# Vulnerability Assessment of Ubiquitous Cities Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process
## 3 Vulnerability Assessment of Cites  
Numerous methods have been developed to perform a vulnerability assessment of cities under natural and man-made hazards. [PERSON] et [76] conducted a vulnerability assessment for the cities of Spain under flooding and extreme precipitation events followed a holistic and multi-stakeholder methodology. [PERSON] et al., [77] used an alternative method to include socio-economic concerns by developing an indicator-based vulnerability assessment for 571 European cities experiencingheatwaves, flooding, and droughts. The weightage was assigned using Factor Analysis (FA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Another case study on flash floods in Egypt used a ranking system based on a composite vulnerability index with eight parameters that integrated hydro-climate and physical vulnerability components [78; 79]. Fuzzy functions of the catastrophe theory are used for the seismic vulnerability of Tabriz city to study the impact of natural, physical, and human variables [80].  
Recent studies of vulnerability studies include remote sensing and extensive use of geographic information systems (GIS). [PERSON] and [PERSON] [81] conducted a case study in Pakistan on accessing drought hazard by analyzing the past droughts and developed the Drought Hazard Index (DHI). The vulnerability assessment of Mumbai City in India focused on the climate change impacts by considering the frequency of natural disaster, as well as the land-use/ land-cover (LULC), digital elevation model (DEM) and historical record on the flood, occurred regions [79]. [PERSON]. [82] explained to role of AHP for the evaluation of performance of a system (edge/cloud platforms in his study). [PERSON], et al. [83] used AHP to identify the determinant factors in the development of smart city composition. While in a recent study, [PERSON], [84] developed AHP-software risk prioritization model to identify and prioritize the influential risk factors using partial least square-structural equation modeling. A few more studies in India are conducted using the AHP for assessing forest cover vulnerability, landslide vulnerability, flood hazard assessment, and the vulnerability of watersheds to climate change [85; 86; 87; 88; 89; 90].  
Since U-cities are associated with a large amount of data handling, data acquisition, communication, processing, and reliability is considered as an indispensable property. Any natural hazard that affects the functionality of data handling or any man-made intervention can cause a high risk of U-cities normal functionality. For example, any untrusted information is a potential risk from the privacy security of individuals, to company finance or even the economy of global markets [91], [92]. Cyberattacks on the IoT network can make physical damage and it can be fatal, especially the applications in the industrial sector [50]. For example, the network security risk assessment for critical information infrastructure is potentially subjected to attack vector [93].  
Researchers recommend considering the vulnerability assessment on the hardware and software separately, as the nature of physical and digital vulnerabilities will require a different set of parameters [93; 94; 95; 96]. A hardware security vulnerability assessment has been developed to use a fault injection attack by a clock glitch generator on an embedded application and evaluate the data flow [96]. A study has pointed out that the Certificate Authority can be a countermeasure in the process to build safe a secured IT service in U-cities [93]. Therefore, it is suggested to conduct a security requirement analysis with a list of the vulnerabilities under different attacks [95]. Based on conflicting theories and paradigms, [PERSON] et al. [50] suggested a meta-analysis and meta-knowledge approach to provide an interdisciplinary and integrated way to understand the nature of the hazard, as well as the interactions between hazards and the ICTs.