IET Smart Cities最新文献

This article promotes the role and importance of art in the research and making of smart cities. To elucidate the potential of using relational artworks for a more vibrant interaction in the city as well as various visuals in knowledge production and/or implications of overlooking them, a case study of Milton Keynes is presented in the article. Visual comparisons and analysis contributed to making the argument clearer by reflecting on the situation on the ground. Qualitative methods have been used for data collection and analysis, which included interviews, document analysis and on-field observations. The findings were presented under three main sections: Innovation in knowledge production, vocabulary and design, and art in Milton Keynes and Milton Keynes in art. The themes are used to clearly discuss the need for innovative methods in knowledge production and cities making while explaining the benefits of integrating art with science. By reflecting on the benefits of accommodating the need for effective communication, higher engagement and fulfilling experience in research and design of cities, the powers of visual and relational art are unpacked throughout the article. Thus, the role of art is introduced to be beyond that of decoration to help facilitate cities development and production.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for social distancing and improved sanitation to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. In the waste management sector, protecting the safety and health of waste collection labourer has become a priority. In Japan, the labour shortage problem and ageing demography have intensified the need for contactless waste collection technology. This study responds to this need by reviewing the global practice of smart waste collection technologies and observing the situation of the Japanese waste collection system through participant observation. Based on the identified trends and status, the authors developed a contactless waste collection system and tested it on an actual working site. The demonstration showed that the system could safely lift a 700 L waste container containing 212 kg of waste to the collection truck without human contact. Labourers can be reduced from 2 to 1 person to operate the collection truck. This study also discovered the smart bin's potential to motivate the reduction of packaging waste consumption.

Leading digital innovation projects in smart cities requires the right human resources with the right set of competencies. Such requirement is challenging because city managers and built environment professionals are traditionally trained and work in disciplinary and professional silos. This results in a lack of knowledge, abilities, and tools to produce optimal outcomes for communities across multiple sectors. Guided by a socio-technical and multidisciplinary approach, the DC2-CF framework is proposed to help urban planners identify, develop and expand the competencies they need to effectively steer responsible digital innovation and ensure public value creation. The DC2-CF proposes a digital innovation process model to facilitate the delivery of successful urban digital innovation projects based on the lessons learned from working with city digital leaders. In addition, the DC2-CF provides a delivery structure which identifies specific tasks, competencies, and roles necessary to enable the use off the innovation process model in practice and break down the professional silos currently existing in cities. The framework is envisioned to assist city planners in fostering leadership capacity in local authorities and the private sector in digital city development, contributing to enhancing collaborative working and effective public value creation.

City living is the new normal as more than half of the world's population resides in urban areas. How has this transition affected public health and urban planning departments, and how, if at all, are they recognizing its effects in their strategic planning documents? Using publicly available strategic planning documents from public health and urban planning departments among rapidly growing U.S. cities, keyword frequency and keywords-in-context/code frequency analyses were performed to address this question. The results indicated that urban planning departments recognize their city's growth and associated effects more frequently than public health departments. Although not all cities included in the study referenced their rapid population growth in their materials, those that did commonly noted its effects on demographic transition, infrastructure planning, and service delivery. Thus, indicating rapid population growth may impact these areas pertinent to public health and urban planning. Regardless of department, the areas least connected to rapid growth in the documents were budgeting and data; two topics indicated by the literature are important tools to address the effects of rapid population growth, signifying, among other things, the need to better utilize smart city initiatives such as real-time data sharing.

Medical therapists often manage medications to improve therapeutic outcomes for their patients. For senior patients who take multiple drugs to manage various conditions, medication adherence is critical. To provide an immersive and engaging medication reminder experience, the authors propose i-Ware, a smart wearable m-Health (mobile health) device. The system's hardware and software were co-designed to meet non-functional requirements. The model reminds patients to take their medication, and the augmented reality goggles aid those who struggle to manage their medicine. The navigation features help users find their way home, and the audio feature reads out the date and time, useful for patients with low vision. The i-Ware system has the potential for real-world application and can significantly improve medication adherence. As an AR-enabled medicine reminder, i-Ware is an innovative solution for medication management in senior patients.

The environmental monitoring of cultural relics based on wireless sensor networks in museums demands for the transmission and processing of massive data, which in turn leads to problems, such as heavy network traffic, high time delay, and unbalanced node energy consumption. To solve these problems, an energy balanced routing protocol which can minimise the network energy consumption is proposed. The improved swarm intelligence optimisation algorithm which combined particle swarm optimisation with ant colony optimisation is adopted to construct an environmental monitoring system for cultural relics preservation. Simulation results show that the decrease of the path length for data transmission under the proposed algorithm is 2.5% higher than that of other classical algorithms, indicating that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the length of network path and improve the transmission performance of network system. In view of optimisation rounds and simulation time, the energy consumption of the network system under our algorithm is 57.5% less compared with other classical algorithms, and the average residual energy variance is 57.1% less. The cultural relics environmental monitoring system based on the proposed routing protocol has better network load balancing performance.

Smart cities driven by modern technologies are the need of the day to alleviate the urbanisation challenges and improve the overall experience of the citizens. As the role of data-sharing to facilitate systems integration across city sectors for developing smart cities has grown ever so profoundly, there is a need for decentralisation, transparency, and openness in terms of integration of city sectors to have efficient data diffusion among them. This is extremely important as the requirements of smart sustainable cities are open data sharing to allow service providers to better serve the citizens. Blockchain technology offers these characteristics with the extremely important added advantage of maintaining data security via an immutable record. However, the notion of the use of Blockchain for smart sustainable cities is still in the early years and requires extensive efforts to research and test it. In this research, a state-of-the-art review is conducted to explore the usefulness of Blockchain technology in smart sustainable city development with a specific focus on cross-sectoral systems integration, highlighting the gaps in the existing body of knowledge. This leads to the proposal of a novel framework for the use of Blockchain for smart sustainable cities, linking together service providers and citizens.

Rapid economic growth has given rise to the urgent demand for more efficient waste recycling systems. An innovative smart recycling bin is proposed that automatically separates urban waste to increase the recycling rate. Over 1800 recycling waste images were collected and combined with an existing public dataset to train neural network classification models for two embedded systems, one incorporating a Jetson Nano and the other a K210 unit. The model developed reached an accuracy of 93.99% on the Jetson Nano and 94.61% on the K210. A user interface application was also designed to collect feedback from users during their interaction with the smart bin. In terms of power consumption, the system employing the Jetson Nano consumed 4.7 W, representing a 30% reduction in power consumption compared to previous work, while the K210 required just 0.89 W of power to operate. In summary, our work demonstrated a small-scale, fully functional prototype of an energy-efficient, high-accuracy smart recycling bin, with the potential of commercialisation for the purpose of improving urban waste recycling.

The increase in the ageing of the population calls for advanced monitoring and actuation systems for the smart control and management of elderly households that should manage to optimise multi-objective control problems. This study proposes a state-of-art approach, based on Approximate Dynamic Programming, that tackles multiple challenges, aiming to maximise the energy efficiency, the electricity cost reduction, the user comfort, and the load monitoring of a typical Greek residency (simulated in EnergyPlus), including both controllable and uncontrollable loads, an energy storage system, and power generation units. The article presents the various simulated loads, pricing schemes under Greek regulations and variety of control strategies that are co-ordinately used to minimise the defined objective functions in contrast to the current state-of-the-art approaches. The latter either focus on single objective problems or use simpler iterative and often limited to specific variables, approaches for multi-objective control. Finally, the presented results provide insights for the optimal and safe residential management and validate the performance of the proposed control strategy in comparison with alternative demand response strategies, offering improved performance by 20% in terms of energy efficiency, cost reduction, and thermal comfort.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are seen as a solution to reduce transport-related greenhouse gas emissions. A major obstacle to wider adoption is the insufficient amount of charging stations. Furthermore, supplying charging stations with renewable energy is still in its infancy. The selection of optimal locations for charging stations is important to best serve the users and maximise the possibilities of renewable energy use. Given this background, this study developed an approach for Solar-supplied Electric Vehicle Charging Station (EVCS) location selection by combining EVCS and solar farm site selection studies using Geographical Information System (GIS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The study determined the most important criteria for site selection based on previous solar and EVCS site selection studies and expert opinions. The 10 most important criteria according to the survey results were: availability of power, solar energy potential, solar panel installation cost, number of EVs, operation and management costs, land cost, distance from roads/highways, distance from current EVCSs, industrial capability of installation and distance to high population density centres. The importance weights of these criteria were assigned using AHP method. The findings are expected to benefit urban planners, decision-makers, and researchers designing solar-supplied EV charging infrastructure.