The Role of Blockchain in the Smart City Platform in Italy

The path towards the realization of Smart City can be seen as a real innovation laboratory in which themes linked to the quality of services and life are merged with new responses for environmental sustainability, safety, mobility and quality of work. This path has experienced an exciting phase in which the cities experimented and adopted new forms of innovation including blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), etc.in many different areas.

Many experiments, which did not always arrive in "production" or that did not always change the structure of the services actually provided, but which have allowed us to generally increase the knowledge of public administrations and institutions about digital opportunities.

Among the main results of this phase there is the awareness that the digital technology is effective when it responds to a design and a vision, and when its adoption allows to overcome the limits of vertical applications that perform, perhaps also with excellent results, to automating or making payments more efficient, managing flows and access in urban mobility services, managing energy consumption or rethinking urban waste collection or many other applications.

Those same experiences and these same results, if managed from an integrated perspective, i.e. if based on data sharing, infrastructures, knowledge can improve decision-making capacity at various levels of Public Administrations and can increase the overall effectiveness of all projects and make each service more "accurate" and closer to each citizen. In addition to being less expensive in terms of costs and delivery times.

Blockchain in the City Platform

What can the blockchain do for the renewal and improvement of Public Administrations? It can be said that it is thanks to the Blockchain that the theme of the intelligent platform for cities has in turn experienced a qualitative leap.

From these comparisons it emerged that there is an area of ​​development today on which the blockchain can give a "special" value and on which it is useful to bring attention and is that of Governance among the many factors of innovation and among many subjects that contribute to the development of new forms of intelligence in the cities.

In rethinking the platform, the blockchain is not only one of the technological infrastructures but it is one of the bases for writing the rules that accompany, with these innovations, the path to new habits and new behaviors.

The moment we assume that the starting point of this perspective lies in the fact that the most advanced projects of intelligent cities are based on the principle of overcoming "silos" logic and on the fact that an integration capacity is needed, we are ahead two values ​​for which the blockchain can make a very valuable contribution: transparency and trust.

The Meaning of Smart City

For the Platform, we mean the possibility of uniting and aggregating all the innovation and control processes in a single all-inclusive platform that is able to guarantee complete knowledge of all components and ensure their integration, interoperability and constant communication of data and knowledge.

The smart city platform is based on the use of blockchain, AI and Internet of Things solutions and includes a rich set of application fields and disciplines such as Big Data and Data Management, Data Analytics, cybersecurity, Risk Management, Remote Asset Monitoring, Performance Management, business intelligence, Identity Management, Network management, Application development, Device management, Application Enablement, Reporting, visualization etc.

Digital Identity in Smart Platforms

A fundamental prerequisite for any type of platform is identity management. One can perhaps say that one of the engines that started the concept of a platform for smart cities comes from the possibility of managing the identity of the objects that make up and contribute to the creation of services. The scenario in which the prospects of smart cities are located is composed of the certainty of an association between data and subject and between data and objects.

Combining digital identities with smart assets means that we can authorize the things we own, which are registered on Blockchain, to initiate transactions on our behalf. The heating system of the house can pay the relative bill and is recognized as a system with its own identity, associated with that of its owner, the refrigerator can order milk when it is ending and also in this case it faces the chain of payments with its specific identity associated with that of its owner, the car can self-program for annual control and so on.

Smart resources recorded on the Blockchain allow you to verify and identify ownership and related rights and duties. In a scenario of this type, in the future, theft, at least in the current sense, would be impossible, that is, it would not be possible to use an asset disassociated from the owner of the property rights. In this scenario, the blockchain makes it possible to redesign the principles and logic of risk management and city security.

A Model of Blockchain Integration Platform in Smart Cities

Blockchain allows relationships between individuals to function in a distributed way, without the need for a central coordinator or planner. There are three main units in the model of a Smart City based on Blockchain that interact with each other through processes that define the operational design of the system: The Smart City; the Smart Community; and single people

The Smart City collects the benefits of greater efficiency when it reaches the involvement and participation of individuals primarily and communities. It is with these realities that we arrive at the integration of Smart Assets, of all that the Internet of Things has been able to make connected and intelligent, and it is here that the logic of Smart Connected products applied to city services takes on value.

Source text:  https://it.coinidol.com/ruolo-della-blockchain/