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Advances on Smart Cities and Smart Buildings  
**[PERSON] \({}^{\star}\)\({}^{\copyright}\)** and **[PERSON] \({}^{\copyright}\)**  
Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Politecnico di Bari, 70126 Bari, Italy;  
[EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
\({}^{\star}\) Correspondence: [EMAIL_ADDRESS]  
Modern cities are facing the challenge of combining competitiveness on a global city scale and sustainable urban development to become smart cities. A smart city is a high-tech intensive and advanced city that connects people, information, and city elements using new technologies in order to create a sustainable, greener city; competitive and innovative commerce; and an increased quality of life. This Special Issue collects the recent advancements on smart cities and covers different topics and aspects. Technological innovations have revolutionized the lifestyle of society and have led to the development of advanced and intelligent cities. The term smart city has recently become synonymous for a city that is characterized by an intelligent and extensive use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in order to allow the efficient use of information. In this context, new solutions and tools are offered to tourists to optimize and customize itinerary planning. In particular, graph theory and optimization algorithms are used to find the optimal touristic itinerary paths and, a multi-algorithms strategy is used to maximize the number of attractions (Pols) to be visited on these paths [1]. A review of the sensors deployed in a smart city is conducted in [2], both from a technological and functional point of view. Sensors play an important role, as they gather relevant information from the city, citizens, and the corresponding communication networks and transfer the information in real-time. Although the use of these sensors is diverse, their application can be categorized in six different groups: energy, health, mobility, security, water, and waste management. Based on these groups, this review presents an analysis of different sensors that are typically used in efforts toward creating smart cities. Insights about different applications and communication systems are provided as well as the main opportunities and challenges faced when making a transition to a smart city. Ultimately, this process is not only about smart urban infrastructure, but more importantly, it is about how these new sensing capabilities and digitalization developments improve the quality of life of the citizens who live in these cities. In addition, the global decarbonization and electrification of the world's energy demands has led to the quick adoption of Electric Vehicle (EV) technology. There is an emerging need to provide a wide network of fast Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) charging stations to satisfy the energy demand and to guarantee the sufficient autonomy of such vehicles. Accordingly, V2G charging stations must be prepared to work properly with every manufacturer and operator and to provide reliable designs and validation processes. To support such processes, the development of power electric vehicle emulators with V2G capability is essential [3]. In [3], the design and development details of an electric vehicle emulator for testing V2G chargers with power factor grid correction functionality are provided, and the ability to emulate a real V2G EV to handle fast charge/discharge with an EV charger is validated experimentally. Another solution to support the attractiveness of EVs by enhancing the autonomy of batteries and by limiting the range anxiety is provided by the analysis in [4]. The integration of an auxiliary power unit (APU) can extend the range of a vehicle, making them more attractive to consumers. Recently, many extended-range electric vehicle systems and configurations have been proposed to recover energy.