Impact case study database

Roussos’s research on large-scale interoperable entity identification systems [3, 4] fostered collaborations with researchers worldwide through the CASAGRAS2 project, notably at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in the USA, under the leadership of Robert E. Kahn (one of the “Fathers of the Internet”). In 2010, Roussos presented to CNRI his research on augmenting the Handle System to incorporate IoT-enabled physical entities. Invented by Kahn, Handle is best known as the technology that underpins the Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) assigned to scholarly publications. Moreover, the extensions to Handle proposed by Roussos involved the federation of proprietary and open universally unique IoT identification schemes [4]. These discussions informed work undertaken by CNRI in cooperation with ETIRI, the research institute of the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in response to the widely publicised incident in 2008 where a number of infants were poisoned by milk formula adulterated with melamine. Their solution involved a nationwide tracing platform based on federated integration, which permits purchasers to track the formula they are purchasing from production plant to shelf. The system was introduced in Guangdong Province (China’s largest province, with a population of 113 million) in June 2014. ‘By the end of that year, the number of registered handles for this application had exceeded 92 million’ [C]. The use of this system become mandatory nationwide in 2015 as a requirement of Chinese food safety law, and has influenced practice globally. In February 2020, French brand Danone announced plans to expand its use of this system from China to its French, German, Australian and New Zealand markets.

Impact on global standards for Smart City infrastructures

Roussos’s publication on federated entity identification systems [4] brought his research to the attention of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations’ specialist agency for information and communication technologies. The ITU sets global standards for such technologies through the issue of Recommendations, which ‘act as defining elements in the global infrastructure of information and communication technologies’ (itu.int/about). With IoT technologies becoming increasingly widespread, the ITU deemed it necessary to provide regulation and guidance in this field. Interoperability was a key concern: the ‘divergence [of IoT platforms] has led to an urgent need for stakeholders to come together to mitigate the risk of data "silos" emerging’ [A, Unleashing Potential].

In March 2015, Roussos was invited to chair a plenary event on emerging trends in the IoT and Smart Cities at the ITU headquarters in Geneva. The event was attended by key IoT stakeholders including senior executives of device manufacturers and the telecommunications industry and led to the formal decision to establish a new ITU study group, Study Group 20 (SG20), focusing on the Internet of Things and its applications including Smart Cities and Smart Communities. SG20 formally convened in October 2016 to address this challenge and to ‘support the creation of an inclusive, interoperable IoT ecosystem capable of making full use of the data generated by IoT-enabled systems’ [A, Unleashing Potential]. SG20 continues to operate today, with Roussos in the role of Associate Rapporteur on one of this group’s ‘key areas of activity’ [E], namely a work package on end-to-end connectivity, networks, interoperability, infrastructures and Big Data related to the Internet of Things and Smart Cities and Communities. This represents ‘a central part’ of the work of the study group as a whole [A, Unleashing Potential].

Roussos’s research [4] was accepted during the inaugural meeting of SG20 in 2016 as the basis for a new work item with the code ITU-T Y.SC-Interop (‘Identifier service requirements for the interoperability of Smart City applications’). This work item was developed by SG20 over the following year before being accepted by the ITU in August 2017 as Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805 [D], enabling a growing number of Smart Cities to streamline their delivery of essential services as part of ITU’s global suite of Internet of Things standards.

Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805 specifies the functionality for federated entity identification services in Smart City applications, ensuring that such systems are interoperable and secure. Federation is achieved through the specification of Service, Data, and Operation Models. The Service Model specifies the structure of the identifier resolution infrastructure, including detailing its components and the relationships between them. The Data Model defines the data structures necessary to represent identifier attributes in the Smart City context, as well as security and operations. The Operation Model describes the essential operations that should be provided by the identifier service, as well as features crucial to facilitating cohesive, transparent and trustworthy operations that integrate different identifier service components as required.

Roussos’s research [4] continues to contribute to the ongoing work of SG20. In January 2020, a further Recommendation was accepted: Y.4459, which details the concrete implementation of Recommendation Y.4805.

Impact on Smart Cities in China and the Smart Africa Alliance

As attested by DONA, an independent international foundation whose mission is to foster interoperability across global information systems, Roussos’s work and the associated development of ITU-T standards has helped tremendously in the adoption of DOA [digital object architecture] technology in many application fields. The Operations and Planning Department (OPD) of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB) confirms that Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805 addresses a key challenge in emerging Smart City systems by establishing the foundation for seamless interoperability across already deployed legacy devices and new and emerging naming and identification schemes. For this reason, there is strong interest in this Recommendation, with exploratory implementations initiated in China and by the Smart Africa Alliance.

The Smart Africa Alliance unites 30 African countries (with a total population of approximately 750 million people) and is concerned with implementing, monitoring and evaluating the SMART Africa Manifesto. This is a formal commitment to facilitate socioeconomic development on the continent through access to broadband and the use of ICTs, which was approved by the African Union (comprising 53 states) in 2014 and which has overseen the introduction of numerous Smart City initiatives across the continent. In 2016, the Rwandan government formally linked the country into a system based on Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805 and operated by DONA. Jean Philbert Nsengimana, Minister for Youth and ICT, identified the importance of the system for the secure management of information in the government’s programme of digital transformation: ‘There is loss of information or it ends up in the wrong hands. [This] system addresses such issues. It is about interoperability, flexibility, scalability and simplicity for information handling for the future. It will help us to better manage information in a way that is resourceful to our citizens’ [F]. In 2017, the Rwandan government launched a year-long pilot project in collaboration with Inmarsat, Ericsson and Intel, aimed at transforming the country’s capital Kigali. A total of 67 innovation projects included applications in farming, transit, security, and water distribution, the latter aiming to prevent sanitation-related disease causing the death of 2,000 children annually. The project has progressed to full operational implementation providing the focus for foreign collaborations and investment including $50 million from the UAE-based Cheikh Rakadh Group for the implementation of the Masterplan.

Also in 2017, the Rwandan government unveiled the Smart Cities Blueprint, intended to accelerate Smart City creation across Africa. The Blueprint offers guidance on planning Smart Cities and refers explicitly to the standardisation work of SG20, as well as examples already implemented in Rwanda and elsewhere [G]. One such example, presented at ITU SG11 in 2017, saw the introduction of an anti-counterfeiting system to electronic device supply chains. The system integrates UUIDs from distinct legacy identification systems such as GSM and IEEE 802.3 to provide a unified application infrastructure and prevent reuse of unlawfully obtained devices [K].

At the Beijing Development Forum in 2017 [L], the Chinese City of Chengdu presented their implementation of Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805 as the foundation for their deployed Smart City infrastructure. In their deployment, entity identification services are used to unify access to all city assets including transportation and communication networks, public spaces and government buildings. It integrates diverse identification schemes relevant to verticals using Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805, which is viewed as offering a considerable advantage over alternatives.

Impact on Smart Sustainable Cities

Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805 is one of a number of ITU standards deriving from the research in [4] and the work of SG20, which together set out specifications for the design and maintenance of sustainable Smart Cities worldwide. A Project Officer at the ITU Standardization Bureau, identifies Y.4805 as an exemplar of ITU standards on Smart Sustainable Cities [H] where interoperability needs to be ensured among heterogeneous and distributed systems in SSC. According to the same presentation [I], cities designed in accordance with or currently working towards the blueprint established by ITU standards including Recommendation ITU-T Y.4805 are: Dubai (UAE), Singapore, Valencia (Spain), Wuxi (China), Foshan (China), Kairouan (Tunisia), Montevideo (Uruguay), Maldonado (Uruguay), Manizales (Colombia), Pully (Switzerland), Guangshan (China), Bizerte (Tunisia) and Moscow (Russia).

The changes made as these cities work towards the Sustainable Smart City standards have benefited their citizens in diverse ways. Singapore’s Outpatient Pharmacy Automation System used robotics and RFID technology to automate the delivery of patient prescriptions in the pharmacy setting, eliminating the possibility of human error in prescription delivery and thereby improving patient safety. The city of Pully introduced ICT to its water network and was able to conserve water by detecting leaks more swiftly. Moscow’s Project Magistral tracked commuter patterns and used the information to redesign its suburban public transport network, resulting in a 50% increase in passenger numbers and helping the city to move from being the second most congested in Russia to a position outside the top 20 [M].

The Director of ITU-T identifies the growth of Smart Sustainable Cities as a core ingredient in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: 'Smart Sustainable Cities will contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals by leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs) to set cities on a development course characterised by environmental sustainability, resilience, and equitable social and economic growth.' [A, Shaping Smarter] The McKinsey Global Institute further quantifies the impact of this work: 'Cities that use smart technologies effectively can make significant progress in quality-of-life dimensions such as time saved, health and safety outcomes, environmental impact, and social connectedness and civic participation, improving some key metrics by 10-30 percent. These issues directly touch tens of millions of lives... we found that smart technologies can reduce fatalities by 8-10 percent, accelerate emergency response times by 20-35 percent, shave the average commute time by 15-20 percent, reduce the disease burden by 8-15 percent, lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 10-15 percent, and reduce water consumption by 20-30 percent.’ [J, p.35]