Sentilo

An open source sensor and actuator platform designed to be used by any city

Sentilo is an open source sensor and actuator platform designed to fit in the Smart City architecture of any city that looks for openness and easy interoperability. Initially driven by the City of Barcelona, Sentilo is a two-fold project:

  • On the one hand, technically it is a platform that can connect sensors from different manufacturers because it provides an open and free API that allows avoid “silos” of information generated by the implementations of propietary software.
  • On the other hand, from the organizational and economic terms, Sentilo has managed to create a community composed of several organizations, companies and public administration that finance collaboratively the development of the platform in an open source model.

Sentilo is distributed with a set of components as you can see here, and also with a series of key features in order to achieve the success of the platform:

  • High performance: the platform is designed focusing in performance to process thousands of messages in a very fast response time.
  • Modular and extensible: Defines a component architecture in order to enlarge the platform funcionality without modifying the core system.
  • Horizontal scalability: allowing an easy distribution of load.
  • Cross platform: Designed as a cross product not focused in any concrete business requirement, fleeing from vertical solutions.
  • Open Source: In order to share contributions and improvements and create an ecosystem of companies around it.
  • Simple REST Interface: it provides a simple, easy to use and intuitive interface.
  • Universal viewer: Provided as a public demo that can be used as a starting point for specific business visualizers.
  • Basic statistics module: Records and displays basic platform performance indicators.
  • Catalogue and administration console: Intended to manage the devices installed in the street and its users (providers and applications).
  • Strong partnership: Last but not least, the sponsorship of Barcelona city council and the participation of a lot of companies guarantees the solidity of the product and its future.

Some examples of how to use the platform currently being used by Barcelona are energy monitoring in municipal buildings, obtaining data related to noise pollution levels as part of the Strategic Noise Map and urban laboratory activities, in many cases related to the Mobile World Lab project.

Terrassa is also setting up an information system on rubbish collection, as well as studying the roll-out of a remote-controlled watering system in its parks and smart lighting solutions throughout the city. And Reus has set up a smart parking system.