From traditional cities to smart cities

La transformación de ciudades tradicionales a ciudades inteligentes se torna cada vez más importante para los actores que interactúan con ella; Gobierno, entidades públicas y privadas, y ciudadanía en general, además de facilitarse su implementación gracias al desarrollo de las TICs (Tecnologías de la información y la comunicación). Cada proyecto atiende a unas necesidades específicas según las características de la ciudad (grado de desarrollo tecnológico, nivel educativo, nivel de prestación de servicios públicos, número de habitantes, condiciones climáticas y ambientales, entre otras), sin embargo, es posible establecer una metodología general para el desarrollo de esta transformación. El presente artículo desarrolla una propuesta metodológica para la implementación de una Smart City que comprende cinco etapas; análisis de la situación actual, elaboración de un plan de trabajo, formulación estratégica, plan de acción y plan de gestión. Cada una de estas etapas se desarrolla integrando los componentes de infraestructura, tecnologías, procesos y capital humano con el fin de satisfacer los objetivos estratégicos establecidos y en general, generar una mejor calidad de vida para sus habitantes y un ambiente sostenible.The transformation of traditional cities to smart cities becomes increasingly important for the actors that interact with it; government, public and private organizations, and citizens in general, in addition to making easier its implementation thanks to the development of ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies). Each project deals with specific needs according to the city’s characteristics (technological development, educational level, quality of provision of public services, number of inhabitants, climatic and environmental conditions, etc.), how-ever, it is possible to establish a general methodology for developing this trans-formation. The present article develops a methodological proposal for the implementation of a smart city which includes five stages; analysis of current situation, preparation of a work plan, strategic formulation, action plan and management plan. Each stage is developed by integrating components such as infrastructure, technologies, processes and human capital in order to satisfy established strategic objectives and, overall, to create a better quality of life of its inhabitants and a sustainable environment

Enabling technologies and sustainable smart cities

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.5311-8814-F0ED | Sara Maria da Cruz Maia de Oliveira PaivaN/

Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities

Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence (SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety, connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living. At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm and future research directions, including architectural design, service provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

Farm Life in the City - A Taxonomy for Smart Urban Agriculture

With more than half of the global population living in cities, current food production has reached sustainability limits. Urban agriculture has moved from an issue at the edge of public discourse to its center to feed future city dwellers. However, cities are hostile for terrestrial life, jeopardizing the availability of important primary resources, such as air, water, or soil. While smart technologies on traditional farms have accelerated the past years (e.g., autonomous tractors), we know little about their potential and applicability in urban areas. Until today, we have little theoretical insights into smart urban agriculture. We offer a multi-layer taxonomy of smart urban agriculture technologies that contributes to the descriptive knowledge in this field while also elucidating the impact on the transformation of cities towards sustainability

Migrating from traditional grid to smart grid in smart cities promoted in developing country

Smart Grid is a term that encompasses the economic benefits of an intelligent and advanced power grid to reach changing responsibilities related directly to sustainability and energy efficiency. Considering the shortfall of alternative fuels in developed regions, the new smart grids, in order to have access to their environmental hazard, show that the average non-renewable and renewable energy sources can be integrated to reduce environmental disasters to improve production costs significantly. In order to provide reliable, secured, and cost-effective power grid functions, infrastructures can quickly and effectively co-ordinate power-sharing between several renewable energy sources freely accessible and economically demand costs. This article reviews the conceptual model, goals, architecture, potential benefits, and power grid issues with a complete and accurate understanding of the different defenders and people involved in the worldwide region scenario. The article examined energy and transmission issues, including smart grids and grid barriers, comprehensively

ACO-RR: Ant Colony Optimization Ridge Regression in Reuse of Smart City System

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, governments of different countries have been focusing on building smart cities. To build a smart city is a system construction process which not only requires a lot of human and material resources, but also takes a long period of time. Due to the lack of enough human and material resources, it is a key challenge for lots of small and medium-sized cities to develop the intelligent construction, compared with the large cities with abundant resources. Reusing the existing smart city system to assist the intelligent construction of the small and medium-sizes cities is a reasonable way to solve this challenge. Following this idea, we propose a model of Ant Colony Optimization Ridge Regression (ACO-RR), which is a smart city evaluation method based on the ridge regression. The model helps small and medium-sized cities to select and reuse the existing smart city systems according to their personalized characteristics from different successful stories. Furthermore, the proposed model tackles the limitation of ridge parameters’ selection affecting the stability and generalization ability, because the parameters of the traditional ridge regression is manually random selected. To evaluate our model performance, we conduct experiments on real-world smart city data set. The experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the baseline methods, such as support vector machine and neural network