City Resource Management Research Articles

Toward Competent City Management using Multi-agent System (MAS)

multi-agent system plays a crucial role in many aspects of life. This refers to its ability to provide scalable and flexible solutions to complex problems. One of these problems is the management of resources in different cities around the world. In this study, we have used the multi-agent system concepts to build competent city resources management. Because of the time and software complexity that arises from implementing the whole system, we chose to implement one city entity, the energy entity. Petri net is used to model the system mathematically. At the same time, we used CPN tools software to simulate the system behaviour in real life. The mathematical model and simulation results proved that the designed energy MAS would achieve its goals when applied in real life. In the future, we intend to complete the construction of the whole system for better resource management of all entities in the city

Water Supply Chain Resource Management in Cities Using Data Mining Techniques

This paper presents a comparative research study between a number of data mining techniques, knowledge discovery tools, data analysis and software packages to be used in a Decision Support System (DSS) for Smart water supply chain resources management. The case study deals with the evaluation and comparative research of water quality of city water supply within New Delhi city area. In the case of New-Delhi water supply alternative actions for improving of water supply and quality are defined for efficient supply in distributed area. The real time water quality monitor uses given standards by Water Quality Index (WQI) and Statistical analysis done on it suggests the shortest path between supply station and local area distribution Centre by used WEKA mining tool (decision tree) and OLAP. The results show that the city water isn't supplied efficiently in the city and not within the standard quality criteria of (WHO) standards and Indian standards. Leanings and research challenges observed during this comparative study have also been enumerated.

Financial Feasibility Analysis of Residential Rainwater Harvesting in Maringá, Brazil

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems are key solutions to improve water resource management in cities, and financial feasibility is essential for their diffusion. Moreover, studies about rainwater often adopt diverse design approaches, leading to incompatible results for direct comparison. This study introduces a categorised item-by-item outlay procedure and evaluates indirect (gravity) and direct (pressuriser) rainwater distribution schemes. Computer simulations were used to design 54 generic RWH system scenarios in Maringá based on a range of design variables. For each scenario, a monthly cost–benefit balance was built, and discounted payback, net present value, and internal rate of return were obtained. Similar outlays were obtained for direct and indirect rainwater distribution schemes (∆ = BRL 21.81) with an average of BRL 13,484.87 among all scenarios. Average operational costs were estimated at BRL 1.31/month.m3 of rainwater demand. On average, paybacks of 14.7 years and internal rates of return of 0.99% per month were obtained among feasible scenarios. Like in other studies, financial feasibility indicators presented significant correlations (0.88 ≤ R2 ≤ 0.94) with rainwater demand. The initial outlay distribution proposed herein provides an objective reference for result comparison among similar studies. Similar results for both rainwater distribution schemes point towards investigating alternative technical solutions for RWH systems.

TRANSFORMATIONS OF CITIES – REGIONAL CENTERS OF THE WESTERN REGION OF UKRAINE IN THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD

Characterization and analysis of structural-parametric transformations in cities - regional centers of the Western region are carried out. Assumptions are made on the basis of observations that changes lead to the deterioration of socio-ecological and economic parameters and architectural and aesthetic characteristics of cities. Comparison of transformations in selected cities - regional centers of the region indicates the phenomenon of fluctuation as an accidental (unreasonable) deviation of a quantity (process or phenomenon) from the average value in individual cities. The large number of different documents of this nature, aimed at different purposes, emphasizes the lack of a unified strategy for urban development. The inconsistency of documents of socio-economic and town-planning character, lack of an effective document of management of town-planning processes is highlighted. Management "in manual mode" causes unsystematic changes, the destruction of the basic principles of urban development, causes irreparable urban planning errors in their development. Assessment of transformations in post-Soviet cities reveals problems, conflicts and inconsistencies: lack of coordinated policies within newly created communities; territorial; ecological; exacerbation of transport problems; destruction of industry and economic structure; social; preservation of historical parts; aesthetic and spatial; engineering and technical; city resource management and uncontrolled processes.
 Analysis and evaluation of processes, problems and structural-parametric transformations in the urban space should be the basis of a new methodological approach to substantiation of strategic decisions and updating urban development documents.There are requirements for urban planning documentation: the organization and development of cities as a system should be focused on increasing the efficiency of time, material resources and human potential; the development of cities on the basis of knowledge of problems and ways to solve them, including world experience, should be associated primarily with the disclosure of their spatial uniqueness. Generalization of the results of analysis and evaluation of structural and parametric transformations in cities indicates the growth of disorder in urban life and the growth of its dynamism, there are spaces of different attractiveness in functional, social and aesthetic terms.

Towards fossil free cities – Emission assessment of food and resources consumption with the FEWprint carbon accounting platform

Current urbanization rates concentrate the ever growing demand for food, energy and water (FEW) resources particularly in cities, making them one of the main drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. The FEW nexus integrative approach offers a potential framework for sustainable resource management in cities. However, existing nexus evaluation tools are limited in application and often inadequate. This is primarily due to the FEW nexus intricacy, the tools’ operational complexity and/or the need to input comprehensive data that is often unavailable to users. Having outlined these current gaps, this paper introduces the FEWprint, an integrated carbon accounting platform that provides an accessible process for FEW nexus-based evaluations of urban areas. This spreadsheet-based framework is employed to calculate a consumption-based footprint derived from food consumption, thermal/electrical energy use, car fuel demand, water management, and domestic waste processing. A comparative assessment between six different communities reveals significant differences in total annual emissions. The food sector impact shows emissions ranging between 993Kg/cap∗yr and 1366Kg/cap∗yr in Amsterdam and Tokyo respectively, but is also the least deviating from all considered resource sectors. This holistic carbon footprint and considered food inventory will serve as a baseline for future integrated urban farming strategies and urban design proposals to be tested.

CONCEPT AND EVALUATION OF AN URBAN PLATFORM FOR INTERACTIVE VISUAL ANALYTICS

Abstract. Urban platforms are becoming a vital role player in city resources management for achieving the right balance between social and economic services and their impact on the environment. More and more cities are starting to benefit from an urban platform to state the city conditions and re-coin the shape of life depending on data gathered from different city systems. However, urban platforms need further support of data analytics in respect of reaching a smart city platform helping city planners with better decision making. Besides, the majority of operational urban platforms consider 2D data only, missing out on the possible information that could be obtained from 3D city models. This work proposes a concept for an urban platform that supports data manipulation and visualization plus interactive analytic functionalities. As a prototype, an urban platform is implemented for integrating and processing 3D city models and 2D traffic data to derive air pollutants emission rates with analytic visualization, leading urban planning to concentrate on the most affected areas. In addition, interactive features are implemented, including filtering, querying, and classifying data to support the analytic visualization in the developed urban platform.

TraCard: A Tool for Smart City Resource Management Based on Novel Framework Algorithm

Background: Fuel is the most important source of energy essential for humanity. It plays a vital role in the economy of a country. Dependency on non-renewable resources like petroleum brings about manipulation of the oil market and an increase in the price of these resources. Excessive use of non-renewable resources leads to global warming. These resources exist in a finite quantity in nature, which makes renewable resources appealing. Objective: Petroleum being a non-renewable energy mode requires monitoring and dynamic pricing based upon the consumption to reduce excessive usage. This dynamic price control on the basis of consumption developed upon the rules of Novel algorithm for resource allocation in the system will orient the end user to move towards developing alternate resources for power generation in the field of renewable energy like wind, hydro, solar, etc. This orientation is one of the key steps for developing a smart city with efficient resource allocation as the key factor of development. Methods: In order to manage resources efficiently, the following processes are incorporated. ➢ Provide End-user a unique ID card (Named as Tra-Card). ➢ Develop data of usage (Fuel, Health Resources, and Supply Chain Management) for initial days. ➢ Automated Management of Resources using Novel Framework Algorithm with fuzzy based stable marriage algorithm). ➢ Develop Customer Management Policy as per the criterion set by governments. ➢ Generate Data and rules for use at individual points of work. Result: The process will help the government make efficient policies and produce real time deliverables over complete control and handling of fuel management; the most important of human life need. This will also allow government’s to provide a solution for end to end charging by making fuel an item of luxury and taxing the people who use it as a luxury product. Discussion: Fuel being primary requisite for human survival needs strict monitoring for irregular usage and laundering. As, the fuel has become an item of luxury for few and item for survival of few “it must be taxed as per the usage” of end-user. The Data is experimental and developed using a multiplication factor α which is multiplied to the base fuel price once it crosses a certain range of Kilometer travelled by the user with his car. Conclusion: The model proposed in the paper captures the necessity of development of an efficient method that considers the finiteness of fossil fuels by monitoring the distribution of fuel and its consumption. The purpose of this project is to save energy with aim of AI Engine managed logistics and goal of creating Energy-Efficient survival of the human species.

Real Time Resource Scheduling Framework for Smart City

Smart City plays a vital role in social development. Real time scheduling of different tangible and intangible resource in distributed environment in smart is challenging problem. The different disaster management tasks smart city applications such as floods, earthquake, pandemic, fire, disaster relief, and control of hazardous area, major accidents, control of terrorism and other attacks require real time emergency resources scheduling. The existing techniques uses for smart city resource management are suffering from low resource utilization and high response time, migration and preemption overhead. This work paper presents cluster based real time resource scheduling framework for emergency situation in smart city. The edge computing resources are group into cluster. The proposed framework increases resources utilization and reduces response time, migration, preemption overheads. The emergency tasks are scheduled to these computing cluster are allow to migrate within the cluster to ensure to reduce migration, switching overhead, response time and increase resource utilization and success rate.

Mitigating service-oriented attacks using context-based trust for smart cities in IoT networks

Abstract Smart City technology is an attempt to improve the quality of life of its citizens by providing promising smart solutions for multiple applications. These applications include healthcare monitoring, resource utilization, city resource management, and various public services. Internet of Things (IoT) enables smart city applications to collect data from various sensors and process it for providing numerous smart services to the end-users with improved performance. The diverse nature of IoT network requires the use of multiple types of sensors which produce a huge amount of data. This data is highly vulnerable to multiple service-oriented attacks; therefore, it must be protected during the communication of IoT nodes. This research work has focused on the identification and detection of malicious nodes causing service-oriented attacks in smart city applications and networks. The direct experience of communicating nodes and recommendations from neighboring nodes are collected to formulate a total trust score. The adaptive weights assigned to direct observations and indirect recommendations ensure the effectiveness of the Context-Based Trust Evaluation System Model (CTES) in detecting On–Off attacks. Moreover, context similarity measure calculations filter out those bad nodes which are posing a Sybil Attack. The proposed CTES has also been simulated on Contiki Cooja. The results also validate the effectiveness of CTES in detecting the bad behavior of malicious nodes.

On the use of random graphs in analysing resource utilization in urban systems.

Urban resource models increasingly rely on implicit network formulations. Resource consumption behaviours documented in the existing empirical studies are ultimately by-products of the network abstractions underlying these models. Here, we present an analytical formulation and examination of a generic demand-driven network model that accounts for the effectiveness of resource utilization and its implications for policy levers in addressing resource management in cities. We establish simple limiting boundaries to systems' resource effectiveness. These limits are found not to be a function of system size and to be simply determined by the system's average ability to maintain resource quality through its transformation processes. We also show that resource utilization in itself does not enjoy considerable size efficiencies with larger and more diverse systems only offering increased chances of finding matching demand and supply between existing sectors in the system.

Urban metabolism planning and designing approaches between quantitative analysis and urban landscape

IntroductionNowadays, urban metabolism (UM) is believed to provide new insights for more sustainable resource management in cities and their hinterlands. UM studies, however, focalize chiefly on quantitative resource input and output (e.g. energy, materials) and tend to neglect the element of space and the qualitative characteristics of the urban landscape. This paper explores the use of UM as a basis for planning and design, focusing on the design process and on landscape configuration, in an attempt to bridge the gap between such an approach and the perceptions of urban inhabitants.Case descriptionTwo case studies on the metropolitan scale based on UM quantification which aim to develop projects that can improve urban sustainability are analyzed: the International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam and the Amsterdam Urban Pulse project. Subsequently, De Ceuvel is explored, an experimental neighborhood in Amsterdam that deployed the UM approach to develop a participatory design and implementation process.Discussion and EvaluationThe method consists in a case study analysis centered on field work, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews with the designers involved, while the inhabitants’ points of view are also polled on the neighborhood scale.ConclusionsThe key results highlight how the UM approach can be integrated with spatial design in two different ways, according to the scales implicated. On the metropolitan scale, UM provides a means of identifying key locations and proposing interventions that can improve a city’s global metabolism. On the scale of the neighborhood, however, the UM approach aims to close the energy and material cycles on the design plot, though without necessarily connecting the neighborhood to the city network.

Heterogeneous Crowd-Sourced Data Analytics

Advances in computing, communication, storage, and sensing technologies have reshaped the lives of people by changing the way they live, work, interact with their environments, and even socialize. Modern information systems collect valuable information about every aspect of our lives. Such data is becoming increasingly voluminous and readily available. Data is heterogeneous, contributed by the crowd of people, coming from different sources and with diverse formats. Broadly, such data is generated mainly from three sources: Internet and Web applications, sensor networks, and mobile/wearable devices. The scale and richness of the multimodal, mixed data sources present us with an opportunity to compile the data into a comprehensive picture of individuals’ daily life facets, transform our understanding of our lives, organizations and societies, and enable completely innovative urban services, including public people and freight transportation, public safety, city resource management, environment monitoring, and social interaction assistance. However, raw data is heterogeneous, redundant, fragmented, and quality-variant, which prevents their direct use for analysis, management, forecasting and planning. Consequently, emerging data analytics targeted to their sessions, including data co-mining, data fusion, data selection, need to be studied and applied more thoroughly.

A Computational Architecture Based on RFID Sensors for Traceability in Smart Cities.

Information Technology and Communications (ICT) is presented as the main element in order to achieve more efficient and sustainable city resource management, while making sure that the needs of the citizens to improve their quality of life are satisfied. A key element will be the creation of new systems that allow the acquisition of context information, automatically and transparently, in order to provide it to decision support systems. In this paper, we present a novel distributed system for obtaining, representing and providing the flow and movement of people in densely populated geographical areas. In order to accomplish these tasks, we propose the design of a smart sensor network based on RFID communication technologies, reliability patterns and integration techniques. Contrary to other proposals, this system represents a comprehensive solution that permits the acquisition of user information in a transparent and reliable way in a non-controlled and heterogeneous environment. This knowledge will be useful in moving towards the design of smart cities in which decision support on transport strategies, business evaluation or initiatives in the tourism sector will be supported by real relevant information. As a final result, a case study will be presented which will allow the validation of the proposal.

KNX Building Automations Interaction with City Resources Management System

Many buildings have been equipped with Building Automation Systems for resources consumption management. The next step is interconnecting those buildings in a City Resource Management System with the power plants, gas plants, water treatment plants, waste water plants and all the other community plants. This paper proposes a solution by avoiding building automation security leaks based on KNX technology and routing servers.

Closing the loop - Strategies for Nutrient and Resource Management in Cities of the Future

Closing the loop - Strategies for Nutrient and Resource Management in Cities of the Future

Interfacing City Resources Management System with SIMATIC WinCC

This paper describes the use of the SIMATIC WinCC software for interfacing City Resources Management System by using a network implemented with high performance industrial programmable logic controllers. This system assure all the requirements of operating the energy resources in a city with the industrial precision and offer to the building occupants an interface with the capability of been accessible from every place of the building. The communication between programmable logic controllers and servers, WinCC use the Industrial Ethernet Protocol, fact that make the monitoring and control of the building accessible from distance clients. Also this type of communication interface permits future expansions and interconnections between other buildings for energy exchanges and resources management.

Why Is Non-revenue Water So High in So Many Cities?

The efficient management of water resources is a growing necessity. Paradoxically, although people are aware of this need, non-revenue water is excessive in many cities in the world. Non-revenue water data indicate that there is much room for improvement in water resource management in cities and they also suggest a lack of motivation to solve the problem in the short-term. This paper investigates the reasons why non-revenue water is so high in many cities around the world. The lack of incentives for management units, the defence of private interests due to corruption, the lack of awareness of citizens-users of the water service and the lack of political willingness are the main causes.

Complexity of legacy city resource management and value modeling of interagency response

For most cities, it is very challenging to both collect information from throughout a city, irrespective of agency or city function, and integrate this information into a broad decision-support environment. For example, this is particularly challenging for mature cities of the size and complexity of New York City, Tokyo, and London and for their managing agencies. Resource management for a city spans multiple domains including water and sanitation, buildings, transportation, energy, security, citizen services, and regional development. Implementing processes, policies, or interoperability features across multiple domains in a legacy city, as defined in this paper, requires significant coordination and permission among the agency players. Here, we propose a novel smarter-city maturity model that depicts the cross-domain and agency-to-agency interactions in response to an event (such as a water-main break). We also propose an enabling system architecture and multidomain-aware command portal that provide a detailed plan to address and optimize the management of resources for complex events. Finally, we propose a value-modeling method for quantifying the estimated cost of alternative scenarios and of selecting the best response to an event. To illustrate the approach, an example is given for a rainfall event.

Towards sustainable urban water resource management: a case study in Tianjin, China

AbstractSustainable water resource management has become a critical issue for the development of cities that suffer scarce water resources. Tianjin City, located in China's Huaihe basin, one of the most polluted and water‐scarce river basins in the country, is a typical example in which water is posing a major constraint to the development. This paper examines the current status of the use of water resources, and the current practices and policy measures taken for water resource management in Tianjin, with a view to drawing lessons through an evaluation of these measures. The study illustrates the role of cities and their complex interaction with their peripheries for the allocation of scarce water resources, and it suggests that a systems approach should be adopted in order to analyse and understand the complexity of the entire picture. Based on this review and evaluation of Tianjin's experience, the authors propose a framework for sustainable water resource management in cities, emphasizing the importance of taking full consideration of resource/environmental capacity and an integrated systems approach for problem solving. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment