From buildings to cities: a scalable smart City implementation for research on smart buildings and infrastructures systems integration

The growing demand for smart city services and applications necessitates scalable and flexible infrastructures capable of integrating heterogeneous devices, systems, and data sources. This article presents the scalable smart city platform implemented at the \ac{EC} \ac{JRC} in Italy, that enables the integration of multiple applications, including smart buildings, infrastructures and environmental monitoring, through a set of heterogeneous devices and communication systems. The platform's IT architecture is designed to ensure future expandability, allowing for the seamless addition of new sensors and applications. A key feature of the platform is the integration of digital twin of single infrastructures, with an approach that can be expanded to whole cities, enabling real-time monitoring, simulation, and predictive analytics. The article discusses the design and implementation of the platform, highlighting the scalability and flexibility of the IT architecture, and presents implemented case studies that demonstrate the platform's effectiveness in integrating multiple applications and sub-systems, and supporting digital twins. The results show that the platform can efficiently handle large amounts of data from heterogeneous sources, providing real-time insights, and supporting data-driven decision-making for urban management. The article concludes by discussing the potential of the platform to enable the integration of multiple systems and scales towards future fully comprehensive smart cities, and outlines future research directions for scaling up the platform to support larger urban areas.

BONO Flavio;  VAGLICA Giovanni;  RENALDI Graziano;  CAZZATO Dario;  VILLARES OJEA Elena;  PASSOS MOREIRA DE SOUSA Jose Ricardo;  HOUSEN Mira; 

2026-01-19

IEEE Xplore

JRC142990

2687-8860 (online),   

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11293300,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC142990,   

10.1109/ISC266238.2025.11293300 (online),