Smart City Technologies Research Articles

IoT and Smart City Technology: Challenges, Opportunities, and Solutions

Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been recently utilized in diverse fields. Smart city is one of the IoT application domains with a lot of research topics and which is operated by integrated IoT applications. In this paper, diverse kinds of solutions, processes, and frameworks to address the existing challenges in information technology are introduced. Such solutions involve various future track topics including blockchain, security, steganography, optimization, machine learning, smart system, and so on. In the subsequent paragraphs, we describe each topic in a summarized way in terms of the existing challenges and their solutions. Specifically, this paper introduced 18 novel and enhanced research studies from different countries in the world. We present diverse kinds of paradigms to subjects that tackle diverse kinds of research areas such as IoT and Smart City, and so on.

Partial Platforms and Oligoptic Surveillance in the Smart City

Smart city technologies are proliferating in our urban environments. The latest iteration of the urban techno-fix, cities on a global level have begun piloting and plugging into a range of “smart” infrastructure and IoT, resulting in granular and even enactments of “the actually existing smart city.” Rather than evoking the once promised vision of the totalizing smart city, the adoption of these technologies draws attention to the fractured, varied, and layered characteristics of these systems. This paper draws on research into GeoPal, an asset management platform used mainly by business improvement areas (BIAs)—in order to ground our theoretical discussion of oligoptic geospatial surveillance.

Innovative Technologies and Services for Smart Cities

Smart cities represent a multidiscipline field continuously evolved by the advancement of sensor-based information technology and communication technology [...]

Application of technology to car parking facilities in Asian smart cities

PurposeThis study aims investigate the status of applying technology in car parking facilities. It also examines the factors affecting the deployment of these technologies as they improve the efficiency and convenience of car parking facilities amidst changing transport needs in Asian smart cities.Design/methodology/approachA comprehensive literature review informs the relationships between car park provisions and the traffic congestion problem. A typology covering different technological solutions is then formulated. The factors affecting the use of two such common technologies (i.e. mechanical car parks and intelligent information systems) are examined in two emerging smart cities in Asia with the aid of a desk-top study for Singapore and a survey covering over 600 samples (including users and non-users, as both groups are important to derive influencing factors) in Hong Kong.FindingsThe extent to which mechanical car parks may help relieve the space shortage problem depends on their relative costs and the facility management performance. For real-time vacancy information systems, their wide spread use depends on drivers’ age and past parking experience.Research limitations/implicationsDue to geographical constraints, only two Asian cities (Singapore and Hong Kong), where the use of smart technologies is flourishing, are included in the study. The survey on car parking apps is preliminary due to their relative short deployment in Asia. It is expected that the phenomena will quickly spread in the region as more smart cities are developed.Originality/valueBy expounding on the development of modern parking technologies in smart cities, the important influence of car parks as a strategic facility toward solving traffic congestion and environmental problems is brought to the attention of policy makers, in particular the influencing factors affecting strategies to promote the use of parking apps.

Technology roadmap for building a smart city: An exploring study on methodology

Based on qualitative case studies, this paper investigates the process of building a smart city roadmap, providing an example of such a roadmap along with some policy recommendations for cities. A 3-phase-process is developed where first literature is reviewed and based on common criteria development cases from 80 cities are gathered. The 2nd phase builds up a technology inventory for the selected cases. The 3rd phase is the expert prediction phase for technology maturity, in which technology development predictions are used to establish the causal relationship between a technology and the timing of its application. This process produces a technology roadmap which is then used as the basis for organizing smart city technologies and applications into four ascending layers: Sensor, Integration, Intelligent, and Application. The result is a blueprint for the application of smart city technologies. In addition, 36 smart city experts were surveyed to assess the maturity of and connection between smart city technologies, markets, and industries. Current smart city developments can then be ascertained to provide recommendations on smart city development. This preliminary forecast and analysis of smart city technologies can be applied to related industries to gain a general understanding of trends in the development of key technologies and applications.

Nudging citizens through technology in smart cities

ABSTRACT In the last decade, several smart cities throughout the world have started employing Internet of Things, big data, and algorithms to nudge citizens to save more water and energy, live healthily, use public transportation, and participate more actively in local affairs. Thus far, the potential and implications of data-driven nudges and behavioral insights in smart cities have remained an overlooked subject in the legal literature. Nevertheless, combining technology with behavioral insights may allow smart cities to nudge citizens more systematically and help these urban centers achieve their sustainability goals and promote civic engagement. For example, in Boston, real-time feedback on driving has increased road safety and in Eindhoven, light sensors have been used to successfully reduce nightlife crime and disturbance. While nudging tends to be well-intended, data-driven nudges raise a number of legal and ethical issues. This article offers a novel and interdisciplinary perspective on nudging which delves into the legal, ethical, and trust implications of collecting and processing large amounts of personal and impersonal data to influence citizens’ behavior in smart cities.

The Internet of Things for Smart Cities: Technologies and Applications

The articles in this special section focus on the application of the Internet of Things in smart cities. Smart cities are creating emerging innovation in academia, industry, and government. A city may be called “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional and modern communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with wise management of natural resources through participatory governance. A smart city is also defined as a city connecting the physical infrastructure, the ICT infrastructure, the social infrastructure, and the business infrastructure to leverage the collective intelligence of the city. Smart cities are usually established relying on both advanced infrastructures and modern information and communication technologies. The articles in this section cover the most recent research and development on the enabling technologies for IoTbased smart cities and to stimulate discussions on state-of-the-art and innovative aspects in the field.

From sustainable to smart: Re-branding or re-assembling urban energy infrastructure?

Visions of sustainable cities have increasingly been substituted by the ambition to become a ‘smart city’ in recent years. Ongoing scholarly discussions often focus on how sustainability and ‘smartness’ relate to each other conceptually, to which extent smart city technologies contribute to making cities more sustainable, and calls to prioritise social issues over technology. The questions of how this ‘shift to smart’ has unfolded, and how it has reshaped strategies and interventions to make cities and their energy infrastructures more sustainable, have however been much less investigated. The aim of this article is to zoom in on the dynamics of such a shift from sustainable to smart. The cities of Malmö and Graz have strong profiles as sustainable cities and have both begun to use smart city branding. We build our analysis on argumentative discourse theory and the concept of socio-material assemblages. Along with a discursive shift from sustainable cities to smart cities, we also observe changes in institutions and socio-material practices. We identify appropriation and colonisation as two dynamics that characterise the relations between assemblages of sustainable and smart cities. We conclude that even when smart city discourses are appropriated by actors in existing sustainable city assemblages, the discursive shift might eventually allow smart city assemblages to colonise existing institutions and socio-material practices. But the shift does not take place through explicit controversy between two discourse coalitions, and it therefore remains important to further investigate the conditions that allow for a change in dynamics from appropriation to colonisation.

Developing a theory of an object-oriented city: Building energy for urban problems

The paper reviews the processes of Geodesign, as it is currently used in practice, and explore its capability and limitation to adapt to new smart city design and technology. Predictions about the future city are being attempted based on data that is for all intents and purposes based on the distant past. In the smart city, where data is both ubiquitous and continuous, it is possible to use metadata to quickly gain an understanding of how the future city is designed and how the current urban system can be altered. Existing building energy data of eight housing units in the Sumida neighborhood of Tokyo was collected using smart meters. This data was analyzed to determine how the buildings perform in real-time, compared to how the energy models predict the building performance. This comparison showed that the existing buildings are using more energy than the current models predict. There is potential that better utilizing data can help designers and planners come closer to meeting community goals. There is also potential that as we integrate more smart city technologies into our cities for improving future city model, or the change model in Geodesign. This paper discussed how other variables that can be incorporated into larger-scale problems, in which an object-oriented city design model is proposed based on a network of objects and multiple system boundaries.

Smart-city Technologies, Government Surveillance and Privacy: Assessing the Potential for Chilling Effects and Existing Safeguards in the ECHR

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) among others has been developing an extensive jurisprudence on the protection of privacy. Its scope is wide and context-dependant, interferences must be provided by a legal framework of certain quality and they must be proportional to a pursued legitimate aim, such as national security. Two key technologies behind smart-cities, the Internet of Things (IoT) and big-data analytics, are changing the nature, scale and purpose of data collected by institutions, public or private. Yet, most of current research on the topic is focused on EU or US law. With this in mind, and in order to bridge this gap in the literature, this research aims to assess how government surveillance relying on smart-city technologies could create a chilling effect, thus curtailing the actual enjoyment of privacy and freedom of expression. We argue that smart-cities are likely to (a) generally weaken privacy by allowing massive data-sets to be cross-referenced, and (b) to obscure the purpose of data collection and thus trump individuals’ perceptions of privacy. We hypothesis that such phenomena may bring a cloud of suspicion on any collection of data and could create a general chilling effect. In such case, even the strong legal safeguards the Court has discovered in recent years may not be enough to prevent it.

Application of Data Distribution Technology in Smart Cities

While the Internet has been proposed for a long time, the Internet of Things is a relatively new concept which is constantly evolving, and it is also an embodiment of the practical use for the construction of smart cities. In this study of smart cities, we first illustrate the data processing problems in smart cities, especially the data distribution challenges, and then introduce the application of improved algorithms for data matching and acceleration. Secondly, big data center node distribution mechanism and data processing method are proposed. Finally, we demonstrate how to conduct data fusion operation by studying the similarity in a heterogeneous database.

Blockchain in Smart Cities: Exploring Possibilities in Terms of Opportunities and Challenges

The ultimate aim of a smart city is to enhance the quality of life for its residents and businesses through modern technologies in order to reduce resource deterioration and maintain overall costs. From this perspective, blockchain is one of these technologies that has received much attention during the recent years as it offers new alternatives for individuals and institutions in the smart city context. This study aims to explore the potential and contribution of blockchain in smart cities by studying and reviewing the literature of scientific research on the concept and fundamentals of blockchain, involving its most practical applications. In addition, it summarizes worldwide examples of success in using blockchain as well as exploring the challenges and opportunities related to this technology in smart cities. Thus, this study provides a useful reference for researchers to review all about the new blockchain technology.

Nudging Citizens through Technology in Smart Cities

In the last decade, several smart cities throughout the world have started employing Internet of Things, big data, and algorithms to nudge citizens to save more water and energy, live healthily, use public transportation, and participate more actively in local affairs. Thus far, the potential and implications of data-driven nudges and behavioral insights in smart cities have remained an overlooked subject in the legal literature. Nevertheless, combining technology with behavioral insights may allow smart cities to nudge citizens more systematically and help these urban centers achieve their sustainability goals and promote civic engagement. For example, in Boston, real-time feedback on driving has increased road safety and in Eindhoven, light sensors have been used to successfully reduce nightlife crime and disturbance. While nudging tends to be well-intended, data-driven nudges raise a number of legal and ethical issues. This article offers a novel and interdisciplinary perspective on nudging which delves into the legal, ethical, and trust implications of collecting and processing large amounts of personal and impersonal data to influence citizens’ behavior in smart cities.

Smart technology in planning cities that suffer the effects of displacement in war countries

The aim of this paper is to identify the role that smart city technology can play in the development of cities in countries that have been affected by war, for example the Syrian Arab Republic and specifically cities that have been subjected to the multiplication of forced displacement movements, imposes significant burdens on all societies, but provides opportunities for development in adopting a rights-based approach that meets the needs of displaced people and host communities. In addressing the effects of displacement within development plans, access to education, Live and reduce the damage to the environment and build social cohesion, smart city solution can transform these challenges to an opportunity make a technological change aims to improve services in an orderly, influential, and provide applications these cities to achieve an impressive leap and able to analyse a large amount of data, Thus making plans for the future and using these data to make effective changes and transform them into intelligent systems that understand the needs, lifestyles, behaviour and culture of the population. Of course, the shift to smart technology requires the participation of local communities as well as all planning entities in order to achieve the best possible rate of success.

A UKF-Based Emergency Aware Fusion Model in a Heterogeneous Network for Wireless Body Networks

Wearable body networks (WBNs) have revealed plenty of effective technologies in many application domains, including healthcare, fitness, and smart cities. Wearable devices are integrated with some daily necessities and they gather information, such as motion data and physiological data. In general, the Kalman-based filters are used to remove the noise from the interference of these data to increase their accuracy. On the other hand, the data could also change dramatically in cases of sudden change, such as the wearer beginning to run without any warning, heart rate rises quickly when the wearer is startled, etc. The existing Kalman-based filters hardly distinguishes both noise and sudden changes. To address this problem, an unscented Kalman filter (UKF)-based emergency-aware fusion model is proposed in this paper to efficiently increase the accuracy of the collecting data when an emergency happens. Here, an early warning mechanism (EWM) is produced to discover the emergency. The traditional UKF is used when an emergency does not exist. The gain matrix should be compensated to reduce the filtering error when an emergency exists. Therefore, the estimator should be adjusted accordingly to avoid it. In simulations, important parameters are discussed. Compared with a traditional UKF, the proposed model shows the same performance without the emergency and shows even better results when an emergency happens.

Predictive Analytics of Hyper-Connected Collaborative Network

The foundation of the infrastructure of a collaborative network for ubiquitous connectivity will employ hyper-connected technologies in smart and sustainable cities. Typically, there are millions of items for processing and analytics on the massive generated data. The predictive analytics are indispensable for such volumes of which there are many drifts in data structures and contents. In order to make better decisions and future planning of ubiquity, a model, and correspondence implementation are designed and developed. It brings decision-making to the expected boundary of collaboration for different performance indexes. The selected method finds cause-and-effect between data to predict the optimum responses to incoming events. The core of approach focuses on Event-Condition-Action rules to build decision trees, which helps further planning. The method can summarize complexity via effective recommended decisions to local experts and analysts.

Digital transformation of existing cities

The article focuses on the range of problems arising on the way of innovative technologies implementation in the structure of existing cities. The concept of intellectualization of historic cities, as illustrated by Samara, is offered, which was chosen for the realization of a large Russian project “Smart City. Successful Region” in 2018. One of the problems was to study the experience of information hubs projecting with the purpose of determination of their priority functional directions. The following typology of information hubs was made: scientific and research ones, scientific and technical ones, innovative and cultural ones, cultural and informational ones, scientific and informational ones, technological ones, centres for data processing, scientific centres with experimental and production laboratories. As a result of the conducted research, a suggestion on smart city’s infrastructure is developed, the final levels of innovative technologies implementation in the structure of historic territories are determined. A model suggestion on the formation of a scientific and project centre with experimental and production laboratories branded as named “Park-plant” is developed. Smart (as well as real) city technologies, which are supposed to be placed on the territory of “Park-plant”, are systematized. The organizational structure of the promotion of model projects is offered according to the concept of “triad of development agents”, in which the flagship university – urban community – park-plant interact within the project programme. The effects of the development of the being renovated territory of the historic city centre are enumerated.

Privacy and Security Data Governance: Surveillance Mechanisms and Resilience Risks of Smart City Technologies

Privacy and Security Data Governance: Surveillance Mechanisms and Resilience Risks of Smart City Technologies

An Analysis of User Behavior on Smart City Facilities in Shin-chon Urban Regeneration Project

In cities where various urban problems are produced due to rapid urbanization, the public side makes an effort to create smart cities. They anticipate that smart city will enhace the competitiveness and the quality of life of urban people. The Roadmap for Urban Regeneration New Deal in Korea envisaged plans such as the activation of the Smart City Urban Regeneration New Deal and the Smart City Demonstration Project in 2018. As a result, applying various technologies from the perspective of smart city into urban regeneration are getting lots of attention especially from both central and local government. The purpose of this study is to define the concept of smart city and smart urban regeneration and analyze current status of facilities using smart city technology in urban regeneration project. With the findings, this paper plans to make some considerations while launching smart urban regeneration project. For this purpose, this study examined literature review, user surveys and interviews. As a result, it is necessary to establish a sustainable vision of the local community, publicize the introduction of facilities with local residents, and establish a practical plan and implementation system when introducing smart urban technology in urban regeneration projects.

Delivering Smart Governance in a Future City: The Case of Glasgow

In 2013, Glasgow City Council received significant funding to develop innovative smart city applications, including the delivery of new electronic public services and the co-production of governance. This case study examines the processes that underpin the ways in which the ‘Future City Glasgow programme’ delivered ‘smart governance’, in the context of a regenerating post-industrial city. We assess the contribution of smart city technologies and data collection and monitoring processes designed to facilitate citizen engagement and sustainable governance practices. The Future City Glasgow programme ran from 2013‒2015, and included the Open Glasgow project, and ‘Demonstrator Projects’ of: Energy Efficiency; Intelligent Street Lighting; Active Travel; and, Integrated Social Transport. Opportunities arose from these demonstrators for developing co-production and legacy initiatives. The case study provides insight into the ways in which citizens and local communities in Glasgow have been engaged in governance processes. This engagement has taken place via traditional and innovative smart city technologies, and in particular in relation to policy formulation, service design and delivery. It finds that the co-creation of governance is shaped by vested interests, that engagement is fragmented and partial, but at the same time new technologies, social media and shared learning opportunities offer innovative new ways for <em>some</em> citizens to influence local governance.