By Halloween, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will have completed a rough draft for Smart City frameworks throughout the country.
NIST is creating a public working group to develop a framework for Internet of Things (IoT) Enabled Smart (IES) Cities, according to Martin Burns of NIST’s Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems Program Office. Burns, who spoke at the Smart Cities panel on IoT-enabled frameworks, said the agency has been developing the framework since November 2015 and plans to have a completed draft of the frameworks by June 30, 2016.
The framework is meant to reveal best practices for IES cities, rather than declare guidelines all city cyber officials should follow.
“The IES framework is not trying to become the one ring that rules them all,” Burns said.
NIST’s IES framework contains three Pivotal Points of Interoperability (PPI), or working groups. These groups include the application PPI, the consensus PPI, and the deployed PPI; they work together to analyze tech suites and study the tech of other smart cities around the world. The consensus group offers collaboration between people who have already established smart city architecture.
According to Daniel Hoffman, Chief Innovation Officer of Montgomery County, Md., the IES framework connects cities the way the central nervous system connects the body. Hoffman compared the cloud to the brain, the network to the spinal column, and the sensors and actuators to nerves. The smart city initiative will enable equipment throughout the city to communicate with one another.
“When you touch something hot, you react before the brain can process it,” Hoffman said. “In the city, those pieces are bus stops and fire hydrants.”