Smart cities strive for open systems with a high level of interoperability between various vendors, to avoid being locked into proprietary systems. In future they may also need several smart city vertical applications to be controlled within a single central management software. These factors have driven the TALQ Consortium to develop the Smart City Protocol to unify systems from multiple suppliers addressing a range of smart city use cases. A carefully developed testing procedure with the support of a digital Test Tool Suite allows the Consortium to verify that single products can be certified as TALQ-compliant.

The latest plug fest was held in the Engineering campus of the University of Valencia, Spain, from July 9 – 11. It was attended by 14 members of the consortium of which ten brought complete systems (CMS and gateway products) to be assessed for TALQ Certification. The other four companies attended a developers’ workshop to get advice for their partial implementations and to gain experience of pairing them with other systems.

Approval of the Certification Test Tool

The event was very successful with the certification tool being confirmed as a suitable means of product certification. The results from the Test Tool, submitted by members prior to the plug fest, were in agreement with the results of the real pairings during the plug fest. Pending a detailed inspection of the log files taken during the plug fest, it appears that all features exercised in the pairings during the plug fest will be considered to be ‘released’ for future versions of the test tool. As a consequence, the tool has been promoted from its beta version to the formal release version 2.1.0.

“We expect most of the eleven products present at the plug fest to be formally certified by the consortium’s Certification Workgroup before the end of July. We were able to exercise a large variety of pairings among four CMS and seven gateway implementations to review their compatibility across both mandatory and optional functions.” reports Simon Dunkley, Secretary General for the TALQ Consortium. “It was a great opportunity to bring together many developers working in the smart city domain, and to share experience and insights.”