Service Discovery and Composition in Smart Cities.

The ongoing digitalization trend has given rise to the concept of smart cities, targeting the interconnection of city infrastructure and services over a digital layer for innovative technological solutions as well as improvements on existing facilities in cities. This article investigates the critical information system constituents of smart cities that facilitate the holistic integration of its ecosystem and resources with the aim to foster dynamic and adaptive software. We identify three main enablers in this direction: (i) semantic functional description of city objects, representing physical devices or abstract services, (ii) a distributed service directory that embodies available city services for service lookup and discovery, (iii) planning tools for selecting and chaining basic services to compose new complex services. We provide an overview of the approach adopted in our ongoing smart city project for each of these three dimensions.