IOTA Announces Smart City Partnership

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Germany-based IOTA Foundation and the South Carolina-based International Transportation Innovation Center (ITIC) announced on Thursday that they are partnering to build a series of “smart mobility testbeds,” according to a joint announcement from the organizations.

IOTA, which is developing a tokenized, blockchain-based protocol for the Internet of Things, stated that its goal is to create a network of developers building smart mobility applications using its open-source protocol and IOTA data market platform to enable a shared mobility system. IOTA also aims to build energy-related applications and supply chain management-related applications.

The ITIC stated that it hopes to build a network of open and closed testbeds–platforms for testing new technologies–to incubate artificial-intelligence-based mobility services in “smart city” environments. It also hopes to generate a test data pool that can be used by the entire smart mobility system. This would allow developers to obtain access to test fleets and test infrastructures within a worldwide network of testbeds. Also, the IOTA data market initiative will be designed to provide a unified platform to acquire, share, and select test data from certified sites.

“The ITIC Mobility Testbed Alliance will serve as a proving ground for new business models and new technology approaches with IOTA distributed ledgers” said IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener in a statement. “We look forward to showing how IOTA-based mobility services can dramatically improve the efficiency and scalability on the transactional level and how the IOTA Data Marketplace can be leveraged to buy and sell vehicle and infrastructure test data across participating testbeds.”

“The age of a shared data economy for mobility services requires standardized ways of performing data transactions considering security, scalability and sustainability criteria across very large sensor and actor networks as well as access to high quality test data,” said  ITIC Chief Technology Officer Joachim Taiber in a statement. “And this is also a global business, therefore our model of funding smart mobility innovation projects will have to work across multiple testbeds, multiple stakeholders whether on the vehicle or infrastructure side and across markets.”

The first live demonstrations at public events as an outcome of the IOTA-ITIC collaboration can be expected later this year, the organizations stated.

More about IOTA here: http://iota.org/

More about ITIC here: http://www.itic-sc.com/