Supporting Living Lab with Life Cycle and Tools for Smart City Environments Paolo Nesi, Michela Paolucci Distributed Systems and Internet Technology Lab, DISIT Lab, University of Florence {Paolo.nesi, michela.paolucci}@unifi.it, http://www.disit.org, https://www.km4city.org , http://www.snap4city.org Abstract—Smart Cities are becoming proactive environments in which municipalities are engaging stakeholders in contributing and participating to the life of the smart city and to the development and updating of the smart solutions in the infrastructure. To this end, the methodologies and tools for Smart City Living Lab start up, management and life cycling are becoming relevant. In this document, the solution developed for Snap4City project is described. Snap4City has been developed on the basis of Km4City tools for supporting Living Lab in response to the competitive call of Select4Cities European commission project directed by three major cities in Europe: Helsinki, Antwerp and Copenhagen. The proposed Snap4City solution includes a IOT/IOE development model, a life cycle and a set of tools for data collection, data sharing, processes and analytics development, collection and management, and sharing. The paper also reports the experience of using these tools. Keywords— Smart City, Living Lab, Open Data, Collaborative Systems, Co-Creation Activities I. INTRODUCTION Smart cities are complex ecosystems in which many distinct aspects coexist, and many kinds of actors interact, such as public administration, citizens, SMEs, stakeholders, research organizations, universities. The main developing areas for a Smart City identified by the IEEE regards: economy, mobility, environment, people, living, governance. In this context, Smart City applications need to support multiple paradigms as data driven, stream and batch processing, to promote new working paradigms to enhance the collaboration among all the actors involved. One of the most diffused ways to apply this paradigm is set up a Living Lab (LL) as a place/methodology to cope with the city evolution in terms of services and city users’ needs and capabilities. Living Labs are instruments where develop and implement technology to accelerate innovations cities [1]. Many studies have been made on Living Labs, for example two different approaches have been identified that can be adopted to realize them: top down and bottom up. The first approach provides technologically deterministic ideas, such as the use of: smart control room, dashboards, centralized architecture to manage the city, ICT-based overview of the activities of the citizens and it is realized in collaboration with stakeholders and companies. The bottom-up approach is a more experimental view point, it is taking place in the last years and it is centered on the idea that the innovation comes from the citizens (e.g., guerrilla bike), so that the main feature is the interaction among the final users [1], [2]. A Living Lab is also seen as a starting point to collaborate and generate models to create Smart Cities [3], as a way to develop collaborative systems capable to engage the community (students, lecturers, computer scientists, electronics engineers, politician, tourists, etc.) [4]. Living Labs are also an instrument to go toward an open innovation business model in which play a fundamental role, aspects such as: co-creation activities, sustainability, multi-disciplinarity, collaborative networked development approach, self-organizing, collaboration of various stakeholders, etc. [5]. Useful activities to promote the collaboration among the different actors involved in a Living Lab, can be: i) organization of events involving the citizens; ii) improvement of co-creation activities, or hackathon to produce new useful services [6]. Over the course of time, Living Labs evolved and moved from the older Three Helix (TH) model to the Quadruple Helix (QH) model. The TH proposes that the three major parties in innovation are industry (wealth generation), universities (novelty production) and public control (government), while the QH poses the attention on the users, identifying them as the fourth helix. The QH classifies the different kind of users as capable to transform the classic innovation actions into user-centric processes: i) enabler (financier and provider of the infrastructure); ii) decision maker (city guidelines, R&I programs supporting user innovation activities); iii) supporter (who promotes the users actions and activities); iv) utilizer (who uses the services produced); Developer; Marketer; Quality controller, [7], [8]. The Living Labs are obviously connected with the concept of Open Innovation, they exploit the possibility of bringing together people with different skills, experiences, roles, expertise, motivations, etc. and many kind of organizations (universities, public administrations, SMEs, stakeholders, industries, etc.) to collaborate and realize useful service considering territorial aspect, sustainability, policies adopted by the cities, [6]. In the Living Lab it is possible to test some technologies and new paradigms to foster the innovation, to shape the applications and services being developed for their citizens, at both micro- and macro-levels. In the living Lab users are not treated only as objects in the innovation process or as mere customers but also as early stage contributors and innovators [9], [5]. In Europe Living Labs are taking place in the Smart Cities and are increasingly adopted as a new paradigm to accelerate innovation actions: the European Network of Living Lab (EUoLL) is a valid reference to be considered to realize a successful LL model. EUoLL recognizes almost 400 Living Labs in the EUoLL present in its network [10]. The main technical issues regarding smart city solutions are related to manage data, consequently they have to solve problems, such as: data access, aggregation, reasoning, access and delivering services via Smart City APIs [11]. The final aim is serving city users in a smarter and more efficient manner, stimulating their participation to the city strategies and