Using a Smart City IoT to Incentivise and Target Shifts in Mobility Behaviour-Is It a Piece of Pie?

The work presented in this paper is a central part of the research and development in the SUNSET project (contract No. 270228), supported by the 7th Framework Research Program funded by the European Commission. The authors also acknowledge the support of other SUNSET consortium members in helping to create and evaluate the SUNSET tripzoom system

Ontology-based Model of a Smart City

The city environment is a complex, dynamic and distributed system. Effective management of the city environment presents a major challenge for a smart city. Effective city management must seek to improve urban infrastructure while minimising the costs, to stimulate innovations in different industries and to improve the quality of life for citizens. To create an adequate model of city’s environment structure it is necessary to analyse all the city’s components that influence the city environment management and to define data flows between these components. The most effective tool for representation of knowledge about the city environment, its components and relationships between them is the organisation of information in the form of an ontology-based model. In this paper we would like to introduce a novel ontology-based model for the smart city that includesdefinitions of entities and their properties, classes and their attributes and relationships between them. Such ontology enables us to use a knowledge base for the smart city as a basis of the decision-making support system for smart city management

An analysis to investigate spatial cognitive factors which influence cycling patterns in Johannesburg

Abstract: Cycling in most African cities is done as either a mode of commuting or for recreational purposes. Apart from Smart cities encouraging a shift from cars to public transport by providing efficient last-mile connections, commuter cycling can take a significant share of end-to-end short distance trips. The ultimate realization of cycling merits by urban dwellers, (such as in Johannesburg, South Africa) is hindered by a lack of appropriate data to aid in understanding the dynamics of cycling behaviour. This paper seeks to be the first step in building a multi-model to govern the use of multi-modes of mobility in the city by initial focusing on promoting NMT usage as a mode of commuting in the city. Identification of these factors would go a long way in improving cycling uptake as well as inform policy strategies for non-motorized transportation in the city. Using an analytical approach, the authors conducted a survey along pre-known locations were cyclist choose to cycle. One route with newly developed cycling infrastructure and another without cycling infrastructure. A self-reported travel behaviour form, was used for the collection of spatial cognitive and attitudinal data on participants’ travel environment, attitude, behaviour, norm, intention, and habit was utilized to gather data to understand cyclist cognitive reasoning for choosing one path over another. The data collected from the survey was then overlaid with Strava Metro cycling data showing locations were cyclist prefer to cycle in the city. Findings from the analysis suggest perceived safe routes and routes that maximize health benefits are preferred. Based on the findings it is recommended that planners need to use crowd sourced data before developing infrastructure for cycling the city

Exploring Fuzzy Logic and Random Forest for Car Drivers’ Fuel Consumption Estimation in IoT-Enabled Serious Games

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have a promising potential for instructional serious games related to field operations. We explore IoT’s potential for serious games in the automotive application domain to improve driving, choosing fuel consumption (FC) as an indicator of the driver performance as it is strongly influenced by driving styles and can be quantified and validated. We propose a FC prediction model, exploiting three vehicular signals that are controllable by the driver (player), that are able to provide direct coaching feedback to the driver and are easily available through the widely available On-Board Diagnostic-II (OBD-II) vehicular interface: throttle position, engine rotation speed (RPM) and car speed. We processed the data with two techniques, random forest (RF) and fuzzy logic (FL). Implementation, training and testing of both models, were made using the enviroCar database which freely provides a significant amount of naturalistic drive data. Results show that RF achieves quite a higher estimation accuracy, which complements FL’s ability to provide driver with easily understandable feedback. We thus argue that the combination of the two models can supply valuable information usable by game designers in the automotive environment

Integrated Sensor Systems for Smart Cities

Smart cities are ubiquitous topic today, and emerge as preferred concept for future development of human lifestyle. In the international literature, there are only a few articles dealing critically with the topic of the smart cities, and even fewer of them are interdisciplinary. Integrated sensor systems are a prerequisite for developing the concept of smart cities in practice because individual sensors can hardly meet the demands of the smart cities for complex information. This paper provides an overview of the theoretical concept of smart cities and the integrated sensor systems. The article promotes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the smart cities, where geomatics should also contribute due to the fact that most of the information has a spatial component

Gamification of E-Participation: A Literature Review

Gamification is one of the most commonly employed approaches for motivating individuals to participate in several types of activities. One of its largest application areas has been e-participation (i.e. citizen engagement in policy-making). Even though the required ICT infrastructure to facilitate e- participation mostly exists today, the focus of the problem has shifted towards humans; citizens are not motivated enough to participate. Gamification is a potential approach to increase motivation towards e- participation. However, currently there is a dearth in our understanding of how gamification is being applied and researched as well as what kinds of result there exist from gamification. The aim of this paper is to synthesize research and findings on gamified e-participation, providing directions for future research in this area