ACCUS

Project’s Goal

Adaptive-cooperative control of urban processes (like traffic, energy, pollution monitoring, water management, outdoor lighting, or information provisioning) is usually covered by self-contained and isolated embedded systems. The objective of the ACCUS project is to develop and demonstrate an integration platform or a middleware to enable interoperability of such systems as well as sharing of services between them. The ACCUS Integration and Coordination Platform (ICP) supports connectivity, data exchange, integration, and orchestration of services and resources provided by a variety of systems deployed in the smart city context.

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DAC.digital’s role

DAC.digital was responsible for the development and demonstration of core ACCUS ICP services and underlying infrastructure, including service and data bus as well as a complex event processing engine to detect events composed of simple data items fed by legacy systems which were not interoperable before (e.g. traffic, weather, pollution data). DAC.digital also developed the Mobile Information and Citizen Sensing (MICS) subsystem, serving as a communication channel between citizens and ACCUS-connected systems. ACCUS project outcomes, including the ICP, were deployed in the city of Gdańsk and demonstrated at the beginning of 2016. As of July 2020, certain platform components are still in use, supporting the Gdańsk open-data programme.

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ACCUS – key information

Funding

M€ 7.79

Duration

Jun 2013 – Jan 2016
26 months

TRL

SEVEN – System Prototype Demonstrated in Operational Environment

SDG / Area / Technology

IoT
Smart Cities
Mobile Development

Our role

Development and demonstration of core ACCUS ICP services and underlying infrastructure

Importance & Background

Future urban environments will have to overcome enormous obstacles in the areas of public and private transportation, logistics, street maintenance, building automation, and intelligent interactions with the local residents. There was a need to integrate such urban systems with a theoretical framework (like semantic interoperability principles) and a practical framework (like methodology, and reference architecture). It would help to build new applications inside convergent situations rather than creating solutions for particular applications and scenarios.

The challenge for ACCUS was to push innovative solutions based on new ICT and new ideas into the market and support the development of new applications while overcoming the current technical obstacles standing in the way of these goals. To do this, ACCUS proposed open-platform and increased interoperability to the research and industrial community. Additionally, actively striving to include stakeholders and end users would have a significant influence in line with the emerging concepts for “Smart Cities,” enhancing the industrial competitiveness of the EU in this field.

General Project Solution

Project ACCUS yields three important innovations.

The first innovation is the facility of an integration and coordination platform for urban subsystems to construct applications such as monitoring, administration, and control that may go beyond the bounds of individual subsystems.The ACCUS platform enables cross-domain and cross-layer collaboration of urban subsystems by addressing the interoperability aspects such as: Semantic interoperability (“what do functions of platform and subsystems mean?”), Pragmatic interoperability (“where can I use composed functions for?”), Information discovery, Knowledge discovery, and Situational awareness under information, resource, and time constraints.

Second, in order to improve the combined performance of urban subsystems, an adaptive and cooperative control architecture and accompanying algorithms are provided. The following basic control challenges are addressed by ACCUS: inherently stable closed-loop systems, controllability of networks of dynamical systems, control robustness, resilient topologies, and reliable networked control.

Third, methods and tools for developing real-time collaborative applications for System of Systems are provided. Platform and control architecture (innovations 1 and 2) are implemented using complementary development processes and technologies. The approach and tool innovation spans the complete life-cycle of applications for the integrated urban subsystems area (from design through operation, maintenance, and perhaps retrofitting). The outcomes include a reference system architecture, platform software (middleware, standard ACCUS services, legacy software interfaces), design tools for information extraction (situational awareness) and control, a model-based design environment for application development (including code generators), validation tools for application development, monitoring and visualization tools to track system level operations, and a reference system architecture.