Does project portfolio management approach fit smart city management?

Nowadays public administrations have to face many challenges related to Smart City initiatives and must coordinate these projects executing effective Smart City strategies with the adoption of an efficient portfolio management framework. Except for a few aspects, literature about this topic is scarce so this study was carried out as an attempt to evaluate the feasibility of adopting PMI’s Project Portfolio Management methodology to handle Smart City initiatives. A specific survey investigating how much Smart City projects mirror portfolio dynamics has been submitted to experts across the globe and the collected results have been analysed according to our possibilities. Results are twofold: on the one hand, it appears that the Project Portfolio Management approach could be beneficial for managing Smart City project sets, on the other hand, the Project Portfolio Management seems to be a very suitable tool when the Smart City project portfolio is heavily influenced by external stakeholders

Detection and prevention of Denial-of-Service in cloud-based smart grid

Smart Grid (SG), components with historical set of security challenges, becomes more vulnerable because Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has its own share of problems while Cloud infrastructure adds yet another unpredicted layer of threats. Scalability and availability, which are strong aspects of the cloud platform making it attractive to users, also attracts security threats for the same reasons. The malware installed on single host offers very limited scope compared to attack magnitude that compromised Cloud platform can offer. Therefore, the strongest aspect of Cloud itself becomes a nightmare in Cloud-Based SG. A breach in such a delicate system can cause severe consequences including interruption of electricity, equipment damage, data breach, complete blackouts, or even life-threatening consequences. We mimic Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to demonstrate interruption of electricity in SG with open-source solution to co-simulate power and communication systems

Simulating Vehicle Movement and Multi-Hop Connectivity from Basic Safety Messages

The Basic Safety Message (BSM) is a standardized communication packet that is sent every tenth of a second between connected vehicles using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). BSMs contain data about the sending vehicle's state, such as speed, location, and the status of the turn signal. Currently, many BSM datasets are available through the connected vehicle testbeds of U.S. Department of Transportation from all over the country. However, without a proper visualization tool, it is not possible to analyze or visually get an overview of the spatio-temporal distribution of the data. With this goal, a web application has been developed which can ingest a raw BSM dataset and display a time-based simulation of vehicle movement. The simulation also displays multi-hop vehicular network connectivity over DSRC. This paper gives details about the application, including an explanation of the multi-hop partitioning algorithm used to classify the vehicles into separate network partitions. A performance analysis for the simulation is included, in which it is suggested that calculating a connectivity matrix with the multi-hop partitioning algorithm is computationally expensive for large number of vehicles

Smart Cities and Urban Sustainability: two complementary and inter-related concepts

The concept of smart cities constitutes a central issue in the field of spatial planning. Numerous studies have been recorded in the relevant literature concerning the comprehension of the concept as well as the strategies connected to the development of smart cities. In an effort to understand and record the way that smart city strategies influence the objectives of urban sustainability, this paper explores the basic components of their interrelations and underlying connections. Initially, the main concepts of this research, smart cities and urban sustainability, are being clarified and their individual components are analyzed in order to better understand the way they influence urban environment.  In this process it is of particular interest to record the way these two concepts could connect and complement each other to create more efficient spatial planning policies and the role of planners in relevance to the challenges that come with the implementation of a smart city approach. The paper concludes that these two concepts have essentially common goals since smart cities approach is about achieving sustainability, efficiency and high quality of life while technology does not play a prominent but a mediatory role in improving and streamlining processes. Therefore, what makes a city both "smart" and "sustainable" is the creation of processes that with the help of ICTs have the potentiality to make the city operate more effectively in all its areas and at the same time to protect the environment, enhance economic growth and improve quality of life. Other qualitative factors such as changing the citizens’ behavior towards more sustainable patterns are essential to the making of smart-sustainable cities

Distributed software infrastructure for evaluating the integration of photovoltaic systems in urban districts

Nowadays, the adoption of renewable energy sources distributed across the city is crucial for planning and developing the future Smart City. An accurate simulation and modelling of energy sources, such as Photovoltaic Panels (PV), is necessary to evaluate both economical and environmental benefits. With the growth of renewable sources in the city simulations of energy production became crucial for the DSO for evaluating retrofits or for network balancing events. In this paper, we present a software infrastructure for simulating the solar radiation and estimating the energy production of a district. The infrastructure simulates the PV production and evaluates the integration of such systems considering real electricity consumption data. In its core, the proposed solution models the behaviours of PV systems taking into account the digital surface of rooftops and sub-hourly meteorological data (e.g. solar radiation and temperature) to compute real-sky conditions. Then, such information is used to feed a model of the hardware components of PV systems to gain more accurate estimations of energy production in the district in real-sky conditions

Approach to Creating an Information-Control System of Hybrid Power System Simulator

The results of development and experimental investigations of information and control hybrid simulator system of conventional and smart grids are considered in the paper. The fragments of the given system experimental investigation and its software tools are provided. Performed results illustrate the possibilities and features offered to a user and necessary for solution of complex power system design, research and exploitation tasks

Implementasi Arsitektur Microservice pada Aplikasi Web Pengajaran Agama Islam Home Pesantren

Aplikasi web pengajaran agama Islam Home Pesantren adalah aplikasi berbasis web yang dapat digunakan untuk mendapatkan konten-konten pengajaran agama Islam. Dalam tahap pengembangan, aplikasi web Home Pesantren menggunakan arsitektur monolitik. Dengan arsitektur tersebut, seluruh struktur proyek ditempatkan dalam satu tempat yang sama. Selain itu, arsitektur monolitik yang diterapkan pada aplikasi web Home Pesantren memiliki kesulitan dalam skalabilitas, karena arsitektur tersebut mengharuskan keseluruhan proyek untuk ditingkatkan ketika kebutuhan skalabilitas menjadi tinggi. Tentu saja, penggunaan sumber daya akan menjadi tidak efisien. Penerapan arsitektur microservice diharapkan dapat meningkatkan modularitas serta kemudahan skalabilitas aplikasi. Penerapan arsitektur microservice akan didukung dengan HTTP dan event driven communication sebagai jembatan intercommunication antar microservice. Serta pengunaan tools docker swarm diharapkan dapat membantu penerapan microservice sehingga skalabilitas dapat dicapai dengan lebih mudah.Kata Kunci: Microservice, arsitektur, aplikasi web, skalabilita