D1.5 Technical Requirements Specification

The document “D1.5 VICINITY Technical requirements and specification” directly addresses Objective 2.4 „VICINITY Technical requirements and solution architecture specified“, in terms of specifying set of required functions and quality features that will be provided by the VICINITY interoperability platform.

These key required functions and quality features are defined based on stakeholders’ barriers and drivers, end-user business expectations and operational needs identified from pilot site locations.

The key VICINITY functions are:

  • interoperability set-up in virtual neighbourhood with value added service and IoT device granularity enabling devices owners, service providers and integrated infrastructure operators to control access to their assets;
  • connecting IoT platforms into virtual neighbourhood using VICINITY Agents (provided by VICINITY out of the box for selected IoT software platforms) or VICINITY Adapters (VICINITY Open interoperability gateway API and set of libraries will be provided for proprietary or closed IoT software platforms);
  • facilitation of exchange data within the virtual neighbourhood using semantic interoperability in controlled, secure and privacy preserving way;

 

The VICINITY quality features focus mainly on user experience, trust, privacy, security, scalability, standardization. VICINITY functions are designed around user (even technical personnel in charge of set-up integration to VICINITY) to ensure as best as possible user experience during installation, configuration, integration of VICINITY components in her infrastructure and usage VICINITY interoperability features.

The VICINITY trust, privacy and security features are mainly build on:

  • supporting of various type of verifiable identities of VICINITY users, value-added service and IoT devices;
  • end-to-end security and authenticity of exchanged data within neighbourhood;
  • access to value-added services and IoT devices controlled by service providers and device owner;
  • preserving privacy based on separation of meta-data from actual data;
  • private data processing consents to control processing of these data within the neighbourhood;
  • supporting privacy features introduced by “EC Regulation 2016/679“, the most notably private data rectification, process restriction and erasure.

 

The high-availability and performance quality measures enable VICINITY to scale-up and scale-out to handle various communication load within neighbourhoods introduced by different applications from building, energy, transport and health domain.

The VICINITY maintainability features, which enable configure, extend, update and adjust VICINITY to constantly changing environment, are built upon standardization on the level of communication interfaces, communication protocols, ontologies and technologies selected, design and architecture patterns applied.

The VICINITY Technical requirements specification together architecture (see D1.6 deliverable) defines the base line for the following implementation of VICINITY components including web-based neighbourhood manager, semantic interoperability gateway, trust, security and privacy services.