IET Smart Cities最新文献

This article explores ways to leverage city data in smart cities and how data virtualisation can help overcome some of the barriers and create new opportunities for data usage. By combining data sources, data virtualisation can help overcome technical and regulatory challenges, and create new value. The topic was approached from three perspectives: the exploitation of city data, the potential for data virtualisation to utilise city data, and the detection of gaps for future use of city data. Finnish cities are interested in utilisation of the rich data they have within the city and new data that is gathered by different actors. However, there is a gap between the potential and the current situation. When city data is generated continuously from different functions, the scattered data storages can be utilised efficiently with data virtualisation. The city itself, commercial operators, governments and individuals all benefit about the deeper understanding of city functions. Sharing data from different systems and sectors creates opportunities for measuring also other but financial benefits. In the case of city bicycles studied in the city of Kuopio, expanded usage of the bicycles was seen as benefiting citizens' wellbeing and health.

Transition to net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from urban transport requires strategies improving energy efficiency and contributing to energy conservation. Efficiency gains can be achieved via combination of new technologies, such as electrification, connectivity, and automation. Energy conservation focuses on reducing the total miles travelled by private cars. Supporting modal shift to public transport (PT) is the essential element of that strategy. It starts with policy support enabling time and space prioritisation of PT vehicles. Next, the emerging technologies can optimise performance and comfort of PT vehicles by making the best use of the assigned resources. This article shows how these technologies can reduce GHG emissions directly, as well as indirectly by making PT an attractive choice boosting patronage. A case study illustrating the improvement of the environmental performance of full hybrid buses via connectivity and geofencing is given.

The transformation into smart cities is imminent to meet the rising number of urban problems and challenges. Digital technologies offer great potential to develop smart solutions, especially in the areas of public administration, energy, infrastructure and mobility. For the successful diffusion, the acceptance of the individual is a crucial part, which can be addressed by an immersive experience along with the personal collection of insights of the innovation. However, at the same time a paradox arises as many new developments are still in the making and therefore, are not yet available to the public. Immersive virtualisation technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) offer great potential to solve this problem. In this study, the usability of VR technology to address individual's innovation barriers in general and to explore the use of emerging digital twin cities (DTC) is analysed, as they provide an ideal basis for the customised creation of immersive VR-applications. Although several themes and applications regarding the potential of DTCs have been addressed in literature, their explicit use in the field of acceptance research has not been pursued. Therefore, a new methodology is introduced and first implementations and results are presented and discussed.

A smart city provides diverse services based on real-time data obtained from different devices deployed in urban areas. These devices are largely battery-powered and widely placed. Therefore, providing continuous energy to these devices and ensuring their efficient sensing and communications are critical for the wide deployment of smart cities. To achieve frequent and effective data exchange, advanced enabling information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure is in urgent demand. An ideal network in future smart cities should be capable of sensing the physical environment and intelligently mapping the digital world. Therefore, in this paper, we propose design guidelines on how to integrate communications with sensing, computing and/or energy harvesting in the context of smart cities, aiming to offer research insights on developing integrated communications, sensing, computing and energy harvesting (ICSCE) for promoting the development ICT infrastructure in smart cities. To put these four pillars of smart cities together and to take advantage of ever-increasing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the authors propose a promising AI-enabled ICSCE architecture by leveraging the digital twin network. The proposed architecture models the physical deep neural network-aided ICSCE system in a virtual space, where offline training is performed by using the collected real-time data from the environment and physical devices.

Most studies in the literature aim to discuss and examine the technologies in smart cities. Much less is known about the dynamics of their acceptance by citizens. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review of studies examining the acceptance of smart city technologies (SCTs), focussing particularly on Technology User Acceptance Models (TAM). Using a novel framework of SCTs based on the technology visibility and citizen interaction, we categorise them as individual-based explicit SCTs, collective-purpose explicit SCTs, digitising SCTs, and infrastructure SCTs. We assess that studies about citizen acceptation of SCTs have been mainly focussed on individual technologies. Also, the review shows that the field is nascent and fragmented, and that a wide variety of variables have been used to predict the adoption of individual-based explicit SCTs, with the classic ones of TAM (perceived use and perceived usefulness) unmistakably being relevant in the smart city context as well. As a result of the fragmentation of the field, our review was not yet able to identify generalisable knowledge about the acceptance of the smart city and its technologies by citizens. We end with some suggestions for future research approaches and designs.

Smart cities equipped with intelligent devices can enhance the lifestyle and quality of humans by automatically and collaboratively acting as a sustainable resource to the ecosystem. In addition, the technological advancement can be further empowered by interconnecting various types of technologies, such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, drones and robotics which will clearly improve the Quality of Services, energy efficiency and connectivity to the overall system. The integration of drones hovering over smart cities with the other devices in the smart city network brings a lot of benefits. However, it can also lead to various security and privacy concerns in the network. The aim of this article is to put forward a secure and safe smart city communication environment by proposing a trust establishment scheme for the ad hoc Unmanned Aerial Vehicles network. In which, malicious devices can be traced and blocked by analysing and evaluating their historical interactions within the system and calculating their trust values. A behaviour-based and local trust value scheme is used to analyse the trust of each communicating device that is further associated with a blockchain distributed ledger. The proposed mechanism is measured over various networking and security metrics, including throughput, latency, accuracy and block updating compared to the existing state-of-the-art solutions.

The continuous development of modern information and communication technologies is driving the smart revolution in the global education system. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has recently posed unprecedented challenges to educational institutes. The education informatisation technologies are playing a vital role to ensure the continuity and enhance the performance of education during the pandemic, which accelerates the integration of cutting-edge technologies and thus the overall development of the smart campus. Alongside the technological advancement, the existing studies indicate that the success of smart campus development mainly depends on three key dimensions: technology capability, sustainability, and student health and well-being. However, the state-of-the-art assessment on smart campus are mostly unilaterally dependent but lack a balanced evaluation of the three dimensions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a hybrid assessment framework that integrates all three key aspects, aiming to provide a multi-dimensional view of campus smartness for human-centred sustainable development. The smart campus assessment index resulting from the proposed framework is constructed under a limiting factor formulation to jointly model the individual contributions from the three dimensions as well as their trade-off relationship. The contribution from each dimension is the weighted normalised sum of a set of precisely selected indicators. A case study is also conducted on the historical data of a US university to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the assessment index in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which also demonstrates the rationality of the hybrid framework for smart campus assessment.

It is presumed that rapidly growing ‘hot cities’ adapt their planning and operations to meet their evolving population's needs. These presumptions inspired the development of the following mixed-method, convergent parallel study. Data from urban planning officials across nine rapidly growing ‘hot cities’ were collected through pre-interview surveys and qualitative key-informant interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify salient issues regarding awareness and perception of rapid population growth and the resulting response from their departments. Results indicate two main themes; Multidimensional Strain and Mitigation Strategies describe city experiences with rapid population growth effects and response. Across cities, urban planners expressed similar experiences of stress on land usage, housing, transportation, programing, and service delivery. Similar response patterns included evaluation and innovation of growth management strategies, enhanced collaboration, and equity considerations. This snapshot of rapid population growth repercussions and current city mitigation strategies may have future implications for public health and urban planning administrators in practice. Results shared also indicate how population data use and sharing can support Mitigation Strategies and impact community health.

There are many indexes and ranking bodies on Smart Cities. However, most of these rankings have their own specific evaluation criteria and ranking methodologies. Currently, there are no uniformly and universally accepted methods for comprehensive and fair evaluation of smart cities. This is a problem as no ranking is widely accepted and universally agreed upon. This not only creates chaos but also confusion as to what indexes to follow. In this paper, 6 current smart city indexes (IMD-SUTD Smart City Index, AT Kearney Global Cities Index, IESE Cities in Motion Index, EasyPark Cities of the Future Index, Mori-Foundation Global Power City Index and Smart EcoCity Index) produced by major organisations are examined, discussed, and compared. Commonalities and differences are highlighted, revealing insights into the accuracy, comprehensiveness, shortcomings, acceptance and usage of these indexes and rankings. Finally, new evaluation factors are suggested and the rationale behind them are provided, in addition to the essential 8 criteria of economy, governance, technology, health, transport, environment, living and sustainability.