Smart agents and fog computing for smart city applications

New Internet of Things (IoT) applications that leverage ubiquitous connectivity, big data and analytics are enabling Smart City initiatives all over the world. These new applications introduce tremendous new capabilities such as the ability to monitor, manage and control devices remotely, and to create new insights and actionable information from massive streams of real-time data. Supporting this new approach requires the adoption of new paradigms. In this paper, agent tecnology is combined with the emergent concept of Fog computing to design control systems based on the decentralization of control functions over distributed autonomous and cooperative entities that are running at the edge of the network. We describe the Rainbow platform that is designed to bring computation as close as possible to the physical part. Multi-agent systems running on top of Rainbow create smart services using adaptive and decentralized algorithms which exploit the principles of collective intelligence.