Requirements for smart cities: Results from a systematic review of literature

Abstract

Smart cities are gaining increasingly more importance in both research and business circles. Much effort is spent to defining what a smart city is and how it could be realized with today's or future technologies. However, from requirements engineering perspective, our knowledge of smart cities is fragmented; little is known about the requirements for smart cities as complex systems, or as systems of systems, in specific application domains. In this paper, we elicit requirements for smart city systems by carrying out a systematic review of scientific literature focused on the so-called “hard” domains of smart cities. Based on 32 selected publications, we gathered and classified requirements in respect to three types of smart city systems (instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent systems) and four classes of requirements: end-to-end experience, architectural, security, and infrastructure requirements. Our most important findings are that: (1) most authors took a bottom-up approach to defining requirements for smart cities; their efforts focused mainly on requirements important for designing an architecture that could scale up to any size and include any device or system; and (2) very little is mentioned on the newly emerging security and privacy challenges that are critical to gain the citizens' acceptance of smart city apps.