Context Of Smart Cities Research Articles

Visual classification of dumpsters with capsule networks

Garbage management is an essential task in the everyday life of a city. In many countries, dumpsters are owned and deployed by the public administration. An updated what-and-where list is in the core of the decision making process when it comes to remove or renew them. Moreover, it may give extra information to other analytics in a smart city context. In this paper, we present a capsule network-based architecture to automate the visual classification of dumpsters. We propose different network hyperparameter settings, such as reducing convolutional kernel size and increasing convolution layers. We also try several data augmentation strategies, as crop and flip image transformations. We succeed in reducing the number of network parameters by 85% with respect to the best previous method, thus decreasing the required training time and making the whole process suitable for low cost and embedded software architectures. In addition, the paper provides an extensive experimental analysis including an ablation study that illustrates the contribution of each component in the proposed method. Our proposal is compared with the state-of-the-art method, which is based on a Google Inception V3 architecture pretrained with Imagenet. Experimental results show that our proposal achieves a 95.35% accuracy, 2.35% over the previous best method.

Exploring Travel Mode Preference of External Trips for Smart City Transportation Planning: Sejong, Korea

In the face of growing concerns about urban problems, smart cities have emerged as a promising solution to address the challenges, for future sustainable societies in cities. Since the early 2000s, 67 local governments in Korea have been participating in smart city projects, as of 2019. The Sejong 5-1 Living Area smart city was selected as one of two pilot national demonstration smart cities. The main objectives of this study are to introduce the Sejong 5-1 Living Area smart city project that is currently in the planning stage, present travel and mode preferences focusing on external trips in a smart city context to be built, and analyze a mode choice model according to the socioeconomic characteristics of individual travelers. One of the distinguishing features of the Sejong smart city is its transportation design concept of designating a sharing car-only district within the city to limit private vehicle ownership to about one-third of residents, while bus rapid transit (BRT) plays a central role in mobility for external trips among four transport modes including private cars, BRT, carsharing, and ridesharing. This study was analyzed using the stated preference survey data under hypothetical conditions by reflecting the unique characteristics of the Sejong smart city transportation policy. Approximately two-thirds of respondents in the survey preferred to spend less than 1.25 USD, traveling less than 35 min on BRT trips. On the basis of the survey data, we developed a mixed logit mode choice model and found the overall model estimates to be statistically significant and reasonable. All people-specific variables examined in this study were associated with mode choices for external commuting trips, including age, income, household size, major mode, driving ability, and presence of preschoolers.

An IoT based ECG system to diagnose cardiac pathologies for healthcare applications in smart cities

The present paper aims to describe the project and development of an ECG monitoring system which is able to diagnose specific cardiac pathologies by adapting the processing algorithm to the monitored patient. The system can work standalone by providing the final diagnosis to the patient by a LEDs set. In addition, an IoT based architecture allows the system to share data and diagnosis with a remote cardiologist in real-time or to store data in a FTP folder, as an Holter monitor, for post-processing and further analysis.The system consists of two sections: the digital one, based on the National Instruments MyRIO, digitalises the signal and processes it in real-time to make a diagnosis on possible occurring cardiac pathologies (bradycardia, tachycardia, infarction, ischemia); the analog section, which performs the acquisition, amplification, and preliminary filtering of a 3-leads electrocardiographic signal. The processing algorithm has been developed in NI LabVIEW environment. The main contribution to the state of the art is due to two removable and updatable memory devices. A first memory has been used to store clinical and personal data of patient so to configure the computing algorithm and adapt it to the monitored patient. A second memory has been used to store accuracy and uncertainty specifications of the ECG system in order to improve the reliability of the final diagnosis.The system aims to provide an electrocardiographic monitoring system for healthcare applications in the smart city context. The possibility to monitor constantly the patient health state at home is an important challenge of the next future smart cities. IoT and automation are the main aspects of the proposed system. Patients having chronic heart diseases need frequent hospitalizations to check their heart health. In this scenario, the proposed system is an Ambient Assisted Living solution developed to encourage the independent life of cardiac subjects by supporting his/her care and wellness during the daily life.

When Smart Cities Get Smarter via Machine Learning: An In-Depth Literature Review

The manuscript represents a comeprehensive and systematic literature review on the machine learning methods in the emerging applications of smart city. Application domains include the essential aspect of the smart cities including the energy, healthcare, transportation, security, and pollution. The methodology presents the state-of-the-art, taxonomy, evaluation and model performance. The study concludes that the hybrid models and ensembles are the best performers since they exhibit both high accuracy and not-costly complexity. On the other hand, the deep learning (DL) techniques had higher accuracy than the hybrid models and ensembles, but they demanded relatively higher computation power. Moreover, all these advanced ML methods had a slower processing speed than the single methods. Likewise, the support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) generally outperformed the artificial neural network (ANN) for accuracy and other metrics. However, since the difference is negligible, it can be concluded that using either of them is appropriate. The study’s findings identify the pros and cons of the methods in each application for future researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers for the right problem within the context of smart cities.

A Connected Mobility Scheme for Taxi Supply-Demand Balancing in a Smart City Context

A Connected Mobility Scheme for Taxi Supply-Demand Balancing in a Smart City Context

An Assembly Line Approach to Technical Communication Pedagogy with Intelligent Content Design and Delivery

Topic-based intelligent content design with a better understanding of semantic web schemas could be the new focus for technical communication (TC) pedagogy in academia - a major shift away from designing standalone static documents. A new such TC course focused on the basics of how XML, RDFS, and OWL schema contribute to the semantic web for CCMS and CDP, including the basics of how faceted search works and ontology creation happens for simple e-commerce based, tourism, healthcare, and consumer product information design. The course also attempted to expose students to a basic understanding of iiRDS – the standard that enables dynamic information request and delivery in the era of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0; and how Microsoft HoloLens - a mixed reality platform caters to intelligent information processing in Toyota and smart city contexts, as case studies. This was an introductory course with conceptual development being the focus, and not programming skills. With this course, we wanted to introduce students to the new industry documentation standards and initiate a process in pedagogy that will ultimately lead to bridging the extreme shortage of qualified job applicants in the industry coming from content strategy as a new field of practice. This paper focused on a pilot study initiating an exercise to explore the extent to which such a course helps teach information management in an English as Foreign Language (EFL) context for computer science majors, within the scope of content language integrated learning (CLIL) and project-based language learning (PBLL).

A mapping towards a unified municipal platform: An investigative case study from a Norwegian municipality

Norwegian municipalities set citizens’ wellbeing a top priority, through transparent social practices and democratic conduct of public services. In 2015, the United Nations (UN) have set a collection of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), which are interlinked towards achieving a sustainable future by 2030. In smart sustainable cities context, a multi-stakeholder, physical and virtual platforms are considered pivotal to achieve the UN SDGs. They are core initiator for transformative actions, endeavoring on public service excellence. This research aims to investigate the digital governance platforms utilized, by a case study Norwegian municipality, to achieve the UN SDGs; towards a smart sustainable city. An empirical systematic approach was followed. The approach commenced by the conduct of a 1) narrative review and synthesis of the literature, and the municipal strategic development documents, 2) collection of a developed semi-structured survey, and 3) interviews with the municipal decision makers (including directors, and departmental professional advisors). As part of the study, broad aspects related to municipal governance and services have been discussed with the interviewees, where effectiveness measures have been identified and prioritized. Further, recommendations for improving the municipal platforms and initiatives were identified and discussed. The municipal investigated platforms and the strategic documents have led to formulating a novel conceptual model for the behavior needed towards making a unified municipal platform. Discussion and recommendations were presented to identify future development prospects, towards achieving a transformative integrated ecosystem. Further, the research presents main concepts, to articulate organizational administrative practices, and to inform municipal stakeholders, decision makers and professionals about the existing digital platforms, while proposing a model for a unified municipal governance transformation.

A Review of Energy Modeling Tools for Energy Efficiency in Smart Cities

Nowadays, modeling tools are a crucial part of best practice in the elaboration and implementation of a decarbonization plan in any organization, city, or country. The present review analyzes the different modeling tools available to assess energy systems in smart cities. It creates an updated overview of the modeling tools currently available, showing their capabilities and main potential outputs when considering the energy efficiency objective in the context of smart cities in Europe. A restricted set of 14 tools are identified which optimally fulfill the modeling mission of the energy sector, in a smart city context, for different time horizons. The selection considers the capability to include decarbonization assessments, namely, by considering the flexibility to use different external factors, energy policies, technologies, and mainly the implementation of Article 7 from the Energy Efficiency Directive and the “energy efficiency first” principle defined by the European Commission. The ELECTRE TRI method was used to implement a multi-criteria decision approach for sorting modeling tools, aiming at distributing the various alternatives by previously defined categories, and considering the performance criteria of each alternative modeling tool, the analysis suggests that the best options are the LEAP, MESSAGEix, and oemof tools.

A Smart Home Power Supervision Strategy Based on Optimal Plug-in Electric Vehicles Integration into Smart City Context for Peak Loads Profiles Flattening

A Smart Home Power Supervision Strategy Based on Optimal Plug-in Electric Vehicles Integration into Smart City Context for Peak Loads Profiles Flattening

ICT Governance in the Context of Smart Cities: A Study in Brazilian Municipalities

ICT resources are essential to support, manage, and innovate cities services to citizens, especially in reference to smart cities context. From this perspective, ICT governance is fundamental to guarantee a return on investments and effectiveness in cities' administration. Based on the Brazilian cities best ranked in the Connected Smart Cities index, this work analyzed ICT governance practices in those cities. The results identified a lack of governance practices in most cities, a lack of active ICT governance transparency, and non-compliance with Brazilian access information law; thus, a set of lessons learned is structured for cities. Future studies can establish a good practice catalog and guidance as a baseline for an ICT open governance approach.

When Intelligent Transportation Systems Sensing Meets Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges

The widespread use of mobile devices and sensors has motivated data-driven applications that can leverage the power of big data to benefit many aspects of our daily life, such as health, transportation, economy, and environment. Under the context of smart city, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), as a main building block of modern cities, and edge computing (EC), as an emerging computing service that targets addressing the limitations of cloud computing, have attracted increasing attention in the research community in recent years. It is well believed that the application of EC in ITS will have considerable benefits to transportation systems regarding efficiency, safety, and sustainability. Despite the growing trend in ITS and EC research, a big gap in the existing literature is identified: the intersection between these two promising directions has been far from well explored. In this paper, we focus on a critical part of ITS, i.e., sensing, and conducting a review on the recent advances in ITS sensing and EC applications in this field. The key challenges in ITS sensing and future directions with the integration of edge computing are discussed.

Requirements and Architecture of a Cloud Based Insomnia Therapy and Diagnosis Platform: A Smart Cities Approach

Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder worldwide. Its effects generate economic costs in the millions but could be effectively reduced using digitally provisioned cognitive behavioural therapy. However, traditional acquisition and maintenance of the necessary technical infrastructure requires high financial and personnel expenses. Sleep analysis is still mostly done in artificial settings in clinical environments. Nevertheless, innovative IT infrastructure, such as mHealth and cloud service solutions for home monitoring, are available and allow context-aware service provision following the Smart Cities paradigm. This paper aims to conceptualise a digital, cloud-based platform with context-aware data storage that supports diagnosis and therapy of non-organic insomnia. In a first step, requirements needed for a remote diagnosis, therapy, and monitoring system are identified. Then, the software architecture is drafted based on the above mentioned requirements. Lastly, an implementation concept of the software architecture is proposed through selecting and combining eleven cloud computing services. This paper shows how treatment and diagnosis of a common medical issue could be supported effectively and cost-efficiently by utilising state-of-the-art technology. The paper demonstrates the relevance of context-aware data collection and disease understanding as well as the requirements regarding health service provision in a Smart Cities context. In contrast to existing systems, we provide a cloud-based and requirement-driven reference architecture. The applied methodology can be used for the development, design, and evaluation of other remote and context-aware diagnosis and therapy systems. Considerations of additional aspects regarding cost, methods for data analytics as well as general data security and safety are discussed.

CrowDSL: Platform for Incidents Management in a Smart City Context

The final objective of smart cities is to optimize services and improve the quality of life of their citizens, who can play important roles due to the information they can provide. This information can be used in order to enhance many sectors involved in city activity such as transport, energy or health. Crowd-sourcing initiatives focus their efforts on making cities safer places that are adapted to the population size they host. In this way, citizens are able to report the issues they identify to the relevant body so that they can be fixed and, at the same time, they can provide useful information to other citizens. There are several projects aimed at reporting incidents in a smart city context. In this paper, we propose the use of model-driven engineering by designing a graphical domain-specific language to abstract and improve the incident-reporting process. With the use of a domain-specific language, we can obtain several benefits in our research for users and cities. For instance, we can shorten the time for reporting the events by users and, at the same time, we gain an expressive power compared to other methodologies for incident reporting. In addition, it can be reused and is centered in this specific domain after being studied. Furthermore, we have evaluated the DSL with different users, obtaining a high satisfaction percentage.

New urban challenges: Shared spaces in smart places – Overview and positioning

Modern cities face many new challenges as a result of the ‘digital age’, in particular the uncertain promise of high urban benefits from the widespread use of communication technology in a smart city context. This essay introduces the theme of ‘Shared Spaces in Smart Places’, the connection between information technology and urban community. Just like 19th century industrial innovations, the new tools of the information age appear to be largely centripetal forces that boost the demand for urban proximity. But also like earlier industrial innovations, information technology has also disrupted shared urban spaces, such as downtown commercial districts that have lost customers to electronic vendors. Both this essay, and this special issue of Land Use Policy, emphasize the ways in which information technology can complement good land use policy and address both longstanding urban challenges at the nexus of digital tools and urban life as well as the new difficulties that have emerged during the information age.

Performance Evaluation in the Inter-Institutional Collaboration Context of Hybrid Smart Cities

Abstract Objective: The smart city is defined as a mix of urban strategies aimed at optimizing and innovating public services. Current cities are hybrid and affected by complex systems with inter-institutional collaboration. This study aims to understand which variables are most present and important according to the literature review and comparative analysis of two case studies. Methodology: The authors have chosen the emerging smart city of Turin and Lugano to conduct a cross-analysis based on the matrix proposed by Yin (2017). This research is characterized as a holistic study of multiple cases. Findings: The research was carried out thanks to results produced by literature and emerging from the analysis of realities exposed, to assess the performance of projects and urban sustainability. A set of 71 indicators has been designed to assess the impacts of a smart city. 5 Indicators are related to management performance, 18 to governance and 48 to reporting. Value Added: This research aims to implement the theory of information reporting by providing guidelines for indicators in inter-institutional, cross-sectoral and multi-level contexts maximising smart factors in cities and meeting stakeholder needs in a hybrid organization. Recommendations: Future research is recommended to confirm the relevant indicators for stakeholders associated with communication methods.

Understanding and Acceptance of Smart City Policies: Practitioners’ Perspectives on the Malaysian Smart City Framework

Whilst a plethora of research exists on the smart cities and project performance evaluations, only few studies have focused on the smart city policy evaluation from the perspective of its acceptance by practitioners. This paper aims to generate insights by evaluating the smart city policy through a developing country case study—i.e., Malaysia. This study employed a questionnaire survey method for data collection and analyzed the data by using Fuzzy Delphi analysis. A group of 40 practitioners was gathered in a focus group discussion through purposive sampling. The main objectives of this survey were to identify the understanding and acceptance levels of the seven smart city domains and respective strategies that are outlined in the Malaysian Smart City Framework. The results disclosed that the practitioners possessed divergent levels of understanding and acceptance in terms of smart city domains. The study participant practitioners accepted all understanding and acceptance objectives of smart economy, living, people, and governance domains (expert agreement 75–92% and threshold d value 0.123–0.188), but rejected all objectives for both smart environment and digital infrastructure domains (expert agreement 55–74% and threshold d value 0.150–0.212). Along with this, acceptance of smart mobility was also rejected (expert agreement 56% and threshold d value 0.245). The findings reveal that considering all opinions expressing dissensus is essential when building more inclusive smart city strategies. This study contributes to the smart city discourse as being one of the first in capturing professional practitioners’ understanding and acceptance on a national level smart city policy by applying the Delphi method in the smart city context. Most importantly, the study informs urban policymakers on how to capture the voices and perspectives of the general public on national and local smart city strategy and initiatives.

IoT-based air quality monitoring systems for smart cities: A systematic mapping study

<p>The increased level of air pollution in big cities has become a major concern for several organizations and authorities because of the risk it represents to human health. In this context, the technology has become a very useful tool in the contamination monitoring and the possible mitigation of its impact. Particularly, there are different proposals using the internet of things (IoT) paradigm that use interconnected sensors in order to measure different pollutants. In this paper, we develop a systematic mapping study defined by a five-step methodology to identify and analyze the research status in terms of IoT-based air pollution monitoring systems for smart cities. The study includes 55 proposals, some of which have been implemented in a real environment. We analyze and compare these proposals in terms of different parameters defined in the mapping and highlight some challenges for air quality monitoring systems implementation into the smart city context.</p>

Co-Shaping Smart Cities

This paper studies participation divides on civic crowdsourcing platforms in a smart city context, hybrid applications of distributed urban innovation management, and new modes of digital citizenship, often applied to co-shape future urban environments. However, the emergence of new participatory instruments also brings new digital inequalities, as their adoption is not distributed equally. Hence, from an explicitly interdisciplinary perspective, this article explores the role of civic engagement, digital inequalities, and opinion leadership in understanding differences in participatory behavior on such platforms. Using a regression model (N = 178), this study shows that participation differences on civic crowdsourcing platforms are explained by opinion leadership and political engagement, but not by community engagement, traditional digital inequalities. This reveals that such platforms are used most by those who were already participating and have high levels of expertise, which sheds a light on the potential empowerment of such platforms and its democratic implications.

How Local Policy Priorities Set the Smart City Agenda

The smart city concept has emerged as a key subject pursued by local governments. Yet, it is not clear how policymakers narrow down the topics to focus on with respect to their smart city agenda. As a result, the aim of this paper is to propose a theoretical contribution that explains how local governments define their smart city policy agenda. It is suggested that the agenda is influenced by policy priorities at the local level from other urban domains. To support this notion, policy studies literature is used to show that three streams of problems, policy, and politics, when aligned, set the policy agenda. The smart city agenda will be formed from key ideas existing at the local political level, such as policy priorities, that have now been matched with solutions framed in the smart city context, all underpinned by a favourable political environment. In addition, from smart city policy related documents, a topic modelling analysis illustrates a set of topics that are associated to the smart city policy agenda in two cities, London and Melbourne. This shows how some topics on the smart city agenda can be likened to issues that are the primary topic of another policy domain.

Smart city dynamics and multi-level management accounting: unfolding a case of sustainable enterprise resource planning

PurposeThis study aims to explore the complex, multi-level institutional dynamics of smart city reforms and projects and their potential sustainability pressures on the implementation of a management accounting system in an Egyptian state-owned enterprise (SOE), which has a politically sensitive institutional character.Design/methodology/approachThis study adds to institutional management accounting research using a multi-level perspective of institutional dynamics in the smart city context. Data were collected from an interpretive case study of an Egyptian SOE that was under socio-political sustainability pressures to implement a smart electricity network project in New Minya city.FindingsSmart city projects have formed social and political sustainability pressures, which introduced the enterprise resource planning (ERP) network as a new management accounting system. A new (complex and multi-level) management accounting system was invented to reinvent the sustainable city as an “accounting city” (which appeared rhetorically as a “smart city”). “Smart” being the visibility and measurability of the sustainability performance of the collective body, which calls the city and its connectivity to different institutional levels brought out in a city network project for the ERP-enabled electricity distribution.Research limitations/implicationsThis study examines a single case study from a single smart city and identifies the accounting community’s need for multiple and comparative case studies to further analyse the potential impact of smart city reforms and projects on the sustainable implementation of management accounting systems.Practical implicationsCity policymakers and managers may benefit from the practical findings of this interpretive field-based case study in planning, implementing and monitoring smart city projects and objectives.Social implicationsIndividual and collective well-being may be enhanced through new management accounting forms of multi-level local governance and increased political, field and organisational sustainability.Originality/valueThis study provides important insights into the sustainability dynamics of management accounting in achieving smart city reforms. The achievement of sustainability management accounting systems has connected to multiple ERP roles at different institutional levels, which resulted in accommodating the socio-political objectives of smart city projects.