Detailed description (English): Municipalities are seeking alternatives to all-in-one smart city mobility systems. They would like to be able to compose a system from multiple suppliers, each one of which provides a best-of-breed component for the particular niche that it serves, choosing sensors from one vendor and information panels from another provider, an app from a developer and a different app from a different developer, and so forth. For an enterprise in Europe to maintain a lead in the provision of smart city solutions to municipalities, it needs to keep ahead of this trend towards the breakdown of all-in-one systems into interoperable components.
EMBERS makes a decisive move in this direction for smart city mobility by developing one key element: the Mobility Backend-as-a-Service web platform, created by Ubiwhere. It ties together an intelligent city mobility system, receives inputs from devices that are deployed on the roads and vehicles, enabling it to keep track of their location, the state of traffic on the roads, which parking spaces are available and which ones are free, and so on. It processes this data and communicates it through apps that help guide vehicles through cities and towards available parking spaces, for instance. This solution, used as a starting point, and separated out as a standalone service, will provide a free, open API that is specific to smart city mobility, allowing developers of devices and apps to start immediately exchanging information about vehicles, roads, routes, parking spaces, drivers, and so forth. This exchange will be possible without having to reinvent this vocabulary and its rules themselves or follow a closed, proprietary system.
The EMBERS Mobility Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) is, thus, a web platform focused on the Urban Mobility domain. With one of its foundations being interoperability, EMBERS is capable of integrating IoT devices and information systems, in compliance with Open Standards (NGSI, OneM2M, LwM2M), Protocols (HTTP, CoAP, MQTT) and Harmonised Data Models, making the data and services available through standardised open interfaces for third-party applications. As a robust solution structured in microservices and deployable in a cloud-based infrastructure, EMBERS can be quickly provided for a particular region, to integrate, harmonise and process the existing datasets (e.g. traffic flows, parking occupancy, public transportation schedules, vehicle positioning). On top of this information, developers can leverage on services such as multimodal routing or complex event processing. With EMBERS, not only city service providers can optimise their operational efficiency (through the business intelligence reports and the efficient routing service), but also the local ecosystem of application developers becomes engaged in solving the urban mobility challenges.
Target group(s): City Service Providers, Municipalities, Parking Operators, Logistics Managers, Bike-sharing Providers, Traffic Managers, Public Transportation Operators.
Objectives: Until November 2018:
- Engage at least three municipalities to have their urban mobility challenges solved by third-party applications on top of the Mobility Backend-as-a-Service;
- Become a market-ready software solution, compliant with OneM2M (SmartM2M), LwM2M, Hypercat and NGSI, through meticulous stress testing, by the facilities IoT Lab (France) and FUSECO Playground (Germany).
Expected Outcomes: Validation of three proof-of-concept mobility challenges, in three different cities, solved by third-party applications.
New use cases, aside of Smart Parking, Smart Traffic, Efficient Logistics Planning and Air Quality monitoring.
Become a reference solution in Smart Mobility for municipalities and decision-makers.
Partner: Université Pierre Marie Curie (University), Inria (Research Institute), Technische Universität Berlin (University), Fraunhofer FOKUS (Research Institute)