TCitySmartF: A comprehensive systematic framework for transforming cities into smart cities

A shared agreed-upon definition of "smart city" (SC) is not available and there is no "best formula" to follow in transforming each and every city into SC. In a broader inclusive definition, it can be described as an opportunistic concept that enhances harmony between the lives and the environment around those lives perpetually in a city by harnessing the smart technology enabling a comfortable and convenient living ecosystem paving the way towards smarter countries and the smarter planet. SCs are being implemented to combine governors, organisations, institutions, citizens, environment, and emerging technologies in a highly synergistic synchronised ecosystem in order to increase the quality of life (QoL) and enable a more sustainable future for urban life with increasing natural resource constraints. In this study, we analyse how to develop citizen- and resource-centric smarter cities based on the recent SC development initiatives with the successful use cases, future SC development plans, and many other particular SC development solutions. The main features of SC are presented in a framework fuelled by recent technological advancement, particular city requirements and dynamics. This framework - TCitySmartF 1) aims to aspire a platform that seamlessly forges engineering and technology solutions with social dynamics in a new philosophical city automation concept - socio-technical transitions, 2) incorporates many smart evolving components, best practices, and contemporary solutions into a coherent synergistic SC topology, 3) unfolds current and future opportunities in order to adopt smarter, safer and more sustainable urban environments, and 4) demonstrates a variety of insights and orchestrational directions for local governors and private sector about how to transform cities into smarter cities from the technological, social, economic and environmental point of view, particularly by both putting residents and urban dynamics at the forefront of the development with participatory planning and interaction for the robust community- and citizen-tailored services. The framework developed in this paper is aimed to be incorporated into the real-world SC development projects in Lancashire, UK

Towards a secure service provisioning framework in a Smart city environment

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Over the past few years the concept of Smart cities has emerged to transform urban areas into connected and well informed spaces. Services that make smart cities “smart” are curated by using data streams of smart cities i.e., inhabitants’ location information, digital engagement, transportation, environment and local government data. Accumulating and processing of these data streams raise security and privacy concerns at individual and community levels. Sizeable attempts have been made to ensure the security and privacy of inhabitants’ data. However, the security and privacy issues of smart cities are not only confined to inhabitants; service providers and local governments have their own reservations — service provider trust, reliability of the sensed data, and data ownership, to name a few. In this research we identified a comprehensive list of stakeholders and modelled their involvement in smart cities by using the Onion Model approach. Based on the model we present a security and privacy-aware framework for service provisioning in smart cities, namely the ‘Smart Secure Service Provisioning’ (SSServProv) Framework. Unlike previous attempts, our framework provides end-to-end security and privacy features for trustable data acquisition, transmission, processing and legitimate service provisioning. The proposed framework ensures inhabitants’ privacy, and also guarantees integrity of services. It also ensures that public data is never misused by malicious service providers. To demonstrate the efficacy of SSServProv we developed and tested core functionalities of authentication, authorisation and lightweight secure communication protocol for data acquisition and service provisioning. For various smart cities service provisioning scenarios we verified these protocols by an automated security verification tool called Scyther

Proposed Framework for Smart Healthcare Services

Smart healthcare is of great interest to researchers and governments due to the increasing development of new smart cities. However, there is no current standard practice to format the cloud computing infrastructure and to assist the healthcare system architect in designing a comprehensive solution for the basic services that are required by the healthcare users while taking into consideration a balanced approach towards their specific functional and non-functional needs such as openness, scalability, concurrency, interoperability and security factors. The integration of smart healthcare services with cloud computing needs a concrete framework. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the different frameworks that discuss smart healthcare services and reach to a conclusion of the common factors to arrive at a unified and smart framework

Smart Cities and standards – The approach of the Horizon2020-project ESPRESSO

A Smart City integrates physical, digital and human systems to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens. Many of these innovative solutions will be based on sophisticated information and communication technologies. However, technological complexity, as well as the complexity of the various sectoral services involved within a Smart City, require a system approach to standardisation. Such an approach must promote the greatest possible reuse of existing open standards to accelerate the Smart City deployment. In an effort to leverage the promise of a system approach, the Horizon 2020-project ESPRESSO (systEmic standardisation apPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities) will focus on the development of a conceptual Smart City Information Framework based on open standards. A further goal of ESPRESSO will be to envisage the impact of those technologies for urban planning and also in societal terms. The partner cities will be engaged to analyse how their services can be streamlined and improved through large-scale use of standards. This will be done by analysing the downstream changes from the new scenarios enabled by large-scale interoperability and what this could bring for a future Smart City. Based on a detailed requirements-engineering campaign executed in close cooperation with cities, standardisation organizations, administrative bodies, and private industry, the project will identify open standards matching the elicited requirements and will establish a baseline for interoperability between the various sectoral data sources and the Smart City enterprise application platform. In a comprehensive set of coordination, support and networking activities, the project will engage a very large number of stakeholders, such as Smart Cities (both existing and those with aspirations), European Standardisation Organizations (ESOs), National Standardisation Bodies (NSBs), Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), public administrations, industries, SMEs, and other institutions. ESPRESSO’s approach emphasises cost reduction and will foster an open market for many actors, avoiding lock-in to proprietary solutions

Value Creation through Urban Data Platforms: A Conceptual Framework

In the context of smart cities, data-driven innovation and digital transformation have received increasing attention from practitioners and academics. The data-centric nature of smart city transformations highlights the essential role of urban data platform (UDP) to manage large and heterogeneous urban data sets and to facilitate interaction among data providers and users in a city ecosystem. To realize value creation through UDP, a comprehensive understanding of the key UDP dimensions and how they influence UDP adoption, use, and value creation are required. For this purpose, we first identify key UDP dimensions through a literature review. Second, by exploring and discussing their relationships with an expert panel, we develop a framework for understanding value creation through UDPs. By identifying key dimensions of UDP and their effects on value creation through UDP, the proposed framework provides a systematic and comprehensive approach for understanding UDP adoption, use, and value creation. Thereby, this study helps city policymakers and business developers in realizing value from UDPs in city ecosystem