Evaluating the Health of Open-Source Smart City Platforms

Abstract

To manage the complexity of smart cities, a variety of smart city platforms (SCPs), both proprietary and open-source, have been proposed. Typically acting as middleware between IoT devices at a lower layer and smart services at a higher layer, these platforms simplify the management of smart cities by reifying a variety of requirements common to different municipalities. Open-source software (OSS) is typically free of charge, making open-source SCPs an attractive option for municipalities with smaller budgets that still wish to improve efficiency and quality of life for residents and visitors. Furthermore, using an OSS SCP promotes digital sovereignty, since municipalities can control where the data will reside and will be less prone to vendor lock-in. A lack of support for OSS hinders its adoption by municipalities' IT teams, often with scarce technical resources. An active (aka "healthy") ecosystem, including well-orchestrated developers and users, the availability of installation and user manuals, non-vulnerable and documented code, test batteries, and other artifacts, is an important decision factor before adopting an OSS SCP. In this paper, we evaluate different open-source SCPs using the concept of "OSS health", covering several of the aforementioned characteristics.