Query: smart cities

title: Internet of Things for Smart Cities
abstract: 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 systems 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.

title: Moving towards smart cities: Solutions that lead to the Smart City Transformation Framework
abstract: A city is a large and permanent human ecosystem which provides a lot of services and opportunities to its citizens. The rapid urbanization and increasing population have put a lot of strains on city infrastructures and service deliveries. The current urbanization requires strong strategies and innovative planning to modernize the urban life. Many cities are enhancing quality and performance of urban services by being digitalized, intelligent and smarter. The policymakers and city authorities are exploring solutions to deliver the new services in an efficient, responsive and sustainable manner for a large population. The study explores all the possible services among various city dimensions which can make a city smart. The ideas related to smart services are collected from the peer vetted creative crowdsourcing process performed online in India. A directed qualitative conventional content analysis is used to analyze the collected ideas. The unique ideas are clustered into 19 different service categories. The findings suggest multi dimensional service classification along with required basic infrastructural development. Further, the Smart City Transformation Framework (SCTF) is proposed to help the policy makers, urban developers, government officials and service providers in terms of understanding and to draw more insights from the suggested smart solutions for development of smart cities. There are four key areas (Planning, Physical infrastructure, ICT infrastructure and Deploying Smart solutions) discussed in the proposed framework to illustrate the city transformation. The proposed SCTF is supported by literature and examples adopted by various smart cities across the world to illustrate its effectiveness. Moreover, a mind map is designed to illustrate the interrelationships among the collected ideas in an attractive and procedural visualization for city transformation process.

title: Unmanned aerial vehicles applications in future smart cities
abstract: Foreseeing changes in how smart cities manage their resources and provide services to the residents; research, development and production in various relevant technology fields is accelerating. Taking advantage of recent advances and innovations in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) robotics and software; smart cities can optimize resources utilization and enhance operations in health, transportation, energy, and water services, as well as elevating the level of comfort of residents. Effectively and efficiently utilizing ICT and robotics in smart cities will result in reducing costs and resources consumption in addition to engaging more effectively and actively with the citizens. One of these technologies is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which can provide many applications for smart cities and create a positive impact on the society. For example, UAVs can be used for environmental monitoring, traffic management, pollution monitoring, civil security control, and merchandise delivery. UAV applications among several others can provide cost effective services to help achieve the objectives of smart cities. However, the integration of UAVs in smart cities is very challenging due to several issues and concerns such as safety, privacy and ethical/legal use. This paper reviews the potential applications integrating UAVs in smart cities, their implications, and the technical and non technical issues facing such integration. It also discusses regulations and enabling technologies currently available and being developed that can be utilized to support such integration.

title: Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning in smart cities
abstract: Smart cities are aimed to efficiently manage growing urbanization, energy consumption, maintain a green environment, improve the economic and living standards of their citizens, and raise the people's capabilities to efficiently use and adopt the modern information and communication technology (ICT) In the smart cities concept, ICT is playing a vital role in policy design, decision, implementation, and ultimate productive services. The primary objective of this review is to explore the role of artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in the evolution of smart cities. The preceding techniques are efficiently used to design optimal policy regarding various smart city oriented complex problems. In this survey, we present in depth details of the applications of the prior techniques in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) cyber security, energy efficient utilization of smart grids (SGs) effective use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assure the best services of 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) communications, and smart health care system in a smart city. Finally, we present various research challenges and future research directions where the aforementioned techniques can play an outstanding role to realize the concept of a smart city.

title: Edge Computing Enabled Smart Cities: A Comprehensive Survey
abstract: Recent years have disclosed a remarkable proliferation of compute intensive applications in smart cities. Such applications continuously generate enormous amounts of data which demand strict latency aware computational processing capabilities. Although edge computing is an appealing technology to compensate for stringent latency related issues, its deployment engenders new challenges. In this article, we highlight the role of edge computing in realizing the vision of smart cities. First, we analyze the evolution of edge computing paradigms. Subsequently, we critically review the state of the art literature focusing on edge computing applications in smart cities. Later, we categorize and classify the literature by devising a comprehensive and meticulous taxonomy. Furthermore, we identify and discuss key requirements, and enumerate recently reported synergies of edge computing enabled smart cities. Finally, several indispensable open challenges along with their causes and guidelines are discussed, serving as future research directions.

title: Enabling technologies and sustainable smart cities
abstract: The technological interventions in everyday processes has led to the rise of Smart ecosystems where all aspects of everyday life like governance, transportation, agriculture, logistics, maintenance, education and healthcare are automated in some way or the other and can be controlled, managed and accessed remotely with the help of smart devices. This has led to the concept of Smart cities where Information Communication and Technology (ICT) is merged with the existing traditional infrastructure of a city which is then coordinated and managed using digital technology. This idea of smart cities is slowly but surely coming into reality as many countries around the globe are adopting this idea and coming up with their own model of smart cities. At the core of smart city lies the sensors and actuators embedded in the smart devices that sense the environment for facilitating effective decision making. The microcontrollers available in these devices are programmed to take decisions automatically based on the information received from the sensors. This involves integration of several information and communication technologies like artificial intelligence, protocols, Internet of things (IoT) wireless sensor network (WSN) etc. This paper discusses and extensively reviews the role of enabling technologies in smart cities. The paper further highlights the challenges and limitations in the development of smart cities along with the mitigation strategies. Specifically, three categories of challenges are identified namely technical, socio economic and environmental giving specifics of each category. Finally, some of the best practices for attaining sustainable smart cities are provided.

title: Securing Smart Cities through Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Requirements, and Challenges
abstract: In recent years, unprecedented work has been done in the area of smart cities. The purpose of developing smart cities is to enhance quality of life factors for people dwelling within them. To achieve that purpose, technologies such as IoT and cloud computing have been utilized. Blockchain technology is also among the promising technologies that can offer countless valuable services to its end users. It is a immutable programmable digital register for the purpose of recording virtual assets having some value and was primarily developed for digital currencies like Bitcoin. To fully utilize the services of blockchain technology within smart cities, characteristics of blockchain technology, and its key requirements and research challenges need to be identified. Hence, in this article, an attempt has been made to identify the characteristics of blockchain technology. Furthermore, indispensable requirements for incorporating blockchain technology within smart cities are enumerated. A conceptual architecture for securing smart city using blockchain technology is proposed and explained using a possible use case study. An overview of a real world three blockchain based smart city case study is also presented. Finally, several imperative research challenges are identified and discussed.

title: Infrastructure Monitoring and Operation for Smart Cities Based on IoT System
abstract: This paper designs a smart urban environment monitoring system based on the wireless network of ZigBee to complete the real time collection of urban environment information. The system consists of the basic monitoring network and the remote receiving terminal. The basic monitoring network connects the streetlights as routes and the taxis as nodes. After dynamically organizing the network, each node is assigned with an address as the only identity in the network. Then, the system designed conducts the simulation experiment to prove that it could meet the needs and send the collected information to the designated terminal in the form of message according to the setting. The sensor organized through the wireless network of ZigBee could inspire the infrastructure construction of the smart city. With the network, a smarter and more comfortable society could be well offered to people.

title: Blockchain for smart cities: A review of architectures, integration trends and future research directions
abstract: In recent years, smart city has emerged as a new paradigm to provide high quality facilities to the citizens by dynamically optimising the city resources. Smart cities can offer finest services for boosting the daily life of citizens on healthcare, transportation, energy consumption, and education. However, the concept of smart city is still evolving and despite its potential vision, there are proliferating security challenges. Blockchain has the potential to promote the development of smart cities owing to its good properties such as auditability, transparency, immutability and decentralization. Therefore, this paper presents the state of the art blockchain technology to solve the security issues of smart cities. Initially, the paper throws light on the background knowledge and then surveys the utility of blockchain in various smart communities such as healthcare, transportation, smart grid, supply chain management, financial systems and data center networks. Finally, some future research directions are identified through extensive literature survey on blockchain based smart city systems.

title: A Review of Technical Standards for Smart Cities
abstract: Smart cities employ technology and data to increase efficiencies, economic development, sustainability, and life quality for citizens in urban areas. Inevitably, clean technologies promote smart cities development including for energy, transportation and health. The smart city concept is ambitious and is being refined with standards. Standards are used to help with regulating how smart cities function and contributing to define a smart city. Smart cities must be officially recognized by national and international authorities and organizations in order to promote societal advancement. There are many research and review articles on smart cities. However, technical standards are seldom discussed in the current literature. This review firstly presents the study of smart city definitions and domain. The well known smart city standards will be presented to better recognize the smart city concept. Well defined standards allow meaningful comparisons among smart cities implementation. How smart city initiatives make a city smarter and improve the quality of life will be discussed for various countries. This review highlights that technical standards are important for smart cities implementation. This paper serves as a guide to the most recent developments of smart cities standards.