The lack of interoperability is considered as the most important barrier to achieve the global integration of IoT ecosystems across borders of different disciplines, vendors and standards.
Indeed, the current IoT landscape consists of a large set of isolated islands that do not constitute a real internet, preventing the exploitation of the huge potential expected by ICT visionaries.
VICINITY is an EU funded project under Horizon 2020 that will build and demonstrate a device and standard agnostic platform for IoT infrastructures that will offer “Interoperability as a Service”. It will rely on a decentralised and user-centric approach that offer a complete transparency across vertical domains while retaining full control of the ownership and distribution of data.
The VICINITY project aims to build and demonstrate a bottom-up ecosystem of decentralised interoperability of IoT infrastructures called virtual neighbourhood, where users can share the access to their smart objects without losing the control over them. The ubiquitous interoperability that is intended to be brought by VICINITY will release the vendor locks that are present in the current IoT ecosystems, and open the door towards independent value added services across IoT domains taking benefits of the availability of big amounts of data in semantic formats that are generated by IoT assets.
VICINITY’s approach will be demonstrated by a large-scale demonstration connecting 8 facilities in 7 different countries. The demonstration covers various domains including energy, building automation, health and transport. VICINITY’s potential to create new, domain-crossing services will be demonstrated by value added services such as micro-trading of DSM capabilities, AI-driven optimization of smart urban districts and business intelligence over IoT. Open calls are envisioned in the project to integrate further, preferably public, IoT infrastructures and to deploy additional added value services. This will not only extend the scale of VICINITY demonstration, but also efficiently raise the awareness of industrial communities of VICINITY and its capabilities.