IoT Platform for Smart City Initiatives : A study of the benefits of a central IoT platform for urban development projects within a municipal context

Abstract: The transformation of cities into smart cities is a common occurrence today, and one of the reasons is urbanization. Technology contributes to the ability to deal with new problems that arise. The number of IoT platforms has increased due to their flexibility and value addition regarding interoperability, processing of IoT data, and analysis capability. An IoT platform's capabilities are desirable, not least to municipalities today. Through IoT devices, such as sensors, the municipality can increase their awareness of the city’s surroundings and stay up to date through better insight into trends or new challenges. However, IoT is in its infancy compared to other markets, and there is a limited understanding of the IoT subject in municipal contexts. These aspects contribute to difficulties when municipalities take on trends for smart city initiatives. There is still a lack of design and development guidelines regarding ICT solutions to enable the development of a holistic smart city. The few current smart city deployments also make it challenging to validate which technology should be adopted to achieve the vision for the smart city. Therefore, the study investigates how a central IoT platform might benefit municipal departments in urban development projects. The case study conducted within the City of Stockholm generated ten benefits that might occur if the central IoT platform were available within the municipal departments' urban development projects. The benefits were divided into three themes: ·         Information and data management ·         Reasons to use IoT data ·         Interoperability between the central IoT platform and systems