scholarly journals Sensors for Sustainable Smart Cities: A Review

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 8198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio A. Ramírez-Moreno ◽  
Sajjad Keshtkar ◽  
Diego A. Padilla-Reyes ◽  
Edrick Ramos-López ◽  
Moisés García-Martínez ◽  
...  

Experts confirm that 85% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. Therefore, cities should be prepared to satisfy the needs of their citizens and provide the best services. The idea of a city of the future is commonly represented by the smart city, which is a more efficient system that optimizes its resources and services, through the use of monitoring and communication technology. Thus, one of the steps towards sustainability for cities around the world is to make a transition into smart cities. Here, sensors play an important role in the system, as they gather relevant information from the city, citizens, and the corresponding communication networks that transfer the information in real-time. Although the use of these sensors is diverse, their application can be categorized in six different groups: energy, health, mobility, security, water, and waste management. Based on these groups, this review presents an analysis of different sensors that are typically used in efforts toward creating smart cities. Insights about different applications and communication systems are provided, as well as the main opportunities and challenges faced when making a transition to a smart city. Ultimately, this process is not only about smart urban infrastructure, but more importantly about how these new sensing capabilities and digitization developments improve quality of life. Smarter communities are those that socialize, adapt, and invest through transparent and inclusive community engagement in these technologies based on local and regional societal needs and values. Cyber security disruptions and privacy remain chief vulnerabilities.

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Elena Laudante

The paper focuses on the importance of robotics and artificial intelligence inside of the new urban contexts in which it is possible to consider and enhance the different dimensions of quality of life such as safety and health, environmental quality, social connection and civic participation. Smart technologies help cities to meet the new challenges of society, thus making them more livable, attractive and responsive in order to plan and to improve the city of the future. In accordance with the Agenda 2030 Program for sustainable development that intends the inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable city, the direction of growth and prosperity of urban environments is pursued by optimizing the use of resources and respecting the environment. In the current society, robotic technology is proposed as a tool for innovation and evolution in urban as well as industrial and domestic contexts. On the one hand the users-citizens who participate dynamically in the activities and on the other the new technological systems integrated in the urban fabric. Existing urban systems that are “amplified” of artificial and digital intelligence and give life to smart cities, physical places that allow new forms of coexistence between humans and robots in order to implement the level of quality of life and define “human centered” innovative solutions and services thus responding to the particular needs of people in an effective and dynamic way. The current city goes beyond the definition of smart city. In fact, as said by Carlo Ratti, it becomes a "senseable city", a city capable of feeling but also sensitive and capable of responding to citizens who define the overall performance of the city. The multidisciplinary approach through the dialogue between designers, architects, engineers and urban planners will allow to face the new challenges through the dynamics of robot integration in the urban landscape. The cities of the future, in fact, will be pervaded by autonomous driving vehicles, robotized delivery systems and light transport solutions, in response to the new concept of smart mobility, on a human scale, shared and connected mobility in order to improve management and control of the digitized and smart city. Automation at constant rates as the keystone for urban futures and new models of innovative society. Through the identification of representative case studies in the field of innovative systems it will be possible to highlight the connections between design, smart city and "urban" robotics that will synergically highlight the main "desirable" qualities of life in the city as a place of experimentation and radical transformations. In particular, parallel to the new robotic solutions and human-robot interactions, the design discipline will be responsible for designing the total experience of the user who lives in synergy with the robots, thus changing the socio-economic dynamics of the city.


2020 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 05002
Author(s):  
Chaitanya Gokhale

To take the initiative of smart cities to new heights is a responsibility of every citizen. Bona fide progress will be seen when people's approach towards their city will change through awareness and education about the prevalent systems. This paper focuses on improving the cultural aspects of a smart city, especially visually, and on improving governance with reference to the 21st century. A majority of the information deals with the must-haves of smart city, later moving on to more specific problems. In the following paper, evaluation, analysis, ideas, innovative solutions along with comparisons and examples from life have been suggested with a view of enhancing the pre-existent, and further developing the cultural infrastructure of a smart city. This is proposed in a way that will help old traditions and historical heritage keep pace with modernism and other urban developments in the age of internet without changing their essence. This, in turn, will lead to touristic developments. Attention has also been paid to heritage restoration and its methods. Special focus has been given to the aesthetics of proposed, self-designed signage systems of the city. It is hoped that the insights presented herewith encourage greater enthusiasm towards art and encourage appreciation towards the culture and heritage of a smart city. This will add value to the quality of life of its citizens.


Author(s):  
C. Ellul ◽  
V. Coors ◽  
S. Zlatanova ◽  
R. Laurini ◽  
M. Rumor

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Simply defined, a Smart City is a city overlaid by a digital layer, which is used for the governance of the city. A Smart City uses intelligent technology to enhance our quality of life in urban environments, bringing together people and data from disparate sources such as sensors, demographics, topographic and 3D mapping, Building Information Models and many more. Increasingly, Smart Cities use this data in a variety of ways, to address key challenges related to transportation, communications, air quality, noise, well-being of the citizens, decision making relating to education and health and urban planning, as well as in relation to initiatives such as startups and fostering economic growth and employment within the city. As more data becomes available, the challenges of storing, managing and integrating such data are also multiplied.</p><p> This increasing interest in Smart Cities world-wide, along with a growing understanding of the importance of integrating “Smart” data with other data and wider applications for the benefit of citizens, made the choice of hosting the third Smart Data, Smart Cities conference in Delft – in conjunction with three other conferences – a very natural one. Together the four conferences were held during the week of 1st–5th October 2018, and alongside SDSC participants were invited to attend the ISPRS Technical Commission IV Symposium, the 13th 3D GeoInfo Conference and the 6th International FIG Workshop on 3D Cadastres. Participant interaction – and the ability to attend sessions across the four events – was particularly encouraged. SDSC 2018 itself was organised by the Urban Data Management Society (UDMS www.udms.net), ISPRS and TU Delft (the Delft University of Technology), and Professor Volker Coors Chaired the SDSC committee.</p><p> As in previous years, three key conference themes were proposed to represent the Smart Cities: <b>Smart Data</b> (sensor network databases, on-the-fly data mining, geographic and urban knowledge modeling and engineering, green computing, urban data analytics and big data, big databases and data management), <b>Smart People</b> (volunteered information, systems for public participation) and <b>Smart Cities</b> (systems of territorial intelligence, systems for city intelligence management,3D modeling of cities, internet of things, social networks, monitoring systems, mobility and transportation, smart-city-wide telecommunications infrastructure, urban knowledge engineering, urban dashboard design and implementation, new style of urban decision-making systems, geovisualization devoted to urban problems, disaster management systems).</p><p> This volume consists of 18 papers, which were selected from 34 submissions on the basis of double blind review, with each paper being reviewed by a minimum of three reviewers. These papers present novel research concerning the use of spatial information and communication technologies in Smart Cities, addressing different aspects of Smart Data and Smart Citizens. The selected papers tackle different aspects of Smart Cities: 3D; Citizen Engagement; transport, sustainable mobility; dashboards and web GIS; citizen engagement and participation; sensors; urban decision making.</p><p> The editors are grateful to the members of the Scientific Committee for their time and valuable comments, which contributed to the high quality of the papers. Reviews were contributed by: Giorgio Agugiaro, Maria Antoniabrovelli, Ken Arroyoohori, Martina Baucic, Michela Bertolotto, Pawel Boguslawski, Azedine Boulmakoul, Caesar Cardenas, Ofelia Cervantes, Volker Coors, Isabel Cruz, Vincenzo Delfatto, Claire Ellul, Tarun Ghawana, Gesquiere Gilles, Gerhard Groeger, Eberhard Gulch, Jan-Henrik Haunert, Stephen Hirtle, Umit Isikdag, Martin Kada, Snjezana Knezic, Robert Laurini, Liu Liu, Ed Manley, Viviana Mascardi, Marco Minghini, Raul Monroy, Regina Motz, Beniamino Murgante, Marco Painho, Dev Paudyal, Alenka Poplin, Ivana Racetin, Ismail Rakip Karas, Preston Rodrigues, David Sol, Wei Tu, Wei Tu, Genoveva Vargas, Kavita Vemuri, Edward Verbree, Mingshu Wang, Maribel Yasminasantos, Sisi Zlatanova. We are also grateful to the work of the local organising committee at TU Delft, without whom this conference would not have been possible. ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume IV-4/W7, 2018 3rd International Conference on Smart Data and Smart Cities, 4–5 October 2018, Delft, The Netherlands</p>


Author(s):  
Baiba RIVŽA ◽  
Ligita ĀZENA

There are two widely used “smart” concepts, often considered to be synonymous with one another - “smart city” and “smart specialisation”. The origin and initial meaning of each concept is different, although there are certain similarities. On the city level, multiple policy initiatives are oriented towards the concept of a “smart city”, which originally developed around the ICT infrastructure as a means to connect cities and thus provide opportunity for development. Recently the term “smart” has also found its way in regional policy. Therefore, it is necessary to interpret both concepts in a wider sense not limiting them only to meanings associated with technology. There is an empirical connection between smart specialisation development (in a wider sense) and introduction of smart cities (in a wider sense). But it does not mean that all regions (especially those with low manufacturing development index) should follow a strategy of research and development and/or hi-tech manufacturing. Smart development is a multi-dimensional concept, consisting of sustainable economic growth and sustainable city or regional development, based on the advantages of sustainable competition. It is also perceived as means to increase overall quality of life. This means that social and environmental capital also plays an important role together with infrastructural and ICT development.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (30 (1)) ◽  
pp. 61-70
Author(s):  
Darie Gavrilut ◽  
Diana Teodora Trip ◽  
Carmen Florina Fagadar ◽  
Daniel Badulescu

The term smart city is often associated with the desire for accelerated modernization of space and urban social interactions, especially based on Information and Communications Technologies. Smart cities are creative and sustainable areas that bring improvements on the quality of life, a friendlier environment and where the prospects of/for economic development are stronger. Such cities are to be considered as the sum of the various improvements in urban infrastructure, the quality of services provided to citizens, the operational costs of public administration. Romania has several key cities that have begun their pivot from regular and only digitized cities, to smart cities. According to information from the Romanian Smart City Association (ARSC), in 2018, at Romanian national level, 24 cities could be considered smart, the following cities being most visible in terms of how many projects have been undertaken so as to develop a smart city: Alba Iulia city has 60 such projects, Cluj-Napoca city has 10, Arad has 9, Sibiu and Oradea each have 8 projects, and Bucharest has started six such projects. At 2020 level, we notice an increase in the number of projects in the following way: Alba-Iulia now has 106 projects, Cluj-Napoca has 54 projects, Timisoara 26, Arad and Iasi have each 19 projects, Brasov and Bucuresti (Sector 4) have 18 projects each, Oradea 17, Sibiu 15, and Piatra Neamț 15 projects. The main areas of interest being Smart Mobility, Smart Governance, Smart Living, Smart Economy, Smart Environment, and Smart People. Having set goals of cutting energy costs by 30% in the field of public transportation and an increase of 45% in terms of innovation products that are to be sourced locally, the city of Oradea has attracted project worth 369 million euros, and this entire sum has been achieved through EU funded grants.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Salma Mohamed Al Sulaiti

Various countries across the globe have implemented smart city initiatives to enhance the quality of living (QoL) for their citizens and other frequent users by offering smart services and innovative solutions. However, in many cases, end-users are often neglected during the planning, designing, and implementation phases of smart cities, which can impact the success of locally-based initiatives because their needs are not always fully taken into consideration. This research aims at exploring the approach of citizen-centricity in smart cities, define their key components, investigate the gap and challenges as perceived by citizens, users, and developers, and propose strategic recommendations for ways to enhance the QoL in Msheireb Smart City (MSC). The primary research was conducted to investigate citizens’ satisfaction, experience, usage of services, and to collect their feedback on areas of improvements in MSC. The results show that MSC’s users had low level of awareness about the smart services offered in the city, which resulted in less frequent use of the services. Based on this research, the strategic recommendations advise that smart city decision-makers should recognize citizens’ needs and preferences by implementing a customer relationship management strategy, promote citizens’ inclusion and engagement by establishing a citizen-centric inclusion strategy, and improve their awareness and usage of services by implementing a marketing campaign strategy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 155014771985398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben Sánchez-Corcuera ◽  
Adrián Nuñez-Marcos ◽  
Jesus Sesma-Solance ◽  
Aritz Bilbao-Jayo ◽  
Rubén Mulero ◽  
...  

The introduction of the Information and Communication Technologies throughout the last decades has created a trend of providing daily objects with smartness, aiming to make human life more comfortable. The paradigm of Smart Cities arises as a response to the goal of creating the city of the future, where (1) the well-being and rights of their citizens are guaranteed, (2) industry and (3) urban planning is assessed from an environmental and sustainable viewpoint. Smart Cities still face some challenges in their implementation, but gradually more research projects of Smart Cities are funded and executed. Moreover, cities from all around the globe are implementing Smart City features to improve services or the quality of life of their citizens. Through this article, (1) we go through various definitions of Smart Cities in the literature, (2) we review the technologies and methodologies used nowadays, (3) we summarise the different domains of applications where these technologies and methodologies are applied (e.g. health and education), (4) we show the cities that have integrated the Smart City paradigm in their daily functioning and (5) we provide a review of the open research challenges. Finally, we discuss about the future opportunities for Smart Cities and the issues that must be tackled in order to move towards the cities of the future.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4511
Author(s):  
Martin Bauer ◽  
Luis Sanchez ◽  
JaeSeung Song

For the last decade the Smart City concept has been under development, fostered by the growing urbanization of the world’s population and the need to handle the challenges that such a scenario raises. During this time many Smart City projects have been executed–some as proof-of-concept, but a growing number resulting in permanent, production-level deployments, improving the operation of the city and the quality of life of its citizens. Thus, Smart Cities are still a highly relevant paradigm which needs further development before it reaches its full potential and provides robust and resilient solutions. In this paper, the focus is set on the Internet of Things (IoT) as an enabling technology for the Smart City. In this sense, the paper reviews the current landscape of IoT-enabled Smart Cities, surveying relevant experiences and city initiatives that have embedded IoT within their city services and how they have generated an impact. The paper discusses the key technologies that have been developed and how they are contributing to the realization of the Smart City. Moreover, it presents some challenges that remain open ahead of us and which are the initiatives and technologies that are under development to tackle them.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 435
Author(s):  
Emanuele Bellini ◽  
Pierfrancesco Bellini ◽  
Daniele Cenni ◽  
Paolo Nesi ◽  
Gianni Pantaleo ◽  
...  

Today, the complexity of urban systems combined with existing and emerging threats constrains administrations to consider smart technologies and related huge amounts of data generated as a means to take timely and informed decisions. The smart city needs to be prepared for both expected and unexpected situations, and the possibility to mitigate the effect of the uncertainty behind the causes of disruptions through the analysis of all the possible data generated by the city open new possibility for resilience operationalization. This article aims at introducing a new conceptualization for resilience and presenting an innovative full stack solution to exploit Internet of Everything (IoE) and big multimedia data in smart cities to manage resilience of urban transport systems (UTS), which is one of the most critical infrastructures of the city. The approach is based on a novel data driven approach to resilience engineering and functional resonance analysis method (FRAM), to understand and model an UTS in the context of smart cities and to support evidence driven decision making. The paper proposes an architecture taking into account: (a) different kinds of available data generated in the smart city, (b) big data collection and semantic aggregation and enrichment; (c) data sense-making process composed by analytics of different data sources like social media, communication networks, IoT, user behavior; (d) tools for knowledge driven decisions able to combine different information generated by analytics, experience, and structural information of the city into a comprehensive and evidence driven decision model. The solution has been applied in Florence metropolitan city in the context of RESOLUTE H2020 research project of the European Commission.


Author(s):  
Иванова Ольга ◽  

The article is devoted to the study of the processes of formation of "smart" cities in Russia. The relevance of the topic is due to the need of society to renew cities, improve the quality of urban space, its ability to ensure the sustainable functioning of the city and the provision of urban services, and strengthen competitiveness. The study on the example of Yekaterinburg highlighted barriers to the introduction of "smart" solutions in the city space, which prevent the launch of processes of complex implementation of the concept "Smart City," justified recommendations for their elimination. The methodological basis of the study is based on theoretical provisions of innovation economy, strategic management, regional and spatial economy. The results of the analysis can be useful to students of higher education, postgraduate students, research scientists, specialists engaged in the development of projects for smart cities, state and municipal employees, as well as other interested persons.


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