MARVEL Standardisation White Paper - An overview of standards involved in smart cities in the context of MARVEL

Since industrialization there has been an increase in rural-to-urban migration searching for improved living standards. Urban areas became a point of attraction to economies and society providing access to multiple and diverse services as well as an improved living environment. To keep up with the needs and services of the people living there, cities have to be continuously growing and changing, resulting in a constant challenge for the development of a city.

Technological innovations, in particular urban technology, helped mitigate some challenges in the development of metropolitan areas, resulting in the development of more efficient cities. Advances in networks, microelectronics and digital electronic technologies as well as the emergence of more digital solutions led to significant improvements in the quality of life of the urban residents. More recently, the introduction of newest digital technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Big Data (BD) has transformed traditional cities into what we know as smart cities.

A Smart city can be defined as a system that uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to meet the requirements of its urban population. These requirements include optimising energy and utility management, environmental protection, improved mobility and transport, among other services. All this, while prioritising security and data privacy.

To accomplish those requirements it is important to follow strict norms and certain ways of working, providing compatibility and ensuring correct process development. Standards are made for these particular reasons, providing best practices emphasising safety and quality. Standards are documents with detailed descriptions defining requirements, production processes and services. These specifications are made through a consensus with industry and market actors. The development of standards for smart cities plays a crucial part in shaping the cities of the future, with the fixed goal of improving the quality of life of its urban residents. One challenge of developing standards in the context of smart cities is that they cover a wide framework of technologies and data-driven solutions. These technologies can belong to AI, software development, information security, and privacy standards, among others.

The European project on multimodal extreme scale data analytics for smart cities environments, MARVEL for short, aims at empowering smart cities authorities to better support their citizens. The goal of this document is to present standards that have been applied during the development of MARVEL and their role played in the project. The document is organised as follows, firstly a short introduction of the MARVEL project is given. Then the goals and outcomes achieved during the lifetime of the project are presented. Secondly, the relevant project's contributions to standardisation are discussed. Finally, the different standards for each of the utilised technologies are listed, giving a short description for each or them.