InterSCity Platform

The InterSCity platform is an open source project licensed under MPL 2.0 to technically support the development of Smart Cities projects. It has been developed by the Smart City Research Group from the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of São Paulo, in the context of the INCT InterSCity with contributions from researchers from the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA) and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).

The main purpose of the InterSCity platform is to provide high-level services and APIs to support the development of novel services for cities by gathering key-enabling technologies such as IoT, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. The platform adopts a microservice architecture to properly support the integration of a large amount of devices and data, and provide quality city-scale services.

Among others, the platform provides the following features:

• City’s resource discovery
• Hide technical details of communication of physical devices from applications
• Provide real-time data from city sensors
• Provide history data from city sensors
• Data filtering through different parameters
• Intermediate communication with actuators

If you want to cite this work, we suggest you cite the following paper:

Arthur de M. Del Esposte, Eduardo F. Z. Santana, Lucas Kanashiro, Fabio M. Costa, Kelly R. Braghetto, Nelson Lago and Fabio Kon. Design and evaluation of a scalable smart city software platform with large-scale simulations. In: Future Generation Computer Systems. Volume 93, April 2019, Pages 427-441.

Team

Master Students:

• Arthur Del Esposte
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Dylan Guedes
• Tallys Martins

Professors:

• Fabio Kon – IME/USP
• Kelly Rosa Braghetto – IME/USP
• Fabio M. Costa – INF/UFG

Other researchers:

• Higor Amario (contact point)

Related Publications

• Design and evaluation of a scalable smart city software platform with large-scale simulations
• InterSCity: A Scalable Microservice-based Open Source Platform for Smart Cities

Sample Applications

Several students from Universtity of São Paulo have developed toy applications during programming courses on the top of InterSCity platform. They use both real and simulated data to provide useful services for citizens and applications to support the work of city managers.

Smart Parking APP

• Description: a single-page application (SPA) that helps users in the hard task of finding available parking spots around the city. It used the platform services to access simulated data.
• Repositories:
  • API
  • Front-end

Smart Traffic Lights

• Description: the Smart Traffic Lights is a toy application based on simulated traffic lights. It aims at manipulate traffic lights based on traffic data, such as cars speed and density of cars on streets. Thus, it actuate on city traffic lights to prevent semaphores being closed to ways with many cars and open to ways without a car.
• Repository

Outdoor Sports Map

• Description: this application uses real data about climate conditions and air quality around the city together with static data on green areas of the city to propose the best place to do outdoor sports. It considers both the users’ location and preferences to render a HeatMap to visually represent the places most conducive to the performance of the sport.
• Repository

Architecture Overview

The following diagram presents a summarized overview of the development services provided by the platform:

The Platform provides high-level RESTful services to support the development of smart city applications, services, and tools for different purposes and domains. Currently, it is composed of six different microservices that provide features for the integration of IoT devices ( Resource Adaptor ), data and resource management ( Resource Catalog , Data Collector and Actuator Controller ), resource discovery through context data ( Resource Discovery ) and visualization ( Resource Viewer ).

The platform intermediates all communication between smart city applications and IoT devices, as well as the complexity of city-scale data management. Specific IoT Gateways register city resources and post their sensorized data to the platform through the Resource Adaptor API. IoT Gateways may also subscribe to receive notifications to act over underlying actuator devices.

For more information about InterSCity microservices’ architecture, check the detailed documentation.

Check out how the InterSCity platform was used in a Smart Cities Course at the Federal University of Maranhão, Brazil.