Smart City Standardization Roadmap Version 1.1

National developments

Innovations developed in Germany constitute a future export if successfully implemented. DKE and DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V.) are working together closely in the Joint Steering Committee for Smart Cities and six other national committees to efficiently take on the interdisciplinary challenges of the topic of smart cities. With (inter)national norms and standards, technical conflicts and interface problems can be solved or prevented altogether. For this reason, interested companies, associations and cities participate in finding solutions in the seven DIN/DKE joint working groups (GAK).

All standardization-related information is discussed and documented in the joint working groups in close collaboration with the national committees, in particular with the joint steering committee. The information obtained is incorporated into the design of the contents of the national standardization roadmap which is updated as needed.

The first analysis was published in April 2014 with the freely accessible standardization roadmap. The German Smart City Standardization Roadmap is not only significant for national interest groups, it also acts as a template for future international projects at ISO and IEC.

International participation

The DKE and DIN joint steering committee is the national point of contact for all trans-European and international standardization activities pertaining to the topic of smart cities.

Via DKE and DIN, Germany, along with Japan and China, is a founding member of the Systems Evaluation Group (SEG) Smart Cities under the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). When evaluating the various technical fields in the smart city sector and when identifying the necessary standardization measures, the SEG Smart Cities can act independently of the IEC and simultaneously benefit from the expertise of numerous international companies that are already represented.

Green cities via smart cities: The use of energy-efficient building technology is a central component of the sustainable use of urban spaces. Technical building equipment is increasingly benefiting from the networking of individual system components.

The development in the fields of smart metering, smart home/building and smart grid allow for the energy and electricity consumption to be controlled efficiently and centrally and is considered particularly promising. These and other intelligent systems (for instance the everyday life-assisting assistance solutions AAL) also permanently increase quality of life and comfort.

Such a networked (and location-independent via smartphone or tablet) control of the system poses specific challenges for manufacturers, architects and city planners. Smart cities also require a holistic approach. There is a need for standardization due to a variety of influencing factors in the sustainable and intelligent design and control of urban infrastructures. The standardization roadmap addresses this situation with a special focus on urban processes. In this context, not only do the water and gas supply need to be analyzed and optimized, so do the medical supply and options offered by services.

Ensuring an increase in the ease of use, energy efficiency and reliability of the systems used requires a high degree of compatibility. The standardization is the necessary instrument to ensure the smooth interaction with the Internet of Things.

Mobility and logistics cannot be separated in a smart city. To manage the flow of goods and persons in a sustainable and resource-efficient manner, the right infrastructure is crucial. Holistic and adequate standardization is a prerequisite for smooth processes in practice.

Carefully planned smart cities must take into account the transformation of the mobility needs of its residents and the development of diverse propulsion concepts and scenarios for their purpose.

The integration and networking of further systems, for instance, the smart grid, smart homes or urban logistics concepts must be ensured. Whether in the fields of green logistics, combined goods transport, traffic management or transport truck priority network: thorough standardization allows for systems developed in isolation to be integrated and compatibility between the individual components of the smart city.

In industrial automation, a wide range of systems from a variety of manufacturers have to work together reliably and efficiently. The users, who are all over the world, expect to be able to access their usual products and solutions from anywhere in the world.

To ensure this global usability and cross-system continuity, international standardization has always been seed as particularly significant and has been sustainably promoted in industrial automation. Standards already exist or are in development for important topics in industrial automation.

The need for standardization arises as a result of the challenge posed by new technologies and new demands placed on production facilities. A smart factory utilizes the Internet of Things to remain competitive and work efficiently with resources. In the city sector, high demands are placed particularly on production facilities, for instance with respect to the space requirement and the optimization of environmental pollution. At the same time, industrial plants that near or integrated into residential areas offer huge benefits with respect to job opportunities and the sensible use of environmentally-friendly transportation.

Production and business processes are coordinated with sensible standardization. Standardization makes the integration of production processes into the structure of cyber-physical production systems described in the Industry 4.0 future initiative easier.

A continuously growing and now comprehensive ICT structure has existed in urban areas for more than 20 years. Due to the increasing relevance and applicability of networked systems, information and communication technology is the key element of a smart city. ICT as a cross-sectional technology creates the basis for networking.

The essential aspects of security and data protection, which are present in all ICT applications, have their own, separate standardization roadmaps and are discussed in more detail there.

In the context of the smart city, ICT must not be seen as being limited to the public sector and only used in public institutions. This delimitation is not expedient, since data, systems or services are no longer statically localized in the age of virtualization and the cloud. Technologies, services and data will no longer be purely located in the municipal or private industry segment in the city of the future. Moreover, the smart city concept blurs these boundaries and the development of new business models is expected in order to be able to meet the needs of urban areas efficiently and sustainably.

The importance and range of ICT requires particularly careful standardization.

The objective of the smart city concept is to optimize energy consumption and the use of resources. Opportunities for this arise from networking systems that have acted independently of each other to date.

There are countless examples: The conversion of excess, ecologically generated electrical energy into hydrogen or synthetic natural gas and mixing it into gas grids allows for large quantities of electricity from renewable energies to be stored long-term. Waste hear from industrial plants can be used as utility heat in building heating systems. Energy efficiency in road traffic can be increased using intelligent traffic control systems.

For this reason, it is important to comprehensibly analyze the subsystems of electricity, gas, heat subsystems and other energy sources as an overall energy system in the standardization roadmap and create compatibility.

A smart grid provides many prerequisites to efficiently control and regulate the energy system: A largely automated and self-repairing supply network, smart meter, localized energy generation and interim storage, local energy management, the takeover of network services by smart homes and buildings, bundling small units into virtual power plants and electronic marketplaces for energy and balancing power.

The interaction between the individual stakeholders is particularly important in a smart city. Basic prerequisites include a wide-scale communications infrastructure, interoperability and compatibility of all involved systems. Full consensus standardization is the suitable and proven basis for this.

The ability to communicate in a crisis situation is increased in a smart city. In the event of an emergency, all affected and relevant entities are able to be quickly informed (e.g. via warning apps) and delegated (with the help of smart meeting and smart building, etc.). Norms and standards are essential in order to improve the response time and coordination of emergency services.

At the same time, the security of currently isolated systems in the networks in a smart city is particularly important. The continued penetration of information and communication technologies in a modern city allows for potential attackers to severely impact critical infrastructures and put data integrity at risk. This requires early, persistent and precise (re)evaluation of cybersecurity.

To be able to analyze potential harmful impacts and identify potential vulnerabilities faster, technical and organizational protective mechanisms must play a central role in the development from the onset. New, safe and self-repairing architectures for the networking information technology must be defined.

Existing and established standards for cybersecurity should also be referenced. The DKE contact office for information security (CIS) created an overview (this overview is not supposed to be migrated according to the table), which can be referenced as a starting point for identifying suitable, existing and proven IT security standards.

The objective of standardization roadmaps is to inform the stakeholders in the respective subject area of important basic requirements and assist them in meeting them. To achieve this, standardization roadmaps provide an overview of the respective technology topic, in this case smart city, and the related standardization landscape and its organizational and content-related further development.

For smart cities, standardization roadmaps also allow for the systematic processing of convergent technologies (cross-committee complex topics) and act as a basis for discussion and exchange between the experts from various domains (e.g. automotive, IT, energy). They thus provide for better understanding because they provide all of the participants the same foundation and offer new committee members a subject-related introduction.

Particularly with respect to important subject areas like smart city, standardization roadmaps emphasizes the need for early development and the significance of the topic of full consensus standardization.