scaling up or lead to duplicated effort and cost. At the same time, funding smart city initiatives continues to be a challenge. This is especially true for small and medium-sized cities that are under pressure to achieve similar outcomes to their larger counterparts but with even more limited resources. An ongoing TM Forum Catalyst project called Connected Citizens: The Smart City Accelerator - Phase II is exploring how a commercial, interoperable platform can enable cities to unlock more value or improve efficiency to support a financially self-sustaining approach to becoming smarter. Orange, CABA (Continental Automated Buildings Association), NTT Group, Nice Cote D’Azur and the City of Saint-Quentin, France, are championing the Catalyst, which includes BearingPoint, Cognizant and Globetom as participants.

Use what you’ve got

Alexandre Chaffotte, Innovation Manager for the City of Saint-Quentin, which plans to deploy the Connected Citizen platform, says that small and medium-sized cities are lagging in the digital transformation process.

“These cities need to overcome such difficulties by developing a new digital vision to foster attractiveness, boost the local ecosystem, improve public services and engage the citizen,” he explains.

He notes that key challenges for cities include lack of an overarching vision, technical capabilities, sustainable business model and investment capacity, and adds that the Catalyst is doing important work in tackling these obstacles and helping cities with their transformation.

Underpinned by Open APIs

The Catalyst team is using an open, cloud-based digital platform, underpinned by TM Forum Open APIs, to enable cities to develop new smart services to stimulate engagement from citizens and service providers.

“This is an enabling platform,” says Christian Maitre, Director, Global Operations Transformation, Orange Group. “It isn’t about addressing a particular issue but provides truly open architecture, where a city can engage with the entire ecosystem and devise its own use cases.”

He adds: “Data monetization may be tomorrow's dream, but in most cities it is not the case today. We understood that we need a new way to enable complex new business models which involve sharing revenue, set-up fees, advertising fees, etc. We will demonstrate with a new global ecosystem based on digital concepts of platforms and APIs a way to resolve the complexities.” For example, a city could leverage the platform to expose IoT data from smart water meters to service providers or app developers to enable them to develop new solutions. Meanwhile, citizens could use the data to track their water usage and the city could ‘nudge’ them into using less water by using games or loyalty programs – perhaps cryptocurrency-based rewards.

Real-world implementation

In this phase of the Catalyst, the team is taking the platform closer to real-world deployment. The idea has been to use a ‘think-tank’ approach for developing the platform which ensures that the resulting commercial offering benefits all stakeholders. Chaffotte says the council of the City of Saint-Quentin has validated the digital platform concept and hopes to roll it out within two years. In the Catalyst demonstration at Digital Transformation World in May, the team showed an end-to-end platform experience, including developer and citizen portals which allow users to easily access and leverage the data.

“From the portal where the on-boarding journey starts, right up to monetization and revenue share, it is seamless,” says Pieter Janse van Rensburg, Director at Globetom. “All the components really do talk to each other.” Nico Mueller, Manager at BearingPoint, adds: “Our experience showed that a smart city platform needs to provide incentives to software developers and data providers to join and enrich the ecosystem. With this iteration all parties can benefit financially from the platform, be it providing data, software or infrastructure.”

The team demonstrated the platform in action using real data from the cities of Nice and Saint-Quentin, showing how it can be used to create new commercial business models via the digital platform and demonstrate the flow of revenue. Fellow champions Orange, NTT and CABA provided input and validation for the platform architecture. BearingPoint supplies the customer relationship management (CRM), partner management and monetization functions in the platform, while Cognizant provides the user generated content management system and is responsible for digital rights management, content publishing and monetization. Systems integrator Globetom is leveraging its service orchestration platform to orchestrate and integrate all platform components. It also provides API management, subscription billing and components related to API monetization. Another important focus in this phase of the project was community-generated content where all members of the ecosystem can create and share content, and the team showcased how TM Forum’s ecosystem modeling tool CurateFx can be used to visualize new business models and relationships.

Leveraging assets

The Connected Citizen Catalyst has previously won awards for its innovative use of TM Forum assets. Ultimately, Maitre notes, the Catalyst is laying the foundations for adapting the assets, frameworks and best practices TM Forum members have developed for the telecommunications industry to smart cities. In addition to using Open APIs, the platform will use blockchain for the management of partner agreements/digital rights, identity and access management, and loyalty accounts.

“APIs are definitely one of the big returns of doing this, and we have developed and adapted them to be more relevant in the smart cities context,” Maitre says.

Watch this video filmed at Digital Transformation World to learn more about the Catalyst: