Z-Bre4k | Konstantinos Grevenitis

Tell me something my friend. You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
Joker/Jack Napier – Batman (1990)
Image from https://comicbook.com

Introduction

Actually, this is the article I should start with, but I didn’t. Before talking about the functionalities of the Orion context Broker, we should tell a few words about the whole initiative.

FIWARE is an open source cloud platform with a collaborative and mature ecosystem of developers, innovation Hubs, accelerators, cities and more than 1000 Small and Medium Enterprises and startups. By 2020, businesses leveraging the FIWARE platform are expected to generate revenues of more than EUR 330 million [1].

FIWARE was born in Europe, from the Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) [1]. FI-PPP, the European programme for internet-enabled innovation, is going from strength to strength. FI-PPP has announced the imminent launch of phase 3 aimed at further accelerating the development and adoption of Future Internet technologies in Europe [2]. It’s goals are:

accelerating the development and adoption of Future Internet technologies in Europe
advancing the European market for smart infrastructures,
increasing the effectiveness of business processes through the Internet.

The European FIWARE Accelerator Programme of 16 accelerators, operating within the programme, has attracted over 8,000 submissions to their open calls. More than 1000 Small- and Medium-sized companies (SMEs) and startups have been part of the FIWARE business acceleration programme. They will be serving at least 1.5 million business customers and reaching a market of more than 20 million consumers [1].

The sectors that FIWARE is involved, are the following: Smart cities, AgriFood, eHealth,
Transport, Energy & Environment, Media & Content, Manufacturing & Logistics, Social & Learning. The European Commision has funded 2 projects to continue the FIWARE Accelerator Programme: IMPACT GROWTH and frontierCities² [1].

The Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP)

The FI-PPP’s goal was to make infrastructures and business processes smarter (i.e. more intelligent, more efficient, more sustainable) through tighter integration with Internet networking and computing capabilities It looked at different sectors such as transport, health, and energy. It defined possible innovative business models for these sectors [1].

The FI-PPP followed an industry-driven, user-oriented approach that combined R&D on network and communication technologies, devices, software, service and media technologies; and their experimentation and validation in real application contexts. It brings together the demand and supply sides, and it involves users early into the research lifecycle. The platform technologies is still used and validated by many actors, in particular by SMEs and public administrations [1].

The FIWARE Foundation

The FIWARE Foundation is the legal independent body providing shared resources to help achieve the FIWARE mission by promoting, augmenting, protecting, and validating the FIWARE technologies as well as the activities of the FIWARE community, empowering its members including end users, developers and rest of stakeholders in the entire ecosystem. The FIWARE Foundation is open: anybody can join contributing to a transparent governance of FIWARE activities and rising through the ranks, based on merit. Founded in 2016 by Atos, Engineering, Orange, and Telefónica, the Foundation is a non-profit organization that encourages the adoption of a common, collaborative and interoperable data sharing framework based on standards and open source technology [3].

Currently as we speak, the FIWARE foundation has 250+ members from 35 countries, 150+ open source projects, 140+ “Powered by FIWARE” solutions, 2,000+ Open source developers contributing code, 100+ Evangelists, 13 FIWARE iHubs, 13 FIWARE Lab Nodes, 10+ Strategic Partnerships [3].

The mission is to develop an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the creation of Smart Applications in multiple sectors. Using FIWARE technologies, organizations can capture the opportunities that are emerging with the new wave of digitalisation brought by combining the Internet of Things with Context Information Management and Big Data services on the Cloud. On the other hand, developers can gather context information at large scale from many different sources. FIWARE also helps to easily process, analyse and visualize managed context information, easing the implementation of the smart behaviour and the enhanced user experience required by next-generation Smart Applications [3].

The FIWARE Community comprises all individuals and organizations contributing achieving the FIWARE Mission. The FIWARE Community is not only formed by contributors to the technology (the Open Source Community working on the FIWARE platform), but also those who contribute in building the FIWARE ecosystem and making it sustainable over time [3].

The FIWARE Technical Steering Committee governs the technical direction of the FIWARE platform and activities of the FIWARE Open Source Community. Governance of the rest of activities carried out by members of the FIWARE Community is organized through Mission Support Committees [3].

The Fiware accelerator program

The FIWARE Accelerator Programme promotes the take up of FIWARE technologies among solution integrators and application developers, with special focus on SMEs and start-ups. Linked to this Programme, the EU launched an ambitious campaign in September 2014 mobilizing up to 100M€, to support 1000 entrepreneurs, SMEs and startups to develop innovative applications based on FIWARE [4].

At this moment, the FIWARE Accelerator Programme is being assembled as a crucial part of the FIWARE Community collaborating with the FIWARE Open Source Community and the rest of FIWARE programmes. Altogether, they will continue their contribution to building the FIWARE ecosystem and make it sustainable over time. Coordination of activities linked to the FIWARE Accelerator Programme takes place in the FIWARE Accelerators Ecosystem Support Committee whose members are encouraged to work together in specific Working Groups [4].

Who is using FIWARE?

SELECT for Cities is based on the notion that cities across the globe are on a continuous search for new and innovative technologies, methods and tools to foster innovation, as well as to create value for both business and citizens, in order to transform into ‘Smart Cities’. The project brings together three cities (Antwerp, Copenhagen, Helsinki) that want to compare different Smart City solutions via an increasing competitive tendering approach. Following the first phase, which is based on the documentation of the architecture and, in some cases, early prototypes, five solutions were selected to participate in the second phase, out of which Engineering, Orchestra Cities, FIWOO, and the Snap4City Platform are using FIWARE components [5].

The IoF2020 project is dedicated to accelerate adoption of IoT for securing sufficient, safe and healthy food and to strengthen competitiveness of farming and food chains in Europe. The IoF2020 consortium of 73 partners, led by Wageningen UR and other core partners of previous key projects such as FIWARE and IoT-A, will leverage the ecosystem and architecture that was established in those projects. The heart of the project is formed by 19 use cases grouped in 5 trials with end users from the Arable, Dairy, Fruits, Vegetables and Meat verticals and IoT integrators that will demonstrate the business case of innovative IoT solutions for a large number of application areas [6].IoF2020 is part of Horizon 2020 Industrial Leadership and supported by the European Commission with a budget of EUR 30 million [7].

The Z-BRE4K architecture is designed and developed on the foundations of the AUTOWARE reference architecture and building blocks enabling the convergence of Information Technology (IT), perational Technology (OT), Engineering Technology (ET) and the leveraging of interoperability of Industrial Data Spaces (IDS), for the support of a factory ecosystem. The objective is to develop a highly adaptive real-time Machine (network of components) Simulation platform that wraps around the physical equipment for predicting uptimes and BRE4Kdowns – thus creating intuitive maintenance control and management systems. The AUTOWARE consortium has created a framework based on other existing frameworks (e.g. BEinCPPS, FIWARE, RAMI4.0) and taking into consideration the industrial requirements from several use cases, thereby aiming to be a solution-oriented framework [8].

On, July 9 2019 NEC Europe and its advanced Smart City solution, the CCOC, has recently been certified a “Powered by FIWARE Platform, becoming part of the FIWARE Marketplace of platforms. This certification complements the one received in 2017 as “Powered by FIWARE Solutions”. NEC CCOC manages information at large scale and gather Context Information coming from different and highly distributed sources such as end users, sensor networks and all kinds of information systems, including social networks, processing it in order to perform smart actions, including prediction and prescriptions. CCOC (Cloud City Operation Centre) solution collects both, real-time and long-term data, coming from all city sources, it automates city processes and allows for the swift provision of municipal services, which in turn reduces the workload at monitoring centers [9].

Please visit the FIWARE website. Here you will find all the necessary information about FIWARE progress.