Smart City Services Research Articles

Smart City Concept, Applications and Services

The purpose of this article is to summarize the current state of understanding the smart city concept and to present a proposed communication platform for the development of city services. The first part of the article is an introduction and definition of a smart city concept. This introduction gives an overview of various aspects - city services, smart infrastructure and facilities, using information and communication technologies, interconnection, feedback, and electronic and digital applications. The next part addresses individual challenges for the planning, development, and operation of cities. New solutions allow for use of different data on cities and meet the request for better city services. An overview of smart cities applications and services is given in the next section of the article. The deployment, implementation and approval of innovative internet based services and applications have to be made in order to permit facing the challenges of advanced cities. An overview of some aspects related to the technological solution of services is discussed in the summary section.

A framework for cloud-based context-aware information services for citizens in smart cities

In the context of smart cities, public participation and citizen science are key ingredients for informed and intelligent planning decisions and policy-making. However, citizens face a practical challenge in formulating coherent information sets from the large volumes of data available to them. These large data volumes materialise due to the increased utilisation of information and communication technologies in urban settings and local authorities’ reliance on such technologies to govern urban settlements efficiently. To encourage effective public participation in urban governance of smart cities, the public needs to be facilitated with the right contextual information about the characteristics and processes of their urban surroundings in order to contribute to the aspects of urban governance that affect them such as socio-economic activities, quality of life, citizens well-being etc. The cities on the other hand face challenges in terms of crowd sourcing with quality data collection and standardisation, services inter-operability, provisioning of computational and data storage infrastructure. In this paper, we highlight the issues that give rise to these multi-faceted challenges for citizens and public administrations of smart cities, identify the artefacts and stakeholders involved at both ends of the spectrum (data/service producers and consumers) and propose a conceptual framework to address these challenges. Based upon this conceptual framework, we present a Cloud-based architecture for context-aware citizen services for smart cities and discuss the components of the architecture through a common smart city scenario. A proof of concept implementation of the proposed architecture is also presented and evaluated. The results show the effectiveness of the cloud-based infrastructure for the development of a contextual service for citizens.

Smart Cities and Green Growth: Outsourcing Democratic and Environmental Resilience to the Global Technology Sector

Climate change and advances in urban technology propel forward the ‘smart city’. As decision makers strive to find a technological fix, smart city strategies are often based on technological orthodoxies which are conceptually and empirically shallow. The motivation behind this paper is to address the conceptual adolescence which relates to the wholesale digitisation of the city by pursuing a twin argument about the democratic and environmental consequences. The authors draw on interdisciplinary theory and insights from urban studies, infrastructure, informatics, and the sociology of the Internet to critique the way the ‘smart city’ is taken forward. It is concluded that private firms market smart city services and solutions based on an ideological legacy of ‘ubiquitous computing’, ‘universal infrastructure’, and ‘green technology’. Based on evidence from three UK cities—Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow—it is argued that the underlying principle of future city strategies is to expand the market for new technology products and services to support ‘green growth’ with disregard for their wider impacts. For citizens, becoming a consumer of the technologies is often presented as progressive ‘participation’ or ‘empowerment’ with unknown or hidden consequences both political and environmental. The city systems become a digital marketplace where citizen-consumers' participation is increasingly involuntary and the hegemony of global technology firms is inflated. What follows is that the city's ‘intelligent systems' are defined through a digital consumer experience that has inherent biases and leaves parts of the city and its population unaccounted for. This renders the city less resilient in the face of future social and climatic risks.

Design and Evaluation of Materialized View as a Service for Smart City Services with Large-Scale House Log

Design and Evaluation of Materialized View as a Service for Smart City Services with Large-Scale House Log

Information centric services in Smart Cities

A “Smart City” is intended as an urban environment which, supported by pervasive ICT systems, is able to offer advanced and innovative services to citizens in order to improve the overall quality of their life. In this context, the present contribution formulates a pioneering proposal, by drawing an advanced information centric platform for supporting the typical ICT services of a Smart City. It can easily embrace all available and upcoming wireless technologies, while enforcing, at the same time, ubiquitous and secure applications in many domains, such as, e-government and public administration, intelligent transportation systems, public safety, social, health-care, educational, building and urban planning, environmental, and energy and water management applications. All the details of the proposed approach have been carefully described by means of pragmatical use-cases, such as the management of administrative procedures, the starting of a new business in a given country, the navigation assistance, the signaling of an urban accident aimed at improving the public safety, the reservation of a medical examination, the remote assistance of patients, and the management of waste in a city. This description makes evident the real effectiveness of the present proposal in future urban environments.

Convergence of MANET and WSN in IoT Urban Scenarios

Ubiquitous smart environments, equipped with low-cost and easy-deployable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and widespread mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), are opening brand new opportunities in wide-scale urban monitoring. Indeed, MANET and WSN convergence paves the way for the development of brand new Internet of Things (IoT) communication platforms with a high potential for a wide range of applications in different domains. Urban data collection, i.e., the harvesting of monitoring data sensed by a large number of collaborating sensors, is a challenging task because of many open technical issues, from typical WSN limitations (bandwidth, energy, delivery time, etc.) to the lack of widespread WSN data collection standards, needed for practical deployment in existing and upcoming IoT scenarios. In particular, effective collection is crucial for classes of smart city services that require a timely delivery of urgent data such as environmental monitoring, homeland security, and city surveillance. After surveying the existing WSN interoperability efforts for urban sensing, this paper proposes an original solution to integrate and opportunistically exploit MANET overlays, impromptu, and collaboratively formed over WSNs, to boost urban data harvesting in IoT. Overlays are used to dynamically differentiate and fasten the delivery of urgent sensed data over low-latency MANET paths by integrating with latest emergent standards/specifications for WSN data collection. The reported experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness (e.g., limited coordination overhead) of the proposed solution.

Architectural implications of smart city business models: an evolutionary perspective

Smart cities have rapidly become a hot topic within technology communities, and promise both improved delivery of services to end users and reduced environmental impact in an era of unprecedented urbanization. Both large hightech companies and grassroots citizen-led initiatives have begun exploring the potential of these technologies. Significant barriers remain to the successful rollout and deployment of business models outlined for smart city applications and services, however. Most of these barriers pertain to an ongoing battle between two main schools of thought for system architecture, ICT and telecommunications, proposed for data management and service creation. Both of these system architectures represent a certain type of value chain and the legacy perspective of the respective players that wish to enter the smart city arena. Smart cities services, however, utilize components of both the ICT industry and mobile telecommunications industries, and do not benefit from the current binary perspective of system architecture. The business models suggested for the development of smart cities require a longterm strategic view of system architecture evolution. This article discusses the architectural evolution required to ensure that the rollout and deployment of smart city technologies is smooth through acknowledging and integrating the strengths of both the system architectures proposed.

The pursuit of citizens' privacy: a privacy-aware smart city is possible

Cities are growing steadily, and the process of urbanization is a common trend in the world. Although cities are getting bigger, they are not necessarily getting better. With the aim to provide citizens with a better place to live, a new concept of a city was born: the smart city. The real meaning of smart city is not strictly defined, but it has gained much attention, and many cities are taking action in order to be considered 'smart'. These smart cities, founded on the use of information and communication technologies, aim at tackling many local problems, from local economy and transportation to quality of life and e-governance. Although technology helps to solve many of these local problems, their ability to gather unprecedented amounts of information could endanger the privacy of citizens. In this article we identify a number of privacy breaches that can appear within the context of smart cities and their services. We leverage some concepts of previously defined privacy models and define the concept of citizens' privacy as a model with five dimensions: identity privacy, query privacy, location privacy, footprint privacy and owner privacy. By means of several examples of smart city services, we define each privacy dimension and show how existing privacy enhancing technologies could be used to preserve citizens' privacy.

USING CITYGML TO DEPLOY SMART-CITY SERVICES FOR URBAN ECOSYSTEMS

Abstract. The rapid technological evolution, which is characterizing all the disciplines involved within the wide concept of smart cities, becomes a key factor to trigger true user-driven innovation. In this context 3D city models will play an increasingly important role in our daily lives and become an essential part of the modern city information infrastructure (Spatial Data Infrastructure). The goal of this paper is to introduce the i-SCOPE (interoperable Smart City services through an Open Platform for urban Ecosystems) project methodology and implementations together with key technologies and open standards. Based on interoperable 3D CityGML UIMs, the aim of i-Scope is to deliver an open platform on top of which it possible to develop, within different domains, various "smart city" services. Moreover, in i-SCOPE different issues, transcending the mere technological domain, are being tackled, including aspects dealing with social and environmental issues. Indeed several tasks including citizen awareness, crowd source and voluntary based data collection as well as privacy issue concerning involved people should be considered.

Developing the Helsinki Smart City: The Role of Competitions for Open Data Applications

This article discusses how Mobile Application Clusters can be developed through competitions for innovative applications. The Smart City services that are developed in competitions benefit both the Mobile Application Cluster and the citizens. The function of the competition mechanism to encourage the development of new mobile applications utilizing Open Data is described with examples from the Helsinki Region. Porter’s model of determinants of national competitive advantage is used as a framework to describe the forces driving the ongoing developments towards the Mobile Application Cluster. In particular the paper explores the interaction between the cluster determinants of Porter’s model with regard to the externalities made by the linkages between the parties in the emerging cluster. In the two competitions for Open Data applications that the paper discusses innovation is supported by a policy-like instrument: an urban competition on open data, which is driven forward through the Living Labs approach to innovation. The two competitions launched in the Helsinki Region are aimed at developing mobile applications by utilizing open data. The paper shows how a Living Lab functions as an innovation intermediary where the competitions are utilized in developing a Smart City.

Southampton goes live with smart city services

Southampton goes live with smart city services