uCIFI Alliance Releases Unified Data Model for Smart City & Utility Devices

Feb. 25, 2020

The uCIFI Alliance today announced the public release of the first unified data model to provide interoperability and interchangeability between connected devices to unlock smart cities, reduce cost and guarantee investments’ sustainability.

The open-source model targets key smart-city applications such as streetlighting, water metering and distribution monitoring, waste management, parking, traffic monitoring, air-quality monitoring, smart buildings, as well as safety and security. It also supports common and more complex services, including multicast grouping, sensor-to-actuator dynamic control and a calendar-based control program to standardize edge computing for IoT sensors.

Launched in 2018, the uCIFI Alliance brings market leaders, cities and utilities together via a unified data model that enables a native communication format between connected sensors on cellular, NB-IoT and LoRaWAN® networks, as well as an open source reference implementation on Wi-SUN mesh to be released as another cornerstone of the alliance’s vision.

With the unified data model, a series of 30 connected sensors and devices used for smart-city projects are described on the Open Mobile Alliance’s Light Weight M2M (LwM2M) registry. These reference objects and associated attributes are modelized using the LwM2M format and can be used on any constrained IoT network. They also can be implemented freely by any vendor in any product to meet cities’ tender requirements for openness and interoperability. Vendors may join the alliance to benefit from the certification program, access test tools and other software resources and to contribute to more interoperable object models.

“Our unified data model allows city-and-utility IoT verticals to immediately benefit from this open-source, multi-transport, multi-supplier and cost-efficient tool to break silos when designing and implementing IoT projects,” said Helmut Schröder, chairman of the uCIFI Alliance. “Thanks to this unified payload structure, cities and integrators can avoid spending money and time breaking silos and developing proprietary data translators for various vendor products. As a result, cities can avoid vendor lock-in and have more flexible, wider and futureproof sourcing.”

With this release, uCIFI aims to fill the interoperability gap and become an IoT standard that offers cities and utilities full interoperability with other leading industry alliances and organizations, such as Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and Internet Protocol for Smart Object (IPSO).