The BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MOTI) is embarking on the journey to deploy a major new platform – the Internet of Things (IoT). While MOTI has a great deal of experience within the field of sensors, until now, each business unit with MOTI has stood up, managed and collected data for their needs. MOTI is now ready to deploy an enterprise IoT platform through which the entire organization will add and manage devices, collect, correlate, analyze and publish sensor data, and drive action – tactical and strategic – based on the knowledge gained from the use of the platform.
MOTI began this journey by building out a Proof-of-Concept IoT Platform based on the Eclipse Foundation’s family of IoT projects. This approach allowed a low barrier to entry approach to experimenting with IoT technologies to rapidly spin up (in just a couple of weeks) an environment upon which the five IoT challenges MOTI/BC Innovation Council’s could run. The learning being achieved daily with the Proof-of-Concept and what we expect to learn from the challenges will play a huge role in defining the future IoT vision at MOTI.
However, the Proof-of-Concept is just that – a prototype – which MOTI is using for now and will abandon when it makes sense. Coming is another key step on the journey: selection and the initial deployment of the "production" IoT platform implementation at MOTI. Into that process will be include what we have learned from standing up the prototype and in integrating some representative devices. We will also take what we have learned from the Challenges to understand the innovative solutions available to us in BC and ways in which we can better make use of the capabilities that come with creating and connecting an IoT platform. In addition, we would like to get a sense what industry is recommending for IoT initiatives at the strategic level.
As such, we are seeking input and recommendations from BC technology community in the IoT space for our future production IoT platform so that we can evaluate the right technologies to move forward with.
What should MOTI focus on from a strategic perspective as we consider the options for selecting and deploying an IoT Platform? We want to look beyond the current basic feature-by-feature comparisons and understand what different participants think will drive the strategic direction of IoT. Things like:
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The trending of IoT and Cloud architectures.
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Scalable, secure device and data management for current and future deployments.
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Advanced techniques for application enablement.
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Open standards and publishing techniques for sharing MOTI data.
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Configurable and extensible automated event creation and response patterns – managed by the business.
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Consolidation, processing, visualization and most importantly, extracting useful information from the volumes of data soon-to-be available to MOTI.
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Transitioning information from the IoT platforms into valued services for the citizens of BC.
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Envisioning the needs for future system-to-system integrations – for example car/road integrations.
And a myriad of other possibilities that MOTI may not be considering as the transition to the process of selecting an IoT Platform selection begins.
While this request does not come with funding, we invite IoT solution providers, big or small, to provide MOTI with their thoughts on the key elements of the strategic direction when selecting an IoT platform that is a secure, scalable, enterprise solution; that is modular, allowing for IoT features to be source from different suppliers; and, is based on open standards and defined APIs.