VITAL-OS: An Open Source IoT Operating System for Smart Cities

Abstract

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has lead to increased possibilities for novel human-centric services in smart cities. Nevertheless, existing IoT platforms for smart cities do not provide the means for integrating data and services from different IoT deployments, which is a prerequisite for several smart city applications such as holistic urban planning, tracking of city-wide APIs and integration of deployments at the level of neighbourhoods or communities in the cities. Hence, smart city projects tend to be fragmented, leading to disaggregated application silos. In order to alleviate this fragmentation and enable more integrated applications, there is a need to enable city authorities and application developers to see IoT systems as part of an integrated whole, allowing optimal use of existing infrastructure and achieving more than what these independent systems can do in isolation. This article presents the VITAL-OS, an IoT operating system for smart cities that facilitates access and control of the city infrastructure, resources and sensor networks, with abstraction and tools that can additionally be used by developers to create new applications using available data to empower citizens. VITAL-OS facilitates the semantic interoperability of diverse vertical IoT deployments in smart cities and enables integrated management of IoT resources as well as rapid development of cross-platform and cross-context IoT applications for smart cities. In this way, VITAL-OS provides a unique value proposition when compared to conventional IoT platforms for smart cities.