Variability Modeling for Smart City Reference Architectures

Abstract

With the convergence of information and telecommunication technologies, the vision of the ‘Smart City’ is fast becoming a reality. City governments in a growing number of countries are capitalizing on these advances to ease the lives of their citizens and to increase efficiency and sustainability. In our previous research, we have proposed a new approach for designing such ultra large and ultra-heterogeneous ecosystems. The approach is manifested as a reference architecture (smartCityRA) that can be used as the starting point, i.e. blue print, for smart city projects. In this paper, we elaborate on the reference architecture by enabling smartCityRA with variability mechanisms to accommodate the instantiations of different smart city software architectures. We do this by using variability modeling and model-driven architecture techniques. The result is smartCityML, a domain specific language (DSL) for modeling smart city systems. We first develop the abstract syntax of the language. Then, we outline the constituent constructs of the language, i.e. the concrete syntax. Finally, we propose tooling ideas for the new language and suggest evaluation criteria and plans.