# Sustainable and Reliable Information and Communication Technology for Resilient Smart Cities
## 7 Technologies of Relevance for oupPLUS
### Quality Assurance Technologies and Principles  
As discussed in Section 4, systematic quality assurance is the key to achieving trustworthy and resilient integrated smart city infrastructures. This is best achieved by first providing an overview of various available urban ICT solutions and components and secondly providing the means for systematically testing and certifying those solutions/components. oupPLUS provides a meta-model for the ICT infrastructure in a city, in order to structure the quality assurance for an urban ICT (see Figure 6). It can be used to describe different potential components and solutions by assigning them to different layers/pillar as well as belonging SAPs and concrete interface/protocol stacks as described in Section 6. Furthermore, a component/solution/product should only be accepted (and deployed) when it adheres to the principles defined in the relevant OUP standards, such as the utilization of open interfaces based on open standards. Figure 6 contains an excerpt of an oupPLUS ontology for the purpose of describing smart city solutions, components and overall ICT eco-systems based on principles of oupPLUS. In Figure 6, we see all artifacts from Figure 5 including the OUP layers, the capability maps for a solution/component, the SAPs from oupPLUS as well as the abstract interface/protocol stacks for communication over an SAP, as described in Section 6 and exemplified with concrete instances in Table 1. Hence, Figure 6 provides the basic artifacts which are required in order to start cataloguing and describing urban ICT infrastructures in addition to the illustrations in Figure 7. These illustrations provide on one hand a more elaborated description of the technical aspects (SAPs, interface/protocol stacks, etc.) whilst at the same time showing the relation to a business perspective including the notion of product and further business views when designing an urban ICT. These extensions and integrational aspects were developed in collaboration with a German smart city portal for creating a supply/demand business community for smart city solutions. Therefore, the oupPLUS meta-model descriptions support the conceptual integration or orchestration of organizational, governmental or business perspectives, which is typically required for a smart city. In order to achieve a complete approach towards the systematic quality assurance and testing of urban ICT, one last ingredient is missing. The oupPLUS-based description of an ICT infrastructure typically contains many solutions/components/products mapped to layers/pillars, SAPs and interfaces/protocol stacks. Therefore, systematic tests at the SAPs with regard to the required interfaces and protocol stacks are needed. By that, the conformance to standards and requirements, interoperability, security, performance and resilience of the components and systems as well as the trustworthiness of the overall solutions and the particular urban ICT infrastructure as a whole are assured. Table 3 provides examples of available automated test suites, which can be used at the oupPLUS SAPs. The testing approaches are to be accompanied by practical and appropriate certification approaches for urban ICT. ICT solutions for smart cities should be deployed only if the required quality has been validated, in order to guarantee an overall level of resilience and trustworthiness of a smart city infrastructure. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{p{34.1 pt} p{34.1 pt}} \hline \hline
**Technology** & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Description**} \\ \hline IoT sensors and communication protocols & Devices that can measure aspects such as temperature, humidity, gas levels, and infrared radiation (but are not limited to these) and can communicate measured values to an IoT platform are termed as IoT sensors. For the IoT sensors and actuators to function in tandem with the belonging IoT platform (in the backend/cloud), it is necessary that they are able to establish communication channels to the platform, and understand each other’s transmitted messages.