Data Exchange Interoperability in IoT Ecosystem for Smart Parking and EV Charging

Many domains are trying to integrate with the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, such as public administrations starting smart city initiatives all over the world. Cities are becoming smart in many ways: smart mobility, smart buildings, smart environment and so on. However, the problem of non-interoperability in the IoT hinders the seamless communication between all kinds of IoT devices. Different domain specific IoT applications use different interoperability standards. These standards are usually not interoperable with each other. IoT applications and ecosystems therefore tend to use a vertical communication model that does not allow data sharing horizontally across different IoT ecosystems. In 2014, The Open Group published two domain-independent IoT messaging standards, O-MI and O-DF, aiming to solve the interoperability problem. In this article we describe the practical use of O-MI/O-DF standards for reaching interoperability in a mobile application for the smart city context, in particular for the Smart Mobility domain, electric vehicle (EV) charging case study. The proof-of-concept of the smart EV charging ecosystem with mobile application user interface was developed as a part of an EU (Horizon 2020) Project bIoTope.