Real Smart City Research Articles

Smart Cities: A Survey on Data Management, Security, and Enabling Technologies

Integrating the various embedded devices and systems in our environment enables an Internet of Things (IoT) for a smart city. The IoT will generate tremendous amount of data that can be leveraged for safety, efficiency, and infotainment applications and services for city residents. The management of this voluminous data through its lifecycle is fundamental to the realization of smart cities. Therefore, in contrast to existing surveys on smart cities we provide a data-centric perspective, describing the fundamental data management techniques employed to ensure consistency, interoperability, granularity, and reusability of the data generated by the underlying IoT for smart cities. Essentially, the data lifecycle in a smart city is dependent on tightly coupled data management with cross-cutting layers of data security and privacy, and supporting infrastructure. Therefore, we further identify techniques employed for data security and privacy, and discuss the networking and computing technologies that enable smart cities. We highlight the achievements in realizing various aspects of smart cities, present the lessons learned, and identify limitations and research challenges.

Internet-of-Things-Based Smart Cities: Recent Advances and Challenges

The Internet of Things is a novel cutting edge technology that proffers to connect a plethora of digital devices endowed with several sensing, actuation, and computing capabilities with the Internet, thus offering manifold new services in the context of a smart city. The appealing IoT services and big data analytics are enabling smart city initiatives all over the world. These services are transforming cities by improving infrastructure and transportation systems, reducing traffic congestion, providing waste management, and improving the quality of human life. In this article, we devise a taxonomy to best bring forth a generic overview of the IoT paradigm for smart cities, integrated ICT, network types, possible opportunities and major requirements. Moreover, an overview of the up-to-date efforts from standard bodies is presented. Later, we give an overview of existing open source IoT platforms for realizing smart city applications followed by several exemplary case studies. In addition, we summarize the latest synergies and initiatives worldwide taken to promote IoT in the context of smart cities. Finally, we highlight several challenges in order to give future research directions.

Cloud-Enhanced Robotic System for Smart City Crowd Control

Cloud robotics in smart cities is an emerging paradigm that enables autonomous robotic agents to communicate and collaborate with a cloud computing infrastructure. It complements the Internet of Things (IoT) by creating an expanded network where robots offload data-intensive computation to the ubiquitous cloud to ensure quality of service (QoS). However, offloading for robots is significantly complex due to their unique characteristics of mobility, skill-learning, data collection, and decision-making capabilities. In this paper, a generic cloud robotics framework is proposed to realize smart city vision while taking into consideration its various complexities. Specifically, we present an integrated framework for a crowd control system where cloud-enhanced robots are deployed to perform necessary tasks. The task offloading is formulated as a constrained optimization problem capable of handling any task flow that can be characterized by a Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG). We consider two scenarios of minimizing energy and time, respectively, and develop a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach to identify the optimal task offloading decisions. The performance comparison with two benchmarks shows that our GA scheme achieves desired energy and time performance. We also show the adaptability of our algorithm by varying the values for bandwidth and movement. The results suggest their impact on offloading. Finally, we present a multi-task flow optimal path sequence problem that highlights how the robot can plan its task completion via movements that expend the minimum energy. This integrates path planning with offloading for robotics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to evaluate cloud-based task offloading for a smart city crowd control system.

Pengembangan e-Government di Pemerintahan Daerah dalam Rangka Mewujudkan Smart City (Studi di Pemerintah Daerah Kota Malang)

This study aims to analyze the development of electronic government which is increasingly prevalent in local governance in order to realize smart city. Smart city is a manifestation of a city that provide excellent public services for the community, and create openness to the public by relying on the power of ICT. The concept of smart city has six indicators, namely smart governance, smart economy, smart live, smart living, smart people, and smart mobility. The object of this research is the development of electronic government in the Local Government of Malang City.

Unveiling smart city implementation challenges: The case of Ghent

The 'smart city' label is internationally used by cities, researchers and technology providers with different meanings. As a popular concept it is widely used by city administrators and politicians to promote their efforts to prepare their cities for the future. There are decent definitions for what a smart city is, but it is much harder to find a trustworthy description of what it takes to become a smart city and how a city administration is impacted by that effort. This paper sets out to investigate how a city, aspiring to become a 'smart city', can manage its internal organization to realize that ambition. Specifically, it describes the case of the City of Ghent, Belgium, and the key challenges it has been facing in its ongoing efforts to be a smart city. Based on in depth interviews with city representatives six key challenges for smart city realization were identified and tested with a panel of representatives from five European cities that are in the process of becoming a smart city. The study contributes to a more professional pursuit of the smart city concept and elaborates the academic body of knowledge on smart city development, as an instance of IT-enabled transformation in public services.

Geo-Social Distance-Based Data Dissemination for Socially Aware Networking

The Internet of Things (IoT), which could connect everything in the world, is promising for the realization of smart cities. However, vehicles connected in the IoT challenges data collection and transmission. Socially aware networking is an emerging paradigm for high-efficiency data dissemination. Existing protocols take advantage of mobile nodes’ social characteristics (e.g., user interest) to improve dissemination performance. However, they have not exploited enough of what relations are valuable between user interests and how these relations can affect the dissemination of social IoTs. This paper takes advantage of interest inclusion and intersection to solve the dissemination problem in a conference scenario. By constructing the structure of the Interest Tree to solely represent the relations of interest inclusion and interest intersection, we integrate vehicles’ social factors into their geographical information, and introduce the concept of geo-social distance (GSD) as the basis of the proposed strategy. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our presented method by comparing with two other existing protocols in terms of four objective metrics, which include delivery ratio, overhead, hop-count, and average latency.

Applied Graph Theory to Real Smart City Logistic Problems

In a recent project in the Region of North Jutland in Denmark, an empirical study of the mobile broadband conditions was carried out by installing measurement equipment on two cars driving around everywhere in the Region. This paper provides an overview of the system designed for carrying out the project, focusing on the solution for the logistics problem presenting well-defined challenges. We present a feasible solution for the non-trivial problem of planning routes, guaranteeing 100% coverage of the 19.000km of roads in the Region and having hard computational time constrains. The solution is a combination of applied graph theory and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), framed into a realistic context to be able to carry out the project. One of the future foreseen application fields of cellular networks is to provide efficient network connectivity to cyber physical systems for the required data transactions between the devices and data processing units. Hence, the results derived from similar measurement projects, among many others, is the evaluation of whether the broadband infrastructure is currently ready for the deployment of Smart City outdoor cyber physical systems and implicitly, which steps should be taken towards the deployment of these systems.

A Smart City System Architecture based on City-level Data Exchange Platform

With the development of information technology and urban planning, there is a higher demand for the life quality of city people. In order to meet the demand for urban facilitation and intelligence, the research on smart city system has been widely discussed in recent years. However, existing researches mostly stay at the theoretical exploration stage, so a feasible and effective framework of smart city system which is suitable for Chinese national conditions is urgently demanded. In this paper, an implementation framework of smart city system is proposed based on city-level data exchange platform. To start with, three subsystems of smart city system are proposed and described, namely citizen-card system, intelligent transportation system, and urban regional health system. The citizen-card system is the foundation to realize smart city system, the intelligent transportation system is the core part of smart city system, and the urban regional health system is the crucial part of smart city system. Then a city-level data exchange platform and its algorithms are proposed, and the data exchange algorithms are also analyzed based on subscription and publishing mechanism. Finally, the proposed system architecture has been implemented and applied to Zhenjiang city, which is a city in Jiangsu province, China. The application performance of the proposed system architecture is also analyzed and discussed. The experimental results show that the proposed framework of smart city system is feasible and effective.

EVE: Fully Electric Vehicle Traffic Simulator for Technological Validation and Decision Making

This paper introduces a novel Fully Electric Vehicle Traffic Simulator that enables the technological validation and support to decision making procedures when deploying Fully Electric Vehicle Infrastructures and Efficient Cooperative route planning in Smart Cities context. One of the main objectives of Smart Cities platforms and infrastructures is increasing energy efficiency and reduce carbon emission, above all in Logistics and Transportation, and the wide adoption of Fully Electric Vehicles and associated energy efficient route planning and charging paradigms is crucial to achieve these objectives. At the same time, there is the need of tools that can support the real deployment and implementation of these services into real Smart Cities scenarios: this is motivated by the fact that sophisticated traffic simulation tools that are able to simulate the impact of Fully Electric Vehicles into real scenarios are not yet available in the market and the tool that we propose in this paper has the objective of covering this technological gap. The results that we present in this paper are the outcomes of research activities performed in the FP7 project EcoGem and of the early activities of the ACCUS and EMERALD projects.

From intelligent to smart cities

Taking Hollands' previous statement on the transition from intelligent to smart cities as its point of departure (‘Will the real smart city stand up?’ City 12(3), 302–320), this article reflects upon the anxieties currently surrounding such developments. In particular, it considers the suggestion that such developments have more to do with cities meeting the corporate needs of marketing campaigns than the social intelligence required for them to be smart. Focusing on the social intelligence of such developments, this article captures the information-rich and highly communicative qualities of the transition. In particular, it examines the methodological issues that smart communities pose cities and the critically insightful role which the networks of innovation and creative partnerships set up to embed such intelligence play in the learning, knowledge transfer and capacity-building exercises servicing this community-led transition to smart cities. This, the article suggests, is what existing representations of smart cities miss. This article offers a critically insightful account of the transition.

From intelligent to smart cities

Drawing upon the smart experiences of ‘world class’ cities in N. America, Canada and Europe, this special issue draws together five papers from leading international experts on the transition from intelligent to smart cities. Together they do what Hollands (‘Will the real smart city stand up?’ City 12(3), 302–320) has recently asked of smart cities and provide the definitional components, critical insights and institutional means by which to get beyond the all-too-often self-congratulatory tone cities across the world strike when claiming to be smart.

Will the real smart city please stand up?

Debates about the future of urban development in many Western countries have been increasingly influenced by discussions of smart cities. Yet despite numerous examples of this ‘urban labelling’ phenomenon, we know surprisingly little about so‐called smart cities, particularly in terms of what the label ideologically reveals as well as hides. Due to its lack of definitional precision, not to mention an underlying self‐congratulatory tendency, the main thrust of this article is to provide a preliminary critical polemic against some of the more rhetorical aspects of smart cities. The primary focus is on the labelling process adopted by some designated smart cities, with a view to problematizing a range of elements that supposedly characterize this new urban form, as well as question some of the underlying assumptions/contradictions hidden within the concept. To aid this critique, the article explores to what extent labelled smart cities can be understood as a high‐tech variation of the ‘entrepreneurial city’, as well as speculates on some general principles which would make them more progressive and inclusive.