Building Smart Cities Research Articles

A Critical Review of Smart City Frameworks: New Criteria to Consider When Building Smart City Framework

In the face of persistent challenges posed by urbanization and climate change, the contemporary era has witnessed a growing urgency for urban intelligence and sustainable development. Consequently, a plethora of smart city schedules and policies have emerged, with smart city assessment serving as a pivotal benchmark for gauging policy effectiveness. However, owing to the inherent ambiguity of the smart city definition and the complexity of application scenarios, designers and decision-makers often struggle to ascertain their desired assessment frameworks swiftly and effectively. In this context, our study undertook a comprehensive analysis and comparative assessment of 33 recently introduced or inferred evaluation frameworks, drawn from a broad spectrum of extensive and longstanding research efforts. The overarching goal was to provide valuable reference points for designers and decision-makers navigating this intricate landscape. The assessment was conducted across seven key dimensions: generalizability, comprehensiveness, availability, flexibility, scientific rigor, transparency, and interpretability. These criteria hold the potential not only to guide the development trajectory and focus of upcoming smart city assessment models but also to serve as invaluable guidelines for stakeholders evaluating the outcomes of such models. Furthermore, they can serve as robust support for designers and decision-makers in their pursuit of targeted frameworks.

Converged Security and Information Management System as a Tool for Smart City Infrastructure Resilience Assessment

Current research on smart cities is primarily focused on the area of applicability of information and communication technologies. However, in the context of a multidisciplinary approach, it is also necessary to pay attention to the resilience and converged security of individual infrastructures. Converged security represents a particular security type based on a selected spectrum of certain convergent security types of, assuming the creation of a complementary whole. Considering the outputs of the analysis of security breaches manifestations, this kind of security makes it possible to detect emerging security breaches earlier (still in the symptom stage), thus providing a more efficient and targeted solution suitable for building smart city infrastructure. In its essence, the article refers to the practical application of the converged security theoretical principles presented in the publication to a functional sample, deployed and tested in practical conditions in context of selected smart city infrastructure protection and resilience. Considering the nature of the practical application, the convergence of a wider spectrum of smart security alarm systems in the resilience assessment context is defined. In the beginning, the general principles of security/safety and the need for their convergence are presented. In this context, the mathematical model called Converged Resilience Assessment (CRA) method is presented for better understanding. Subsequently, Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems are described as a technological concept that can be used for resilience assessment. The most beneficial part is the structural, process, and functional description of the Converged Security and Information Management System (CSIM) using the concept of smart security alarm systems converged security.

Assessing the Status and Challenges of Urban Land Administration Systems Using Framework for Effective Land Administration (FELA): A Case Study in Pakistan

The urban land administration system (LAS) of any country serves as a key pillar for good governance, resource planning, service delivery, infrastructure development, and revenue collection. To reform their LASs, countries need a thorough understanding of their existing context and global relevance. The goal of this paper is to examine the status and challenges of urban LASs in Pakistan using the United Nations Framework for Effective Land Administration (FELA). The exploratory case study method used in the paper employs a mixed approach, which includes FELA-based questionnaire surveys, group discussions, and desk reviews. A total of 525 urban LAS stakeholders, including owner-buyers, real estate agents, bankers, lawyers, and LAS organizations, participated in the activity. The results show that more than half of the stakeholders are not satisfied with existing urban LASs, their governance and accountability, laws, and policies. Corruption is prevalent mostly in government organizations. Fraud and joint ownership are the most common sources of dispute, with 67 percent of the respondents stating that the cases take more than two years to resolve in court. The financial aspect of urban LASs is suffering due to property undervaluation and low revenue collection. Manual data and record keeping in LASs further complicate the system, with 87 percent of all respondents interested in innovating the urban LAS using modern technologies. Furthermore, 92 percent of all respondents expressed the need to standardize the existing LASs. There is a lack of capacity and skills, and 89 percent of organizations’ respondents believe that human resources skilled in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) can improve the efficiency of urban LASs. There is a lack of partnership among LAS organizations and a gap in the accessibility of LAS-related quality information. The country’s vision of building smart cities can be realized through LAS standardization and 3D and GIS innovation.

Ukraine's post-war reconstruction: Building smart cities and governments through a sustainability-based reconstruction plan

The war between Russia and Ukraine started when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022; and it has been a major catastrophe in every sense of the word. In this article, we focus on the future reconstruction of the country in the short and long term, and the importance of creating a reconstruction plan based on sustainability and energy efficiency to turn Ukraine and each of its local governments into smart cities. Environmental protection policies should be enacted to facilitate the green transformation of the economy. The green transition will enable greater economic efficiency and competitiveness of Ukraine in European and global markets. Transparency in management and efficiency of its use is also another challenge to be achieved during reconstruction in order to achieve environmentally sustainable and smart cities and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

Proposed Consumptions for Building Ho Chi Minh City a Smart City from the Experience of Some Countries in the World

Urbanization is taking place in many parts of the world and is being implemented rapidly in regions of dynamic development. Vietnam is one of the countries with fast international integration. Therefore, the process of urbanization is also very developed. Ho Chi Minh City - one of the two most developed cities in Vietnam also has a strong urbanization process. However, for this urbanization to be sustainable, effective measures are needed. Therefore, we propose some measures to build the city. Ho Chi Minh City has become a smart city from the experience of Japan, the Netherlands, and the US. Since their experience in building smart cities in these countries, we hope to contribute to building Ho Chi Minh City into a smart city in the 4.0 era.

Dracula urbanism and smart cities in style and substance

Dialogues in Urban Research was established to create critical yet constructive conversations about cities and urbanization at a perilous but fascinating historical-geographical conjuncture. In this vein, we thank our four interlocuters, Emma Colven, Renee Tapp, Delik Hudalah, Dallas Rogers, and Christopher Silver, for their provocative comments on our manuscript. There is much food for thought in their ideas. In response to their comments, we initially expound on three core themes in the article that address their concerns about our conceptual apparatus. Here we offer clarity to dispel any misunderstandings of what our paper is about. The discussion's cornerstone: Dracula urbanism as an important situated theorising; Dracula's complicated features, and the reality of smart city building as the leading edge of Dracula urbanism. Then, we illuminate the contributions of our critics as a collection of nuanced modifications and extensions of our work. We are heartened that these fellow urbanists, in this special journal issue, have critically appraised the Dracula urbanist concept and move it forward in meaningful ways.

What Los Angeles tells us about Dracula Urbanism

ABSTRACT In their piece “Toward a Dracula Urbanism: Smart City Building in Flint and Jakarta,” Wilson and Wyly (2022) inaugurate Dracula urbanism as an explanatory framework for identifying previously unnoticed dynamics in advanced capitalist cities, particularly those engaging in smart city initiatives. From the perspective of LA, a radically different context from Wilson and Wyly’s (2022) choices of Flint and Jakarta, I argue that the logic of Dracula urbanism can be extended beyond the imbrication of real estate states and smart cities to shed new light on other forms of urban redevelopment and their consequences such as gentrification and urban exclusion more broadly. Additionally, I emphasize the importance of the local in the multi-scalar Dracula urbanist imagination, and make an argument against the so-called centerless and unbounded character of smart cities, which I show are mired in forms of inter-urban competition and discourses shaped by ever-present, politico-legally defined borders.

The use of blockchain technology to build smart cities: creating public value in Kuwait

Purpose The purpose of this study is to understand the public value of the government of Kuwait using blockchain technology to develop the capabilities of smart cities. Design/methodology/approach Research was conducted in Kuwait, where the increased use of blockchain technology has been evidenced in both the private and public sectors. A total of seven IT managers were interviewed to gauge their responses to blockchain and its use in Kuwait ministries. Findings Blockchain technology offers many benefits for the development of smart cities in Kuwait. This is a statement that received almost mutual agreement amongst all the IT managers interviewed. However, as regards wider acceptance, the majority mentioned that a framework is necessary to better articulate the public value of using blockchain in smart cities in Kuwait. Originality/value This paper develops research hypotheses and a framework for articulating the public value of blockchain technology for smart cities in Kuwait.

Use of Blockchain Technologies in Smart Cities

Abstract: A city is called a smart city where every citizen gets quality government services using the technologies like Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT also helps in providing operational efficiency in information sharing with the public. Smart cities promote better quality of life by using modern technologies and economic growth. Blockchain helps in end-to-end data transfer with great efficiency, transparency and security. Every data is stored in a block which has a hash value also considered as digital signature. In this paper, it is discussed how we can use Blockchain technologies to promote smart cities and provide better services. Also, it discusses various challenges and trends in use of blockchain technology in building smart cities.

Collaboration and Management of Heterogeneous Robotic Systems for Road Network Construction, Management, and Maintenance under the Vision of “BIM + GIS” Technology

In modern society, intelligent spatial analysis services have been playing an important role in building smart cities. Especially, people’s spatial information needs have changed with the technological progress of times, from traditional two-dimensional appearance to three-dimensional interior. In this case, the construction of street networks is a key part of spatial information analysis research. Establishing an integrated indoor-outdoor street network data model with accurate information and complete attributes can provide strong technical support for indoor-outdoor navigation, emergency evacuation, and other application services. However, most of the current studies on internal and external road networks are independent of each other. This means that indoor road networks are mainly based on floor plans, which contain little information and do not represent the spatial relationships between floors. Indoor and outdoor links often suffer from poor connectivity and data loss. Heterogeneous robotics is a high degree of integration of intelligent control and platform control technologies. In a sense, it is a technology platform for connecting heterogeneous robotic populations. By developing effective collaboration and control strategies, tasks can be performed with the highest success rate and the lowest risk while respecting spatial and temporal constraints. As a result, the study of the coordination and management of heterogeneous robotic systems for road network construction, management, and maintenance is a topic of a great theoretical value and significance. Therefore, this paper proposes an intelligent road network construction method that incorporates BIM and GIS technologies. This study uses the building information model to enrich the information of indoor building components and combines the strong spatial analysis capability of outdoor areas with GIS road network technology to build an indoor road network and design a connection scheme for indoor and outdoor areas. After that, the construction of an integrated indoor-outdoor street network is completed, and the interaction between indoor as well as outdoor spatial data is very smooth.

Net Zero Transformation of Buildings with Gamification and Sustainability Performance Monitoring System

Today’s digitally hyperconnected world, inching closer to mid-century climate-concern goals, is engaged in accomplishing sustainability targets. Industry and infrastructure have become as central to climate action as they have traditionally been to economic growth and social development. Commercial and public buildings in Smart cities contribute significantly to such progress. However, buildings also carry a negative impact on the environment and society, contributing through pollution, depletion of resources, carbon emissions, and high energy consumption. This paper describes the criticality of a sustainability performance information platform that brings together all the aspects of a sustainable building’s social, economic, and environmental qualities through intelligent management and operations. The author extends his belief in multi-dimensional sustainability by emphasizing the importance of people-participation through behavioral change and persuasive design in clean building technology to bring about a change for good. This paper is an attempt at a framework that will lead to greater collaborative efforts towards more intelligent, sustainable cities with interoperable green buildings.

Demystifying the Role of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Smart City Applications: Background, Motivation, Recent Advances, and Future Research Directions.

Smart cities provide an efficient infrastructure for the enhancement of the quality of life of the people by aiding in fast urbanization and resource management through sustainable and scalable innovative solutions. The penetration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in smart cities has been a major contributor to keeping up with the agility and pace of their development. In this paper, we have explored Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is one such technical discipline that has great potential in optimizing ICT processes and has so far been kept away from the limelight. Through this study, we have established the various roles that NLP plays in building smart cities after thoroughly analyzing its architecture, background, and scope. Subsequently, we present a detailed description of NLP's recent applications in the domain of smart healthcare, smart business, and industry, smart community, smart media, smart research, and development as well as smart education accompanied by NLP's open challenges at the very end. This work aims to throw light on the potential of NLP as one of the pillars in assisting the technical advancement and realization of smart cities.

Current issues and Countermeasures of Smart City Construction: the case study in China

As an emerging pattern in city planning around the globe, the smart city is gradually changing people's traditional way of life. Building smart cities can boost domestic demand, drive the growth of innovative industries, and promote regional economic development. It helps to enhance the core competitiveness of cities and allows them to gain a competitive advantage in the fierce regional competition. China has led the way in the construction of smart cities in recent decades. This paper provides a concise overview of the evolution of Chinese smart city policy and relevant strategies, and it analyses some of the challenges encountered along the way. The main problems can be divided into three: lack of specific plans, concerns about environmental protection, and low degree of citizen participation and information privacy. This paper puts forward relevant recommendations based on these problems as follows: scientific planning and rational layout increased investment, implementation of the concept of sustainable development, and introduction of public participation and protection of information privacy. These recommendations can aid in the growth of smart cities in China and serve as a point of reference for the relevant government agencies and smart city-related businesses in China and abroad, boosting the sustainable and healthful growth of the smart city.

Dependable modulation classifier explainer with measurable explainability.

The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a significant role in building smart cities worldwide. Smart cities use IoT devices to collect and analyze data to provide better services and solutions. These IoT devices are heavily dependent on the network for communication. These new-age networks use artificial intelligence (AI) that plays a crucial role in reducing network roll-out and operation costs, improving entire system performance, enhancing customer services, and generating possibilities to embed a wide range of telecom services and applications. For IoT devices, it is essential to have a robust and trustable network for reliable communication among devices and service points. The signals sent between the devices or service points use modulation to send a password over a bandpass frequency range. Our study focuses on modulation classification performed using deep learning method(s), adaptive modulation classification (AMC), which has now become an integral part of a communication system. We propose a dependable modulation classifier explainer (DMCE) that focuses on the explainability of modulation classification. Our study demonstrates how we can visualize and understand a particular prediction made by seeing highlighted data points crucial for modulation class prediction. We also demonstrate a numeric explainability measurable metric (EMM) to interpret the prediction. In the end, we present a comparative analysis with existing state-of-the-art methods.

A Hybrid Algorithm for Urban LULC Change Detection for Building Smart-city by Using WorldView Images

Technological advancement in smart cities can have adverse effects on the environment. Timely monitoring of smart cities to preserve environmental sustainability is a thrust area of research. It can be done by using change detection with multi-temporal satellite data. The success of these methods solely depends on the calibre of the backend image segmentation and Land-use Land-cover classification technique. The limitation of using cutting-edge classification algorithms is the availability of a proper dataset and identification of the edge structure of different LULC classes. In contrast, a segmentation algorithm cannot detect LULC classes automatically. In this research, we eliminated these shortcomings by considering a hybrid approach. We proposed a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) and ISODATA-embedded large-scale change detection method. This method can automatically segment, detect, and perform LULC change analysis. We have considered the multi-sensor dataset of Barasat, West Bengal, India, obtained from the WorldView satellite sensor for the experimental study. The proposed method is validated concerning three different cutting-edge methods.

Modeling Methods of 3D Model in Digital Twins

To understand the current application and development of 3D modeling in Digital Twins (DTs), abundant literatures on DTs and 3D modeling are investigated by means of literature review. The transition process from 3D modeling to DTs modeling is analyzed, as well as the current application of DTs modeling in various industries. The application of 3D DTs modeling in the fields of smart manufacturing, smart ecology, smart transportation, and smart buildings in smart cities is analyzed in detail, and the current limitations are summarized. It is found that the 3D modeling technology in DTs has broad prospects for development and has a huge impact on all walks of life and even human lifestyles. At the same time, the development of DTs modeling relies on the development and support capabilities of mature technologies such as Big Data, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and game technology. Therefore, although some results have been achieved, there are still limitations. This work aims to provide a good theoretical support for the further development of 3D DTs modeling.

An Individual Tree Segmentation Method From Mobile Mapping Point Clouds Based on Improved 3-D Morphological Analysis

Street tree extraction based on the 3D mobile mapping point cloud plays an important role in building smart cities and creating highly accurate urban street maps. Existing methods are often over- or under-segmented when segmenting overlapping street tree canopies and extracting geometrically complex trees. To address this problem, we propose a method based on improved 3D morphological analysis for extracting street trees from mobile laser scanner (MLS) point clouds. First, the 3D semantic point cloud segmentation framework based on Deep Learning is used for pre-classification of the original point cloud to obtain the vegetation point cloud in the scene. Considering the influence of terrain unevenness, the vegetation point cloud is de-terraformed and slice point cloud containing tree trunks is obtained through spatial filtering on height. On this basis, a voxel-based region growing method constrained with the changing rate of convex area is used to locate the stree trees. Then we propose an progressive tree crown segmentation method, which first completed the preliminary individual segmentation of the tree crown point cloud based on the voxel-based region growth constrained by the minimum increment rule, and then optimizes the crown edges by “valley” structure-based clustering. In this paper, the proposed method is validated and the accuracy is evaluated using three sets of MLS Datasets collected from different scenarios. The experimental results show that the method can effectively identify and localize street trees with different geometries and has a good segmentation effect for street trees with large adhesion between canopies. The accuracy and recall of tree localization are higher than 96.08% and 95.83%, respectively, and the average precision and recall of instance segmentation in three datasets are higher than 93.23% and 95.41%, respectively.

TOWARDS SMART CITIES IN SOUTH AFRICA: EVOLUTION, DEFINITIONS, AND FUTURE CITIES

High urbanisation rates lead to increasing pressure on governments to provide sustainable living conditions. This article aims to explore the approaches that smart city projects around the world use to address some of these challenges. The evolution of cities is landmarked by technological innovation; and the successful use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology seems to be another landmark. In this article the focus falls first on the evolution of cities and the definition and future of smart cities. In part two the focus is on the challenges and opportunities that South Africa faces in its quest to build smart cities.

The “Smart City” concept and its implementation prospects

The article reveals the content of the “smart city” concept. Thus, the concept of 'smart city' itself can be considered not only as a concept, but also as an urban space itself, 'saturated' with digital and innovative technologies. Key approaches to the implementation of the concept of “smart city” are given. The basic components and tools of a smart city are pointed out. Existing problems, challenges and threats in the context of building smart cities are disclosed. Russian realities of embodiment of concept “smart city” are considered. Possible perspectives of “smart city” concept realization are pointed out. The conclusions are summarized. On the whole, a smart city is an inevitable condition for present and future development of urban space. The “smart city” is not only a tool for improvement of comfort, improvement of conditions, but also a necessary answer to the arisen threats and challenges, which are unprecedented in character.

Intelligent System Application to Monitor the Smart City Building Lighting

A smart city incorporates infrastructure methods that are environmentally responsible, such as smart communications, smart grids, smart energy, and smart buildings. The city administration has prioritized the use of cutting-edge technology and informatics as the primary strategy for enhancing service quality, with energy resources taking precedence. To achieve optimal energy management in the multidimensional system of a city tribe, it is necessary not only to identify and study the vast majority of energy elements, but also to define their implicit interdependencies. This is because optimal energy management is required to reach this objective. The lighting index is an essential consideration when evaluating the comfort indicators. In order to realize the concept of a smart city, the primary objective of this research is to create a system for managing and monitoring the lighting index. It is possible to identify two distinct phases within the intelligent system. Once data collection concludes, the monitoring system will be activated. In the second step, the operation of the control system is analyzed and its effect on the performance of the numerical model is determined. This evaluation is based on the proposed methodology. The optimized results were deemed satisfactory because they maintained the brightness index value (79%) while consuming less energy. The intelligent implementation system generated satisfactory outcomes, which were observed 1.75 times on average.