Smart City Vision Research Articles

C2IoT: A framework for Cloud-based Context-aware Internet of Things services for smart cities

The smart city vision was born by the integration of ICT in the day to day city management operations and citizens lives, owing to the need for novel and smart ways to manage the cities resources; making them more efficient, sustainable and transparent. However, the understanding of the crucial elements to this integration and how they can benefit from each other proves difficult and unclear. In this article, we investigate the intricate synergies between different technologies and paradigms involved in the smart city vision, to help design a robust framework, capable of handling the challenges impeding its successful implementation. To this end, we propose a context-aware centered approach to present a holistic view of a smart city as viewed from the different angles (Cloud, IoT, Big Data). We also propose a framework encompassing elements from the different enablers, leveraging their strengths to build and develop smart-x applications and services.

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.

Complex IoT Systems as Enablers for Smart Homes in a Smart City Vision.

The world is entering a new era, where Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart homes, and smart cities will play an important role in meeting the so-called big challenges. In the near future, it is foreseen that the majority of the world’s population will live their lives in smart homes and in smart cities. To deal with these challenges, to support a sustainable urban development, and to improve the quality of life for citizens, a multi-disciplinary approach is needed. It seems evident, however, that a new, advanced Information and Communications Technology ICT infrastructure is a key feature to realize the “smart” vision. This paper proposes a specific solution in the form of a hierarchical layered ICT based infrastructure that handles ICT issues related to the “big challenges” and seamlessly integrates IoT, smart homes, and smart city structures into one coherent unit. To exemplify benefits of this infrastructure, a complex IoT system has been deployed, simulated and elaborated. This simulation deals with wastewater energy harvesting from smart buildings located in a smart city context. From the simulations, it has been found that the proposed infrastructure is able to harvest between 50% and 75% of the wastewater energy in a smart residential building. By letting the smart city infrastructure coordinate and control the harvest time and duration, it is possible to achieve considerable energy savings in the smart homes, and it is possible to reduce the peak-load for district heating plants.

Rethinking GIS Towards The Vision Of Smart Cities Through CityGML

Abstract. Smart cities present a substantial growth opportunity in the coming years. The role of GIS in the smart city ecosystem is to integrate different data acquired by sensors in real time and provide better decisions, more efficiency and improved collaboration. Semantically enriched vision of GIS will help evolve smart cities into tomorrow’s much smarter cities since geospatial/location data and applications may be recognized as a key ingredient of smart city vision. However, it is need for the Geospatial Information communities to debate on “Is 3D Web and mobile GIS technology ready for smart cities?” This research places an emphasis on the challenges of virtual 3D city models on the road to smarter cities.

Managing Large Amounts of Data Generated by a Smart City Internet of Things Deployment

The Smart City concept is being developed from a lot of different axes encompassing multiple areas of social and technical sciences. However, something that is common to all these approaches is the central role that the capacity of sharing information has. Hence, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are seen as key enablers for the transformation of urban regions into Smart Cities. Two of these technologies, namely Internet of Things and Big Data, have a predominant position among them. The capacity to “sense the city” and access all this information and provide added-value services based on knowledge derived from it are critical to achieving the Smart City vision. This paper reports on the specification and implementation of a software platform enabling the management and exposure of the large amount of information that is continuously generated by the IoT deployment in the city of Santander.

A Novel IoT-aware Smart Parking System based on the integration of RFID and WSN technologies

Enabling a sustainable mobility is one of primary goals of the so-called Smart Cities vision, and in this perspective, the deployment of intelligent parking systems represents a key aspect. This paper presents a novel IoT-aware Smart Parking System based on the jointly use of different technologies, such as RFID, WSN, NFC, and mobile. It is able to collect, in real time, both environmental parameters and information about the occupancy state of parking spaces. To reduce the overall system costs, the possibility to use a solar RFID tag as cars’ detection system has been analyzed. The system allows drivers to reach the nearest vacant parking spot and to pay for the parking fee, by using a customized mobile application. Furthermore, a software application based on RESTful Java and Google Cloud Messaging technologies has been installed on a CS in order to manage alert events. A proof-of-concept has been defined to demonstrate that the proposed solution is able to satisfy real requirements of an innovative Smart Parking System, while preliminary analysis of solar tag usage investigates the feasibility of the proposed detection solution.

Smart Cities and Sustainability: A Set of Vertical Solutions for Managing Resources

The Smart City vision can be viewed as a “system of systems”, where all systems within it are interconnected, in constant communication with each other in real time, exchanging information, and making smart decisions all in a sustainable and highly efficient model. Two decades ago, the Smart City concept was born to address emerging city sustainability issues and was mainly focused on energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions reduction. More recently the term was attached to the role of ICT infrastructure. This paper aims to clarify interrelations between the Smart City concept and fostering the sustainable development of cities. The paper is based on an analytical study of the main characteristics and systems of a Smart City, emphasizing the significant role of Future Internet in the development of Smart Cities. The first section is a short introduction to challenges and drivers for a Smart City. Sections two and three discuss the technological context of Future Internet and the expected impact of Internet-of-Things, sensors, tags, and cloud computing on Smart Cities. The next two sections analyze the main Smart City Systems and approaches for managing them. Moreover, sections six and seven analyze two of the top performing Smart Cities in Europe and also address the UAE 2021 Vision in order to assert the environmental impacts that occur as a result of transforming into a Smart City. This paper concludes with a common framework for transforming cities into smart ones, which depends on the nature, circumstances, and resources of each city.

A Review on Atmospheric Parameter Monitoring System for SMART CITIES using Internet

Objects of everyday life will be equipped with microcontroller, microprocessor, embedded system and transceivers for digital communication with one another and with the users, becoming an integral part of internet. In this paper, we focus specifically to an urban internet for atmospheric parameter system. Through the mechanism of internet, we make a modem specially focused on atmospheric parameter which consists of three sensors for air, noise pollution and temperature measurement and the controlling of street light thus connected to the embedded system. This transmitted the data to the server and received by the pc or GUI modem. For this, modem is designed to support SMART CITY vision, which aims at exploiting the most advanced communication technologies to support added-value services for the administration of the city and for the citizens.

Byproducts of Urban Infrastructure Interfaces: Evidence from Parking Compliance

The increased levels of urbanization have resulted in the demand for developing urban technologies that can realize the vision of smart cities, i.e., urban environments that are sustainable, livable and resilient. Electromechanical infrastructure is substituted by intelligent, cyber-physical infrastructure (e.g., coin-based ticket fare collectors are substituted by smart cards) in an effort to both reduce costs, increase efficiency as well as improve the user-friendliness of the system. Significant efforts and resources have been allocated in the area of public transportation, including the modernization of subway and bus networks. However, one of the most-discussed aspects of public transportation in our automobile-dominated cities is that of parking infrastructure. While research has concluded that appropriate pricing of metered parking zones is essential to allow local businesses to flourish and even reduce congestion, there is still a lot of hesitance on implementing the appropriate policies. Hence, parking zones are still significantly underpriced. The problem is further pronounced by poor enforcement. However, during the last years, most of the coin-based parking meters are being substituted by “smart” meters that accept various types of payments (e.g., credit cards, mobile etc.). While these meters have been installed to mainly make parking payments more convenient to drivers, they appear to have important indirect benefits. In particular, in this study we use quasi-experimental techniques to analyze parking citation information from the city of Pittsburgh and we find that the installation of the new parking meters leads to increased compliance with parking rules. This can further have significant implication for the design of the urban infrastructure interfaces of the upcoming smart technology.

Incorporating a Systemic and Foresight Approach into Smart City Initiatives: The Case of Spanish Cities

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, cities face serious societal, economic, environmental, and governance challenges. Under the term “Smart City,” numerous technology-based initiatives are emerging to help cities face contemporary challenges while the concept itself is evolving towards a more holistic approach. Nevertheless, the capability of smart initiatives to provide an integrated vision of our cities is still very limited. Eventually, many of these initiatives do not fulfill satisfactorily their initial objectives because they fail to understand the complexity, diversity, and uncertainty that characterize contemporary cities. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to display an urban functional system, capable of interpreting the city in a more holistic way, and to incorporate foresight tools so as to formulate Smart City visions in a more participatory way with the involvement of local stakeholders.

Addressing big data challenges in smart cities: a systematic literature review

PurposeBig Data has become crucial for fulfilling the vision of smart cities; however, there are several challenges associated with its use. This study aims to provide a holistic view of challenges of using Big Data in smart cities and the solutions to deal with them by systematically selecting, reviewing and synthesizing the literature in this area.Design/methodology/approachA systematic literature review was conducted by following a rigorous search protocol that identified a total of 310 peer-reviewed academic research papers. These papers were subsequently filtered and finally 38 relevant papers were selected.FindingsA number of major challenges (human dynamics, privacy, security, volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value) associated with Big Data in a smart city and the respective solutions to address them were identified. This study primarily contributes in providing the process of effectively managing Big Data in smart cities.Practical implicationsThe study provides valuable information to the Big Data practitioners by illustrating the process of effective management of Big Data in smart cities. This study further provides the directions to the future researchers.Originality/valueThe study is original and is based on the existing literature and its interpretation.

Enabling Smart Transportation Systems: A Parallel Spatio-Temporal Database Approach

We are witnessing increasing interests in developing “smart cities” which helps improve the efficiency, reliability, and security of a traditional city. An important aspect of developing smart cities is to enable “smart transportation,” which improves the efficiency, safety, and environmental sustainability of city transportation means. Meanwhile, the increasing use of GPS devices has led to the emergence of big trajectory data that consists of large amounts of historical trajectories and real-time GPS data streams that reflect how the transportation networks are used or being used by moving objects, e.g., vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. Such big trajectory data provides a solid data foundation for developing various smart transportation applications, such as congestion avoidance, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and effective traffic accident response, etc. Instead of proposing yet another specific smart transportation application, we propose the parallel-distributed network-constrained moving objects database (PD-NMOD), a general framework that manages big trajectory data in a scalable manner, which provides an infrastructure that is able to support a wide variety of smart transportation applications and thus benefiting the smart city vision as a whole. The PD-NMOD manages both transportation networks and trajectories in a distributed manner. In addition, the PD-NMOD is designed to support general SQL queries over moving objects and to efficiently process the SQL queries on big trajectory data in parallel. Such design facilitates smart transportation applications to retrieve relevant trajectory data and to conduct statistical analyses. Empirical studies on a large trajectory data set collected from 3,500 taxis in Beijing offer insight into the design properties of the PD-NMOD and offer evidence that the PD-NMOD is efficient and scalable.

Internet of Things

Purpose – An empirical testing on IBM smart cities projects was applied so as to demonstrate that the combination between the use of Internet of Things (IoT) and the implementation of the Open Innovation (OI) model within smart cities which has been changed the development of urban areas and effected firms’ innovativeness. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – A case study methodology on a leading multinational firms deeply involved in smart cities projects has been chosen. Findings – From this study it emerged how IBM: has a clear vision of smart cities and IoT; adopt a worldwide OI approach to smart cities; delineate-specific strategies and create OI units ad hoc for smart cities’ projects. Research limitations/implications – The major limitation of this work is that the analysis presented has been developed only on one case of multinational firm that operate in smart cities contexts. Practical implications – Recommendations will be made both to public and private actor in order to plan and implement efficient strategies to improve their performances. Originality/value – The concept of smart city has become quite popular between scholars and practitioners in the era of digital economy. Cities become smart developing new urban area using new Information and Communication Technologies such as mobile devices, the semantic web, cloud computing, and the IoT. Smart cities make innovation ecosystem, joining together different forces like knowledge-intensive activities, institutions for cooperation and learning, and web-based applications collective intelligence. This research is of importance and significance to scholars, government, and firms who need to understand the relevance of smart cities in the current economy.

Towards a smart city based on cloud of things, a survey on the smart city vision and paradigms

AbstractSmart city represents one of the most promising, prominent and challenging Internet of Things (IoT) applications [1]. In the last few years, indeed, the smart city concept has played an important role in academic and industry fields, with the development and deployment of various middleware platforms and IoT‐based infrastructures. However, this expansion has followed distinct approaches creating, therefore, a fragmented scenario, in which different IoT ecosystems are not able to communicate between them. To fill this gap, there is a need to re‐visit the smart city IoT semantic and to offer a global common approach. To this purpose, this paper browses the semantic annotation of the sensors in Cloud, and innovative services can be implemented and considered by bridging Cloud of Things (CoT) and IoT. Things like semantic will be considered to perform the aggregation of heterogeneous resources by defining the CoT paradigm. We survey the smart city vision, providing information on the main requirements and highlighting the benefits of integrating different IoT ecosystems within Cloud under this new CoT vision. This paper also discusses relevant challenges in this research area. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A multilevel method to assess and design the renovation and integration of Smart Cities

Contemporary cities are the scenes of sudden and numerous changes from social, economical and environmental points of view. The capability for cities to endorse, foster, enhance ongoing transformations and modern challenges is obstructed by the unsuitableness and lack of communication and integration of both material and immaterial infrastructures. The new vision of Smart Cities can fill these gaps, as it represents a balance among hardware and software aspects, technology and human capital, and it aims at realizing and guaranteeing the quality of life to the inhabitants.At today, there is absence of uniformity both in the definition and in the concept development of a Smart City, and there are not practical methodologies supporting the evaluation models developed in literature. The approach often does not appear as a holistic, complete and integrated, but as a combination of sector-based non communicating and non integrated actions. In this framework, the aim of this paper is to outline a planning methodology of actions to realize a Smart City that provides a holistic and specific approach to territories and cities by taking into account the specific features of the context and by developing different and appropriate strategies. According to this, a way to integrate the various aspects of a Smart City through the definition of the relations existing among all the subsystems of the city, considered as a whole (human) organism, has been developed.

Towards Safe Cities: A Mobile and Social Networking Approach

Population density and natural and man-made disasters make public safety a concern of growing importance. In this paper we aim to enable the vision of smart and safe cities by exploiting mobile and social networking technologies to securely and privately extract, model and embed real-time public safety information into quotidian user experiences. We first propose novel approaches to define location- and user-based safety metrics. We evaluate the ability of existing forecasting techniques to predict future safety values. We introduce iSafe, a privacy-preserving algorithm for computing safety snapshots of co-located mobile devices as well as geosocial network users. We present implementation details of iSafe as both an Android application and a browser plugin that visualizes safety levels of visited locations and browsed geosocial venues. We evaluate iSafe using crime and census data from the Miami-Dade (FL) county as well as data we collected from Yelp, a popular geosocial network.

Smart cities from scratch? A socio-technical perspective

This paper argues that contemporary smart city visions based on ITs (information and tele- communication technologies) configure complex socio-technical challenges that can benefit from strategic niche management to foster two key processes: technological learning and societal embedding. Moreover, it studies the extent to which those processes started to unfold in two paradigmatic cases of smart city pilots ‘from scratch’: Songdo (South Korea) and PlanIT Valley (Portugal). The rationale and potentials of the two pilots as arenas for socio-technical experimentation and global niche formation are analysed, as well as the tensions and bottlenecks involved in nurturing socially rich innovation ecosystems and in maintaining social and political support over time.

Internet of Things for Smart Cities

The Internet of Things (IoT) shall be able to incorporate transparently and seamlessly a large number of different and heterogeneous end systems, while providing open access to selected subsets of data for the development of a plethora of digital services. Building a general architecture for the IoT is hence a very complex task, mainly because of the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. In this paper, we focus specifically to an urban IoT system that, while still being quite a broad category, are characterized by their specific application domain. Urban IoTs, in fact, are designed to support the Smart City vision, which aims at exploiting the most advanced communication technologies to support added-value services for the administration of the city and for the citizens. This paper hence provides a comprehensive survey of the enabling technologies, protocols, and architecture for an urban IoT. Furthermore, the paper will present and discuss the technical solutions and best-practice guidelines adopted in the Padova Smart City project, a proof-of-concept deployment of an IoT island in the city of Padova, Italy, performed in collaboration with the city municipality.

Photovoltaics in Net Zero Energy Buildings and Clusters: Enabling the Smart City Operation

From 2012 to comply with the ED 2010/31/EU and its recasts, all new buildings will perform as Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NearlyZEBs). Buildings are going to be transformed through a careful design into energy generation systems, and the conventional, centralized system of energy generation is going to be replaced by a “web” of energy generation systems. Photovoltaics (PV) seems to be one of the most suitable energy generation technologies for enabling this change, thanks to its “fair” cost, technical features, and multifunctional use in the building's envelope, as well as in the urban environment. PV will be an indispensable technology for Net Zero Energy Buildings (NetZEBs), with the consequence of being a kind of “ubiquitous” technology, also suitable for added uses than the traditional ones. For example: in addition to the multifunctional use in the building's envelope, it might offer advanced services for improving the efficiency and participation in the city processes. A multidisciplinary investigation on possible ways for PV and NetZEBs to change the future urban scenario is proposed, focusing on design, energy management and technological issues to support a Smart City (SC) vision.

2. Medical information systems

Advancements in smart devices, wearable gadgets, sensors, and communication paradigm have enabled the vision of smart cities, pervasive healthcare, augmented reality and interactive multimedia, Internet of Every Thing (IoE), and cognitive assistance, to name a few. All of these visions have one thing in common, i.e., delay sensitivity and instant response. Various new technologies designed to work at the edge of the network, such as fog computing, cloudlets, mobile edge computing, and micro data centers have emerged in the near past. We use the name ``edge computing'' for this set of emerging technologies. Edge computing is a promising paradigm to offer the required computation and storage resources with minimal delays because of ``being near'' to the users or terminal devices. Edge computing aims to bring cloud resources and services at the edge of the network, as a middle layer between end user and cloud data centers, to offer prompt service response with minimal delay. Two major aims of edge computing can be denoted as: (a) minimize response delay by servicing the users’ request at the network edge instead of servicing it at far located cloud data centers, and (b) minimize downward and upward traffic volumes in the network core. Minimization of network core traffic inherently brings energy efficiency and data cost reductions. Downward network traffic can be minimized by servicing set of users at network edge instead of service provider's data centers (e.g., multimedia and shared data) Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and upward traffic can be minimized by processing and filtering raw data (e.g., sensors monitored data) and uploading the processed information to cloud. This survey presents a detailed overview of potentials, trends, and challenges of edge computing. The survey illustrates a list of most significant applications and potentials in the area of edge computing. State of the art literature on edge computing domain is included in the survey to guide readers towards the current trends and future opportunities in the area of edge computing.