Preliminary Study on Evaluation of Smart-Cities Technologies and Proposed UV Lifestyles

Abstract

Our current society is facing challenges in both sustainability and environmental pollution due to fast urbanization, limited resources, and increasing senior population. Smart cities which aim to increase efficiency and convenience would not be able to solve fundamental challenges caused by urban lifestyles. In 2013, the Universal Village concept was proposed to enhance human-nature harmony through prudent use of technologies and to address the eco-challenges due to fast urbanization.This paper first studies the environmental implications due to urban lifestyles and proposes the suitable UV framework and detailed content of universal village lifestyle in order to address the eco-challenges. The paper then evaluates the development of current smart city technologies and assesses their validity with regard to the concept of Universal Village through systematic studies of several major intelligent systems.Specifically, this paper discusses the subject of connectivity from four perspectives: mutual interaction, feedback loop, dynamic information loop, and material cycle. The paper evaluates whether information feedback loops could be formed for these major systems, and also explores the mutual interaction and dependence among the seemingly independent major systems. We discover that mutual interaction connects the aforementioned systems into an interconnected network and naturally forms dynamic information loops in which the decision of one system may be the required input of another system or vice versa. This implies that proper functioning of these systems requires extensive information sharing among them. One event might dynamically trigger different events. The last connectivity is a material cycle. We explore the whole life cycle of products, including impact from lifestyle, customers’ need, product design, cloud manufacturing, sale channel, feedback collection from customers, reuse and recycling, scrapping, to final waste-disposal, etc., and study how to reduce the demand for resource and waste during the procedure. The idea is to include the perspective of UV lifestyle when designing products: considering the possibility in proactively reducing the need, sharing a product with different people, reusing product parts into the manufacturing, recycling reusable components of finished products before the products’ being fully disassembled, etc. The advantage is to reduce the need for products and to avoid manufacturing the same components from raw materials directly, which demands less resource.In summary, connectivity, as discussed from the four perspectives, would greatly contribute to the effectiveness and efficiency of our connected smart systems. Dynamic information loop helps coordinate resource allocation, decreases the collective costs, and reduces demand of natural resources from the natural environment, resulting in less damage to the environment which ultimately enhances system-wide harmony between human and its natural environment, and leads to human happiness in general.