Smart City Paradigm Research Articles

Learning from the Informality. Using GIS Tools to Analyze the Structure of Autopoietic Urban Systems in the “Smart Perspective”

This paper explores the link between the current vision of the “smart city” and the notion of urban autopoiesis understood as self-organized/managed urban systems. It seeks to highlight how the use of GIS analysis, applied to the study of informal settlements, can provide useful information to understand the smart city paradigm. The paper argues the key idea that a smart city should not be seen only as a high-tech urban environment because the transition to smartness will need major changes in its inner structure. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative GIS analysis methods, this study examines the case of the BaSECo Compound, one of the densest informal settlements in Metro Manila (Philippines), with the aim of both generating a comprehensive morphological analysis of this dynamic urban area as well as contributing to the configurational theory of the smart city. The results suggest that the analysis of autopoietic urban systems could expand our understanding of how the structure of the city could evolve to accommodate the needs of its citizens and creating more resilient and inclusive communities.

Preface - smart city and its development

Gusti Ayu Made Suartika Master Program in Architecture - Planning and Development, Udayana University, Denpasar Campus, 80232, Bali-Indonesia.Email: ayusuartika@unud.ac.idCities are contingent on the historical forces that have shaped their development. Among these are colonization, industrialization, technology, and information. Today the Smart City has emerged as one possible answer to the emergent problems of urbanization in the 21st century. It joins a multitude of concepts and ideas that address daily life in the post-industrial world of informational capitalism – the sustainable city, the creative city, the green city, and the liveable city – and the Smart City that now seems to resonate with urban administrations and urban designers worldwide. The question is what is it?Cities are merely reflections of the political economy of their own history. They are acts of imagination that combine use values and exchange values, political elites and poverty, fixed and mobile capital, multi-modal transport systems, and a chessboard of land uses that reflect urban politics, investment strategies, densities and class distinctions, histories, and expectations. There is no ‘one size fits all’, and cities worldwide contain a vast range of differences. On the basis of capitalist urbanization, most cities grow by consuming themselves – by destroying the old to build the new in an effort to reduce crime, pollution, waste disposal, amenity, security and to increase the rate of commodity circulation to generate wealth.All historical periods have advanced on three fronts; first, the stockpiling of capital; second, the progression of ideologies that inform development and third, technological advancement. The smart city paradigm falls into the latter category. It is firmly committed to informational technology and informational capital to fuel progress. Given this commitment, the problem is that human interests may be subsumed to technological ‘efficiency’, forgetting that what is human and what is technical, are not homologous. A central problem, therefore, is how to temper the use of technology with democratic politics and the voice of the people.Today’s social system has been described as ‘the Network Society’ - the product of informational capitalism. This has entailed massive shifts in power, identity and traditional concepts of place as the virtual world of the space of flows reconfigures the material world in a diversity of forms. In the process, many cities thrive, while others sink in a sea of decay. Development is not democratic, and those cities that become hard-wired fastest also have the economic advantage as well, attracting a new ‘creative class’ of intellectuals, artists, business people, and professionals who then support a plethora of new urban spaces. As a resolution to the above problems, the smart city is therefore not merely a neutral technological fix. It is infused with problems that need to be interrogated if a more humane as opposed to a more efficient environment is to emerge.As we might expect, the smart city is frequently lauded as a panacea for all ills. To test this idea, the third International Conference on Smart City Innovation (ICSCI)-2020 provided space for all forms of critique and debate in order to test the reality of the smart city in theory and practice, and as a viable strategy for future urbanization. In so doing, this conference was conducted to embrace the following four themes and extended topics:1. Energy & environment:(a) Sustainable energy storage system for urban built environment;(b) Urban energy system, security and sustainability2. Infrastructure:(a) Sustainable urban mobility(b) Sustainable urban water management(c) Sustainable regional development3. Information and communication technologies/ICT and mobility:(a) Extending urban healthcare services to rural areas(b) Internet of things/IoT4. Quality of life:(a) Urban housing infrastructure, policy & technology(b) Live-able urban environment(c) Urban healthcare servicesIn contrast to the previous two ICSCI gatherings, the conduct of the 2020 exposition was organized in conjunction with the 13th AUN/SEED-Net Regional Conference on Energy Engineering (RCEneE). This collaboration was completely executed in online mode using Webex. This rationale was decided in response to the ongoing development of the Covid-19 pandemic that started at the end of year 2019 and has had a devastating global impact. Despite regretfully being unable to proceed on the basis of face-to-face encounter, the conference was successfully delivered. It was engaging and well supported, and the Committee would like to express its sincere appreciation to all of those who made this event possible. Thank you.

Miniaturized Pervasive Sensors for Indoor Health Monitoring in Smart Cities

Sensors and electronics technologies are pivotal in several fields of science and engineering, especially in automation, industry and environment monitoring. Over the years, there have been continuous changes and advancements in design and miniaturization of sensors with the growth of their application areas. Challenges have arisen in the deployment, fabrication and calibration of modern sensors. Therefore, although the usage of sensors has greatly helped improving the quality of life, especially through their employment in many IoT (Internet of Things) applications, some threats and safety issues still remain unaddressed. In this paper, a brief review focusing on pervasive sensors used for health and indoor environment monitoring is given. Examples of technology advancements in air, water and radioactivity are discussed. This bird’s eye view suggests that solid-state pervasive sensors have become essential parts of all emerging applications related to monitoring of health and safety. Miniaturization, in combination with gamification approaches and machine learning techniques for processing large amounts of captured data, can successfully address and solve many issues of massive deployment. The development paradigm of Smart Cities should include both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

An IoT‐Based Network for Smart Urbanization

Internet of Things (IoT) is considered one of the world’s ruling technologies. Billions of IoT devices connected together through IoT forming smart cities. As the concept grows, it is very challenging to design an infrastructure that is capable of handling large number of devices and process data effectively in a smart city paradigm. This paper proposed a structure for smart cities. It is implemented using a lightweight easy to implement network design and a simpler data format for information exchange that is suitable for developing countries like Pakistan. Using MQTT as network protocol, different sensor nodes were deployed for collecting data from the environment. Environmental factors like temperature, moisture, humidity, and percentage of CO2 and methane gas were recorded and transferred to sink node for information sharing over the IoT cloud using an MQTT broker that can be accessed any time using Mosquitto client. The experiment results provide the performance analysis of the proposed network at different QoS levels for the MQTT protocol for IoT‐based smart cities. JSON structure is used to formulate the communication data structure for the proposed system.

Rediscovering Refugee Routes: On the Creation of Collective Memory Map Services

The route followed by a refugees’ group towards its final destination can be concerned in many cases as the main axe around which the collective memory of such a group of people is intertwined. Such a route enriches people memories with common experiences targeting places and interactions among refugees and locals. The route itself can be a very effective tool that will affect the collective memory of such people positively or negatively. A crucial point in the modern paradigm of smart cities is quality of life. To achieve quality of life for its citizens a smart city should establish ways to reduce alienation among the different groups that constitute city’s palimpsest. A way to achieve this goal is the knowledge of the different identities each citizens’ group have. Collective memory understanding of the different people groups is one of the basic vehicles towards this goal. In this paper, we attempt to give a first answer to such problems proposing and implementing specific services in the context of a crowdsourcing system for collective memory management using interactive maps. We demonstrate a basic usage scenario to show the strength of the implemented services, along with a first evaluation showing positive results.

Urban flow prediction with spatial–temporal neural ODEs

With the recent advances in deep learning, data-driven methods have shown compelling performance in various application domains enabling the Smart Cities paradigm. Leveraging spatial–temporal data from multiple sources for (citywide) traffic forecasting is a key to strengthen the smart city management in areas such as urban traffic control, abnormal event detection, etc. Existing approaches of traffic flow prediction mainly rely on the development of various deep neural networks –e.g., Convolutional Neural Networks such as ResNet are used for modeling spatial dependencies among different regions, whereas recurrent neural networks are increasingly implemented for temporal dynamics modeling. Despite their advantages, the existing approaches suffer from limitations of intensive computations, lack of capabilities to properly deal with missing values, and simplistic integration of heterogeneous data. In this paper, we propose a novel urban flow prediction framework by generalizing the hidden states of the model with continuous-time dynamics of the latent states using neural ordinary differential equations (ODE). Specifically, we introduce a discretize-then-optimize approach to improve and balance the prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. It not only guarantees the prediction error but also provides high flexibility for decision-makers. Furthermore, we investigate the factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that affect the city traffic volume and use separate neural networks to extract and disentangle the influencing factors, which avoids the brute-force data fusion in previous works. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, while requiring significantly less memory cost and fewer model parameters.

A Testbed for GNSS-Based Positioning and Navigation Technologies in Smart Cities: The HANSEL Project

In urban contexts, the increasing density of electronic devices equipped with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers and complementary positioning technologies is attracting research and development efforts devoted to an improvement of the quality of life towards the smart city paradigm. Vehicular and pedestrian positioning and navigation capabilities are among the major drivers for innovation in this process. Ultra-low-cost electronics such as smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors aim at providing accurate and reliable positioning solutions through a set of promising solutions. Among these, snapshot positioning allows to remotely perform the post-processing of GNSS signals in IoT sensor networks while Wi-Fi™ ranging and cooperative positioning provide auxiliary anchors of opportunity to enhance indoor/outdoor positioning capabilities. This paper presents an innovative platform to perform a centralised testing and assessment of such positioning and navigation technologies along with a set of results obtained in the context of the European project HANSEL, by relying on current network technologies and infrastructures (i.e., Wi-Fi™ and cellular connectivity).

Testing the Smart City Paradigm in Italian Mid-Sized Cities: An Empirical Analysis

ABSTRACT Urban management in the South of Europe is a very complex issue. The smart city model can offer an innovative response to this complexity, both by improving quality of life and by furthering sustainable development. Implementing an effective smart city model requires its inclusion in urban strategic planning in an integrated and comprehensive manner, sometimes backed by regional, national, and international support policies. Within this framework, the aim of this article is twofold. It intends to clarify the definition of the smart city model as it is applied in the Southern European context, and it aims to contribute to the development of the smart city as an effective model for urban management and to the assessment of its planning in mid-sized cities. This in-depth assessment will bring into focus some critical considerations involved in smart city planning initiatives and will offer useful recommendations for future policymakers.

IoT-Enabled Smart Sustainable Cities: Challenges and Approaches

The ongoing diffusion of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is opening new possibilities, and one of the most remarkable applications is associated with the smart city paradigm, which is continuously evolving. In general, it can be defined as the integration of IoT and Information Communication Technologies (ICT) into city management, with the aim of addressing the exponential growth of urbanization and population, thus significantly increasing people’s quality of life. The smart city paradigm is also strictly connected to sustainability aspects, taking into account, for example, the reduction of environmental impact of urban activities, the optimized management of energy resources, and the design of innovative services and solution for citizens. Abiding by this new paradigm, several cities started a process of strong innovation in different fields (such as mobility and transportation, industry, health, tourism, and education), thanks to significant investments provided by stakeholders and the European Commission (EC). In this paper, we analyze key aspects of an IoT infrastructure for smart cities, outlining the innovations implemented in the city of Parma (Emilia Romagna region, Italy) as a successful example. Special attention is dedicated to the theme of smart urban mobility.

A genetic algorithm for energy efficient fog layer resource management in context-aware smart cities

The development of novel Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based solutions becomes essential to meet the ever increasing rate of global urbanization in order to satiate the constraint in resources. The popular ‘smart city paradigm is characterized by ubiquitous cyber provisions for the monitoring and control of such city's critical infrastructures, encompassing healthcare, environment, transportation and utilities among others. In order to manage the numerous services keeping their Quality of Service (QoS) demands upright, it is imperative to employ context aware computing as well as fog computing simultaneously. This paper investigates the feasibility of energy minimization at the fog layer through intelligent sleep and wake-up cycles of the fog nodes which are context-aware. It proposes a virtual machine management approach for effectively allocating service requests with a minimal number of active fog nodes using a genetic algorithm (GA); and thereafter, a reinforcement learning (RL) approach is incorporated to optimize the period of fog nodes’ duty cycle. Simulations are carried out using MATLAB and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves energy consumption of the fog layer by approximately 11–21% when compared to existing context sharing based algorithms.

Development of Intelligent Car-Parking System

In this modern world, the paradigm of smart cities has gathered major popularity. Thanks to the evolution of microcontroller, the notion of smart city seems more convincing. This paper proposes an algorithm that helps users to find a free parking space for cars automatically. Microcontrollers and sensors have already made a huge impact on learning and predictive analysis. The widespread affirmation gave a new life to this open source hardware component which potentially became a big challenge to many industrial products and new interests in electronic system and prototyping.This paper deals with effective parking solution which involves the use of ultrasonic sensor, atmega series, wireless signal module, cloud server and decrease the time spent for searching parking spaces. IoT based new parking platform enable to connect, analyze and automate data gathered from devices and execute smart parking possible. The proposed system not only reduces manpower but also reduces traffic congestion, and facilitating secure parking system within a limited area.

On strategy for the development of multifunctional social infrastructure complexes in the ‘Smart City’ paradigm

Subject. The article describes the findings of the authors of fundamental strategic decisions on the formation of multifunctional urban complexes, using the housing demand and supply criterion. Objectives. We undertake a comprehensive study aimed at perfecting the methodology for evaluating the options for city infrastructure development at two stages, i.e. strategic, when general targets of feasible commissioning are determined, and current, when parameters of demand for facilities are taken into account. Methods. The study employs methods of expert survey, statistical data processing, predictive and investigative analysis. Results. We explored factors of creating amenities and comfort in residential construction areas, developed an algorithm to calculate the volume of new living space commissioning on the basis of evaluating demands in the Smart City paradigm. Conclusions. The study shows the cost increase depending on the built-up area, number of floors, and the balance between the type of capacity and the number of residents in the quarter (linear relationship).

Intelligence, security, and vehicular sensor networks in internet of things (IoT)-enabled smart-cities: An overview

Security in Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) is a critical subject that must be addressed in the emerging Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Users share confidential information that can be used against them by attackers. Popular attacks include Malwares and Spams, Black Holes, Wormholes, and Physical/Electronic Outages. Such VSN attacks can lead to loss of life due to road accidents and breach of privacy. In this paper, we overview the VSN concept in a vehicular IoT-based smart city paradigm, focusing on the security aspects. In addition, we discuss the design features of VSN, its robustness, and reliability. We also discuss relevant communication technologies and their security concerns. We highlight the main open research issues in literature and provide hints for overcoming them. This analysis concludes that VSNs play a key role in developing efficient ITS. Nevertheless, current VSNs security standards must be improved for a reliable, and safe transportation system.

Methods for multi-criteria evaluation of forming the clusters and quarters in the smart city paradigm given the development of dynamic workplaces

Subject. The article investigates environmental factors and their influence on the multi-criteria evaluation of the comfort of living in various city-forming systems, i.e social (employment), organizational (organization of transport, leisure, education, healthcare), technological (automation of living environment and services). Objectives. The purpose is to develop a methodology for multi-criteria evaluation of the formation of clusters and quarters in the smart city paradigm; to solve engineering problems in the owner-developer system, focusing on development of models and methods to increase the employment level, and taking into account the development of dynamic jobs. Methods. We employ methods of analysis and synthesis: the analysis of factors of comfort living in various urban structures, and the synthesis – in generalization of results at the stage of designing the environment. Results. The paper offers a methodology for multi-criteria evaluation of functional options for the composition of quarters and clusters, considering the factors of dynamic jobs development. It presents variants of architectural and planning solutions for cluster development of various types of city planning. Conclusions. The developed methodology can be useful for elaboration of plans for social development of territories.

Musical Smart City: Perspectives on Ubiquitous Sonification

Smart cities are urban areas with sensor networks that collect data used towards efficient management. As a source of ubiquitous data, smart city initiatives present opportunities to enhance inhabitants' urban awareness. However, making sense of smart city data is challenging and there is a gap between available data and end-user applications. Sonification emerges as a promising method for the interpretation of smart city data and the production of novel musical experiences. In this paper, we first present the smart city paradigm. We then cover the topics of ubiquitous and mobile music, followed by an overview of sonification research. Finally, we propose an approach entitled ubiquitous sonification and present the initial design of a speculative use case for musical smart city systems, leveraging user and urban data to inform behaviour.

BioSmartSense+: A bio-inspired probabilistic data collection framework for priority-based event reporting in IoT environments

Recent years have seen a widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT) in the implementation of smart city applications. A key enabler in the smart city paradigm is the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which facilitates automated real-time sensing, communication, and actuation, assisting in unmanned monitoring of physical phenomenon and supports intelligent decision making. Nevertheless, designing a smart and energy-efficient IoT network for sustainability and near-perfect device actuation is a major challenge. To address this, our preliminary work (Roy et al., 2019) proposed a gene regulatory network (GRN)-based distributed event sensing and data collection framework called bioSmartSense. It attempted to make sensing and reporting tasks energy-efficient through bio-inspired self-modulation of IoT device energy levels. In this paper we extend it, under the name bioSmartSense+, to conceive realistic sensing and reporting mechanisms by incorporating device heterogeneity, probabilistic sensing, and priority-based event reporting. For experimental study, we used both simulated and real data to evaluate energy and coverage-related performances. Experimental results establish the efficacy of our framework in terms of energy-efficiency and event reporting rate compared to a state-of-the-art data collection approach.

Blockchain and Fog Based Architecture for Internet of Everything in Smart Cities

Fog computing (FC) is used to reduce the energy consumption and latency for the heterogeneous communication approaches in the smart cities’ applications of the Internet of Everything (IoE). Fog computing nodes are connected through wired or wireless medium. The goal of smart city applications is to develop the transaction relationship of real-time response applications. There are various frameworks in real-world to support the IoE in smart-cities but they face the issues like security, platform Independence, multi-application assistance, and resource management. This article is motivated from the Blockchain and Fog computing technologies and presents a secured architecture Blockchain and Fog-based Architecture Network (BFAN) for IoE applications in the smart cities. The proposed architecture secures sensitive data with encryption, authentication, and Blockchain. It assists the System-developers and Architects to deploy the applications in smart city paradigm. The goal of the proposed architecture is to reduce the latency and energy, and ensure improved security features through Blockchain technology. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture performs better than the existing frameworks for smart-cities.

Improving communication precision of IoT through behavior-based learning in smart city environment

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emergent heterogeneous communication platform that provides ubiquitous access to resources and meets the user demands. Developing smart city paradigm employs this communication platform for providing services to the users and granting distributed resource sharing. Mitigating adversary device selection in this platform prevents irrelevant data exchange and eases information access and exchange. External and internal communication hindering factors needs to be addressed to sustain uninterrupted communication. To improve the precision in communication security, an observation-based security system is modeled in this manuscript. This security system observes the local and global behavioral change in IoT device communication. The local and global behavioral changes are defined using device attributes and behavior modeling. The device and service provider input observations are processed by a neural network-based learning scheme to identify errors in the resource access. The communicating users and IoT devices are secured by selecting reputed service providers and data sources to improve the distributed resource utilization in IoT based smart city. The performance of the proposed scheme balances between security and resource utilization requirements of the users by reducing response loss and non-reputed device selection.

Exploring the Essence of the Right to Data Protection and Smart Cities

This report has been written in the context of the SPECTRE project. SPECTRE stands for 'Smart city Privacy: Enhancing Collaborative Transparency in the Regulatory Ecosystem'. It is a four-year interdisciplinary research project funded by FWO (Flanders Research Foundation - Belgium). The main goal is to examine privacy and data protection challenges in the smart city from the perspective of law, communication studies and economics and to propose solutions to address the privacy/utility challenge that more and more cities are called to face. The report aims to provide an analysis of the ‘essence’ of the right to data protection and how it is challenged by the smart city paradigm that leaves individuals with limited opportunities for control over their personal data. The focus is on the fundamental rights component of data protection and Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights rather than the secondary legal framework regulating personal data processing in detail. Even though in the day-to-day legal practice secondary acts like the General Data Protection Regulation dominate the scene, we consider that at both a conceptual and pragmatic level, legal analyses of the scope, interests and values of the right to data protection and the conditions under which it can be limited are essential for the application and future shaping of data protection law. The report transposes the findings of the analysis in the smart city context to demonstrate the tensions between the right to data protection, centred around control and the need to counter power and information asymmetries, and the paradigm of smart city processing.

SMART ZERO CARBON CITY: KEY FACTORS TOWARDS SMART URBAN DECARBONIZATION

Fossil fuels-based human activity over time has generated unacceptable local levels of air pollution and GHG emissions. One of main implications of this activity is Climate Change, which unforeseen consequences are already impacting at local and global scales. This research is focused on defining an effective framework to shift that trend in the local level through the implementation of the Smart Zero Carbon City concept, which brings together the emerging Smart City paradigm and the 2030/2050 EU goals with the urgent need of decarbonizing our local environments. In this case, the study applies the Smart Zero Carbon City concept and implementation method into 5 EU cities, focusing on the case of Sonderborg municipality (DK) to extract the Key Factors towards Smart Urban Decarbonization, which are applicable to other cities facing this ambitious transition. Keywords: Decarbonization, Smart Zero Carbon City, Smart Cities, Energy Transition