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Modern cities require a tighter integration with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for bringing new services to the citizens. The Smart City is the revolutionary paradigm aiming at integrating the ICT with the citizen life; among several urban services, transports are one of the most important in modern cities, introducing several challenges to the Smart City paradigm. In order to satisfy the stringent requirements of new vehicular applications and services, Edge Computing (EC) is one of the most promising technologies when integrated into the Vehicular Networks (VNs). EC-enabled VNs can facilitate new latency-critical and data-intensive applications and services. However, ground-based EC platforms (i.e., Road Side Units—RSUs, 5G Base Stations—5G BS) can only serve a reduced number of Vehicular Users (VUs), due to short coverage ranges and resource shortage. In the recent past, several new aerial platforms with integrated EC facilities have been deployed for achieving global connectivity. Such air-based EC platforms can complement the ground-based EC facilities for creating a futuristic VN able to deploy several new applications and services. The goal of this work is to explore the possibility of creating a novel joint air-ground EC platform within a VN architecture for helping VUs with new intelligent applications and services. By exploiting most modern technologies, with particular attention towards network softwarization, vehicular edge computing, and machine learning, we propose here three possible layered air-ground EC-enabled VN scenarios. For each of the discussed scenarios, a list of the possible challenges is considered, as well possible solutions allowing to overcome all or some of the considered challenges. A proper comparison is also done, through the use of tables, where all the proposed scenarios, and the proposed solutions, are discussed.

One of the main concerns of the last century is regarding the air pollution and its effects caused on human health. Its impact is particularly evident in cities and urban areas where governments are trying to mitigate its effects. Although different solutions have been already proposed, citizens continue to report bad conditions in the areas in which they live. This paper proposes a solution to support governments in monitoring the city pollution through the combination of user feedbacks/reports and real-time data acquired through dedicated mobile IoT sensors dynamically re-located by government officials to verify the reported conditions of specific areas. The mobile devices leverage on dedicated sensors to monitor the air quality and capture main roads traffic conditions through machine learning techniques. The system exposes a mobile application and a website to support the collection of citizens’ reports and show gathered data to both institutions and end-users. A proof-of-concept of the proposed solution has been prototyped in a medium-sized university campus. Both the performance and functional validation have demonstrated the feasibility and the effectiveness of the system and allowed the definition of some lessons learned, as well as future works.

Many innovative services are emerging based on the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, aiming at fostering better sustainability of our cities. New solutions integrating Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) with sustainable transport media are encouraged by several public administrations in the so-called Smart City scenario, where heterogeneous users in city roads call for safer mobility. Among several possible applications, recently, there has been a lot of attention on the so-called Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), such as pedestrians or bikers. They can be equipped with wearable sensors that are able to communicate their data through a chain of devices towards the cloud for agile and effective control of their mobility. This work describes a complete end-to-end IoT system implemented through the integration of different complementary technologies, whose main purpose is to monitor the information related to road users generated by wearable sensors. The system has been implemented using an ESP32 micro-controller connected to the sensors and communicating through a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) interface with an Android device, which is assumed to always be carried by any road user. Based on this, we use it as a gateway node, acting as a real-time asynchronous publisher of a Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol chain. The MQTT broker is configured on a Raspberry PI device and collects sensor data to be sent to a web-based control panel that performs data monitoring and processing. All the architecture modules have been implemented through open-source technologies. The analysis of the BLE packet exchange has been carried out by resorting to the Wireshark packet analyzer. In addition, a feasibility analysis has been carried out by showing the capability of the proposed solution to show the values gathered through the sensors on a remote dashboard. The developed system is publicly available to allow the possible integration of other modules for additional Smart City services or extension to further ICT applications.

Built environments are, for most of us, our natural habitat. In the last 50 years, the built-up area has more than doubled, with a massive biodiversity loss. The undeniable benefits of a city providing all the basic needs to a growing population showed longer-term and less obvious costs to human health: autoimmune and non-communicable diseases, as well as antimicrobial resistance, have reached unprecedented and alarming levels. Humans coevolved with microbes, and this long-lasting alliance is affected by the loss of connection with natural environments, misuse of antibiotics, and highly sanitized environments. Our aim is to direct the focus onto the microbial communities harbored by the built environments we live in. They represent the nexus for urban regeneration, which starts from a healthy environment. Planning a city means considering, in a two-fold way, the ecosystem health and the multidimensional aspects of wellbeing, including social, cultural, and aesthetic values. The significance of this perspective is inspiring guidelines and strategies for the urban regeneration of the cities of tomorrow, exploiting the invaluable role of microbial biodiversity and the ecosystem services that it could provide to create the robust scientific knowledge that is necessary for a bioinformed design of buildings and cities for healthy and sustainable living.

Capitulo 3 - MIL Cities and MIL Citizens: Informed, Engaged, Empowered by Media and Information Literacy (MIL). Smart Cities typify the current and future data-rich environments. In these types of environments, technology and the analysis of vast data facilitate more intelligent choices and actions—largely automated using algorithms and artificial intelligence—related to mobility, security, energy use, culture, markets, etc. (Ballon, van der Graaf, & Walravens, 2017). A discussion on the necessity of data literacy has emerged from debates on datafication, big data, open data, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The question, however, lies on the relation between media and data literacy. In this contribution, we reflect on aspects of data literacy by examining the literature on smart cities and data in smart cities. We argue that smart cities are not automatically media and information-literate cities. Furthermore, smart cities can only become media and information-literate cities by actively developing an open data context, involving citizens in data projects, empowering civil society participation, and stimulating data literacy in a broad sense.

The digital revolution has brought about many societal changes such as the creation of “smart cities”. The smart city concept has changed the urban ecosystem by embedding digital technologies in the city fabric to enhance the quality of life of its inhabitants. However, it has also led to some pressing issues and challenges related to data, privacy, ethics inclusion, and fairness. While the initial concept of smart cities was largely technology- and data-driven, focused on the automation of traffic, logistics and processes, this concept is currently being replaced by technology-enabled, human-centred solutions. However, this is not the end of the development, as there is now a big trend towards “design for values”. In this paper, we point out how a value-sensitive design approach could promote a more sustainable pathway of cities that better serves people and nature. Such “value-sensitive design” will have to take ethics, law and culture on board. We discuss how organising the digital world in a participatory way, as well as leveraging the concepts of self-organisation, self-regulation, and self-control, would foster synergy effects and thereby help to leverage a sustainable technological revolution on a global scale. Furthermore, a “democracy by design” approach could also promote resilience. ISSN:2071-1050

L'efficienza energetica è diventata un argomento centrale nella pianificazione e nella gestione urbana a causa del cambiamento climatico globale e delle emergenze ambientali. L'articolo analizza i modelli e le procedure che sono stati testati nel gruppo MySmartCityProgram da diversi programmi europei che promuovono misure innovative di efficienza energetica a scala di quartiere. L'analisi dei casi studio del Programma ZenN, in particolare, ha evidenziato che struttura della proprietà, erogazione di fondi pubblici e disponibilità di finanziamenti bancari sono i principali fattori critici per raggiungere o ostacolare la fattibilità finanziaria. In vista delle fasi di implementazione del Green Deal europeo che, tra le varie azioni, intende avviare una "ondata di rinnovamento" delle città e degli edifici, i risultati dello studio potrebbero essere un buon punto di partenza per discutere come progettare le procedure, gli standard e gli strumenti più adeguati per facilitare questo tipo di progetti. Energy efficiency has become a central topic in urban planning and management because of the global climate change and environmental emergencies. The paper analyzes the models and procedures that have been tested in the MySmartCityProgram group according to different European Programs that promote innovative energy efficiency measures at district scale. The study of the case studies of the ZenN Program, in particular, has showed that structure of the property, provision of public funds and availability of bank financing are the main critical factors to achieve or hinder the financial feasibility. In view of the implementation phases of the European Green Deal which, among various actions, intends to start a ‘wave of renovation’ of cities and buildings, the results of the study could be a good starting point to discuss how to design the most appropriate procedures, standards and tools to facilitate this type of projects.

In the last few years, service science has opened a debate on the need to adopt new approaches to better understand emerging social and economic dynamics. By following this direction, different multi- and trans-disciplinary research pathways are requesting to consider an increasing number of new variables in the management of Complex Service Systems (CSSs), underlying the fact that traditional approaches are useless in supporting decision makers in facing the challenges imposed by a more articulated scenario. To bridge this gap, the paper focuses attention on the phenomenon of ‘smart cities’ as an example of CSSs with the aim to investigate in which ways actors’ perceptions affect opportunities and willingness for value co-creation and collaborative paths. Via a survey on a random sample of 374 providers and users of city service platform in the city of Brno in Czech Republic, the actors’ perceptions were analysed and through the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) the relationships between actors’ perceptions and their willingness in building value co-creation and collaborative paths have been tested. The principal goal was to attract the attention of service community on the role of cognitive and psychological dimensions in affecting value co-creation and collaborative paths in CSS using the example of smart city as tangible evidence of CSS.

Starting from the analysis of the problems that characterize the Italian suburbs, the application of a Smart Methodology to a real peripheral area is presented. In literature, several studies underline the urgent request of the city's periphery, enhancing local and national projects to increase the quality of life in the suburbs. In this framework, authors propose a multifunctional centre development, characterized by modern technologies (both structural and plant) to implement energy efficiency and social aggregation, in line with the citizen's needs. Once the simulation model of alternative solutions, such as construction type, energy system and social services, was elaborated in Matlab/Simulink, the application of a smart methodology was necessary to draft the priority ranking of the various strategies. Results highlight which solution obtained a positive impact on the overall smart axes, providing a useful approach for designers to plan a sustainable and smart project.

Since the 1950s digital technologies have been used by governments in the global North for the purposes of managing populations and delivering services. Over time, with the development of more sophisticated hardware and software, and the creation of the internet, the use of digital technologies for the purposes of governance has expanded in scope and depth. This has included the use of computation to monitor, manage and govern urban infrastructures and systems (Mitchell, 1995; Graham and Marvin, 1996). From the late 2000s, networked digital technologies that algorithmically produce, manage, analyse and act on streams of big data to augment and mediate the operation and governance of urban systems and life were branded as smart city technologies (Townsend, 2013). Such technologies include: city operating systems, integrated control rooms, coordinated emergency management systems, intelligent transport systems, smart energy grids, smart lighting and parking, sensor networks, building management systems, social and locative media, and city apps. A number of scholars have argued that a key transformative effect created through the adoption of smart city technologies is the reconfiguring of urban governmentality and the practices of governance (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Braun, 2014; Gabrys, 2014; Klauser et al., 2014; Vanolo, 2014; Davies, 2015; Sadowski and Pasquale, 2015; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016; Krivy, 2018). The general conclusion is that algorithmic forms of governance are producing a shift from disciplinary forms of governmentality towards social control.

Urban green infrastructure plays an increasingly significant role in sustainable urban development planning as it provides important regulating and cultural ecosystem services. Monitoring of such dynamic and complex systems requires technological solutions which provide easy data collection, processing, and utilization at affordable costs. To meet these challenges a pilot study was conducted using a network of wireless, low cost, and multiparameter monitoring devices, which operate using Internet of Things (IoT) technology, to provide real-time monitoring of regulatory ecosystem services in the form of meaningful indicators for both human health and environmental policies. The pilot study was set in a green area situated in the center of Moscow, which is exposed to the heat island effect as well as high levels of anthropogenic pressure. Sixteen IoT devices were installed on individual trees to monitor their ecophysiological parameters from 1 July to 31 November 2019 with a time resolution of 1.5 h. These parameters were used as input variables to quantify indicators of ecosystem services related to climate, air quality, and water regulation. Our results showed that the average tree in the study area during the investigated period reduced extreme heat by 2 &deg, C via shading, cooled the surrounding area by transferring 2167 &plusmn, 181 KWh of incoming solar energy into latent heat, transpired 137 &plusmn, 49 mm of water, sequestered 8.61 &plusmn, 1.25 kg of atmospheric carbon, and removed 5.3 &plusmn, 0.8 kg of particulate matter (PM10). The values of the monitored processes varied spatially and temporally when considering different tree species (up to five to ten times), local environmental conditions, and seasonal weather. Thus, it is important to use real-time monitoring data to deepen understandings of the processes of urban forests. There is a new opportunity of applying IoT technology not only to measure trees functionality through fluxes of water and carbon, but also to establish a smart urban green infrastructure operational system for management.

The Smart city ecosystem is composed of several networked devices that provide services to citizens and improve their quality of life. Basic services, which must be exposed by the underlying software infrastructure, require efficient networking and communication protocols to coordinate and manage all the system components. In particular, Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) are envisioned as key components of smart cities. Verification is crucial in such a highly dynamic scenario to ensure operation correctness and to reduce the development cost of smart applications. However, the rigidity of existing middlewares makes development, reconfiguration, and testing rather difficult. In this work, we propose a middleware that supports development and testing of distributed applications in VSNs. The middleware is based on symbolic processing. Interactive testing as well as incremental development are enabled by the exchange of executable symbolic code among vehicles. The symbolic approach also fosters rapid prototyping and construction of testbeds.

In lieu of an abstract, this is an excerpt from the first page. The exponential growth in the volume of Earth observation data and the increasing quality and availability of high-resolution imagery are increasingly making more applications possible in urban environments. In particular, remote sensing information, especially when combined with location-specific data collected locally or through connected devices, presents exciting opportunities for smart city applications, such as risk analysis and mitigation, climate prediction, and remote surveillance. On the other hand, the exploitation of this great amount of data poses new challenges for big data analysis models and requires new spatial information frameworks capable of integrating imagery, sensor observations, and social media in geographic information systems (GIS).

The aim of the paper is to define a set of smartness and sustainability indicators applicable to European cities and to assess their outcome in an ex ante perspective with regard to the implementation of Europe 2020 strategy. Following the DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressures, State, Impact, Response) model, we select a bundle of indicators for three relevant sustainability domains (environmental, social and cultural), which are proper to the smart city definition. Then we define groups of homogeneous cities for each domain by using a two-step cluster analysis. Results show the existence of heterogeneous groups of cities that are likely to become smart in the cultural domain, side by side with groups of more developed urban areas that have acquired a substantial advantage in the environmental and social dimensions.

While there is a relatively extensive literature concerning the nature of smart cities in general, the roles of corporate actors in their production and the development and deployment of specific smart city technologies, to date there have been relatively few studies that have examined the situated practices by which the smart city unfolds in specific places. In this paper, we draw on three sets of interviews ( n = 114) and ethnographic fieldwork to chart the smart city ecosystem in Dublin, Ireland. We examine how the four city authorities have actively collaborated to frame a disparate and uncoordinated set of information and communication technology-led initiatives, what Dourish terms the ‘accidental smart city’, into an articulated vision of Dublin as a smart city. In particular, we focus on the work of ‘Smart Dublin’, a shared unit established to coordinate, manage and promote Dublin’s smart city initiatives and to drive new economic development opportunities centred on corporate interventions into urban management and living. Our analysis highlights the value of undertaking a holistic mapping of a smart city in formation, and the role of political and administrative geographies and specialist smart city units in shaping that formation.

The evolution of the Internet of Things, cloud computing and wireless communication has contributed to an advance in the interconnectivity, efficiency and data accessibility in smart cities, improving environmental sustainability, quality of life and well-being, knowledge and intellectual capital. In this scenario, the satisfaction of security and privacy requirements to preserve data integrity, confidentiality and authentication is of fundamental importance. In particular, this is essential in the healthcare sector, where health-related data are considered sensitive information able to reveal confidential details about the subject. In this regard, to limit the possibility of security attacks or privacy violations, we present a reliable mobile voice disorder detection system capable of distinguishing between healthy and pathological voices by using a machine learning algorithm. This latter is totally embedded in the mobile application, so it is able to classify the voice without the necessity of transmitting user data to or storing user data on any server. A Boosted Trees algorithm was used as the classifier, opportunely trained and validated on a dataset composed of 2003 voices. The most frequently considered acoustic parameters constituted the inputs of the classifier, estimated and analyzed in real time by the mobile application.

Green transportation is becoming relevant in the context of smart cities, where the use of electric vehicles represents a promising strategy to support sustainability policies. However the use of electric vehicles shows some drawbacks as well, such as their limited driving-range capacity. This paper analyses a realistic vehicle routing problem in which both driving-range constraints and stochastic travel times are considered. Thus, the main goal is to minimize the expected time-based cost required to complete the freight distribution plan. In order to design reliable routing plans, a simheuristic algorithm is proposed. It combines Monte Carlo simulation with a multi-start metaheuristic, which also employs biased-randomization techniques. By including simulation, simheuristics extend the capabilities of metaheuristics to deal with stochastic problems. A series of computational experiments are performed to test our solving approach as well as to analyse the effect of uncertainty on the routing plans. This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (TRA2015-71883-REDT), and the Ibero-American Program for Science and Technology for Development (CYTED2014-515RT0489). Moreover, The authors appreciate the financial support of the Erasmus+ Program (2018-1-ES01-KA103-049767) as well as the support of the UPNA doctoral program.

Typical of the 1990s, the global cities phenomenon preceded the past decade’s massive spread of smart cities. Yet the question of how the two phenomena currently coincide remains to be considered, as well as an analysis based on viewing smart cities as global cities. An analysis related to the European scenario is developed in this article, aimed at giving a response to the previous considerations. An index is also proposed; concerning the global character of the cities, it considers the ability of the cities to attract Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). Results of the proposed analysis show that in Europe four main scenarios exist. Two regarding positive and negative correlations between the diffusion of global and smart cities, and another two scenarios demonstrate cases in which the two features are not correlated. The first two cases are respectively related to smart cities that are also global cities. The last two cases deal with the presence of different drivers that are not related to smart urban plans, which could, however, drive the attraction of FDI or which could also promote smart actions without the thrust of FDI. Correlation and regression analyses complement the work.

Nowadays, recent advancements in ICT have sped up the development of new services for smart cities in different application domains. One of these is definitely healthcare. In this context, remote patient monitoring and rehabilitation activities can take place either in satellite hospital centres or directly in citizens’ homes. Specifically, using a combination of Cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics technologies, patients with motor disabilities can be remotely assisted avoiding stressful waiting times and overcoming geographical barriers. This paper focuses on the Tele-Rehabilitation as a Service (TRaaS) concept. Such a service generates healthcare big data coming from remote rehabilitation devices used by patients that need to be processed in the hospital Cloud. Specifically, after a feasibility analysis, by using a Lokomat dataset as sample, we measured and compared the performances of four of the major NoSQL DBMS(s) demonstrating that the document approach well suits our case study.

Studying the governance of a smart city food system, this paper offers a critical synthesis of the literature on the governance of smart cities and goes on to use the insights it offers as a basis to examine the claim made about the food system emerging from the 2015 World Expo in Milan. In particular, the claim made about the infrastructure developments underlying this urban and regional innovation as doing nothing less than building a smart city food system from the ground up. In going some way to qualify this claim, the paper suggests that while such a statement does reflect much of what is currently understood about the infrastructure developments underlying this urban and regional innovation, the claim made about the World Expo building a smart city food system from the ground up, offers more of an insight into the state-of-the-art on the governance of smart cities than it does into the critical nature of the food system surfacing from the Expo in Milan. The paper suggests the reason for the partial synthesis of smart cities as food systems, rest with the claims made about the Expo in Milan failing to recognise the: (1) need for the governance of smart cities not to be in strictly technical, but wider social, cultural and environmental terms; (2) requirement for the infrastructure developments underpinning this urban and regional innovation to also support the sustainable growth of food systems; (3) pressure there is to re-direct the participatory governance agenda of smart cities towards urban policies whose management of natural resources is wise in meeting the human expectation of and social need for food and requirement there is for the municipal strategies and capacity-building exercises underpinning food systems, to be systematic in cultivating an environment able to support the inclusive growth of them across regions; (4) call for the resilience of any such sustainable and inclusive growth to constitute a material condition of the infrastructure developments underlying this urban and regional innovation and surfacing as a smart food system in the City of Milan.

The application of innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to the field of Urban Facility Management (UFM) outlines new possibilities for optimizing existing services and for developing new services based on the key concepts of: Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, information sharing and smart applications. Such ICT-based services could potentially be able to: transform the demand for infrastructures and physical assets; participate to requalification processes; influence the sustainability of the built environment as well as the economic value of urban areas. Starting from this premise, the paper deals with the contents and the current results of an ongoing research whose aim is to propose sets of classification and coding rules and a framework for identifying, analysing and linking Smart Cities (SC) domains and sub-domains, related UFM services and the various levels of enabling ICT technologies. The application of the proposed framework to a selected representative sample made up by both European Initiatives (e.g. H2020 projects) involved with SC solutions at the urban scale and virtuous cases of cities that have implemented smart solutions, allows to collect, allocate and process information, in a unified way, in order to: • identify and describe the current main trends within each of the SC domains (e.g. mobility, energy, waste, building, governance) and sub-domains; • implement a taxonomy of UFM services, including related characterising parameters and stakeholders; • identify and analyse, according to reading keys, smart UFM services that may have meaningful impacts (accessibility, transport, land-use, etc.) on urban areas; • draw the current innovative scenarios of smart UFM services enabled by ICTs, characterized by information sharing (Big Data flows) and by the integration of physical and digital infrastructures and assets; • highlight the emerging and widespread enabling technologies for smart UFM services, related to each of the layers of the technological infrastructure (e.g. sensing, network, platform, analytics, applications); • investigate the possibility of the creation of context-aware communities through the inclusion of multiple social components. The research, which is part of the PRIN research “Metropolitan cities: economic-territorial strategies, financial constraints and circular regeneration”, aims at providing interpretive keys and structured information, useful to study, evaluate and compare possible influences and impacts of the smart UFM services on the sustainability of the urban environment and on the dynamics of property values. The scenario that emerges from the analysis is inscribed in the broader framework of the circular economy where, with the support of ICTs -based services, cities can put in place virtuous processes to reduce, recycle and reuse waste.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are related to the integration of computing and communication capabilities into physical systems. An example of CPSs is the smart city model, which is growing around the prototype of an urban (physical) environment with a new generation of innovative services for transportation, energy distribution, healthcare, environmental monitoring, business, emergency response, and social activities developed in its digital twins. Smart cities are also an example of how CPSs must include the presence of people, which can't be neglected in the loop of producing, collecting and consuming data, information and services. Enabling the technology for such a setting requires a viewpoint of Smart Cities as system of cyber-physical and social systems (CPSSs) which are the result of the integration of several technologies that cooperate to provide seamless services to end users. Such technologies enable the collection, storage, and processing of massive amount of data gathered from the environment and/or produced by citizens themselves. Social interactions amongst participants are promoted as well. CPSS 2019 wants to present innovative research trends and to explore new challenges in the field of smart cities as a system of cyber -- physical systems crossed with the social perspective. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers, practitioners, smart city operators and industries working in the field in order to cross-fertilize theoretical and practical aspects.

Traditional urban pollution monitoring systems suffer of the sole presence of fixed stations. Data gathered from such devices are precise, thanks to the equipment quality and to established and robust measuring protocols, but these sampled data are located in very limited areas and collected by discontinuous monitoring campaigns. The spread of mobile technologies has fostered the development of new approaches like Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), offering the chance of using mobile devices, even personal ones, as sensors of urban data. Nevertheless, one of the open challenges is the management of the integration of heterogeneous data flows, different from types, technical specifications (e.g. diverse transmission protocols) and semantics. Osmotic computing aims at creating an abstract level between the mobile devices and the cloud, enabling opportunistic filtering and the addition of metadata for improving the data processing flow. This work focuses on the design and the development of the middleware which integrates data coming from mobile and IoT devices specifically deployed in urban contexts using the Osmotic Computing paradigm.

Nowadays, sensor-rich smartphones potentially enable the harvesting of huge amounts of valuable sensing data in urban environments, by opportunistically involving citizens to play the role of mobile virtual sensors to cover Smart City areas of interest. This paper proposes an in-depth study of the challenging technical issues related to the efficient assignment of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) data collection tasks to volunteers in a crowdsensing campaign. In particular, the paper originally describes how to increase the effectiveness of the proposed sensing campaigns through the inclusion of several new facilities, including accurate participant selection algorithms able to profile and predict user mobility patterns, gaming techniques, and timely geo-notification. The reported results show the feasibility of exploiting profiling trends/prediction techniques from volunteers’ behavior, moreover, they quantitatively compare different MCS task assignment strategies based on large-scale and real MCS data campaigns run in the ParticipAct living lab, an ongoing MCS real-world experiment that involved more than 170 students of the University of Bologna for more than one year.

The Collaborative Internet of Things (C-IoT) is an emerging paradigm that involves many communities with the idea of cooperating in data gathering and service sharing. Many fields of application, such as Smart Cities and environmental monitoring, use the concept of crowdsensing in order to produce the amount of data that such IoT scenarios need in order to be pervasive. In our paper we introduce an architecture, namely SenSquare, able to handle both the heterogeneous data sources coming from open IoT platform and crowdsensing campaigns, and display a unified access to users. We inspect all the facets of such a complex system, spanning over issues of different nature: we deal with heterogeneous data classification, Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) management for environmental data, information representation and unification, IoT service composition and deployment. We detail our proposed solution in dealing with such tasks and present possible methods for meeting open challenges. Finally, we demonstrate the capabilities of SenSquare through both a mobile and a desktop client.

Traffic congestions cost billions of dollars to the society every year and are often aggravated by road users looking for parking. One way of alleviating the parking problem is providing decision makers of smart cities with powerful exploratory tools to analyse the data and find more effective solutions. This paper proposes a novel visual analytics tool for decision makers that allows multigranular spatio-temporal on-street parking data exploration. Even if the tool has been designed to deal with on-street parking data, it relies on a generic logic that makes it adaptable to more general spatio-temporal datasets.

This chapter aims at theoretically linking entrepreneurship and institutional conditions in the case of “smart cities”. After discussing how agglomeration economies shape entrepreneurship through the main relevant body of literature, the chapter articulates on the concept of “smart city” and presents a newly collected dataset on a “smart city” for the Emilia-Romagna Region in Northern Italy. Elements that drive improvements in the “smartness” of a city are presented in order to derive policy implications and the theoretical linkages between entrepreneurship, particularly “green” entrepreneurship, and a peculiar case of such an institutional setting as a “smart city”. The absence of proper data to test for a bi-directional causal link between entrepreneurship and smart city is discussed as a limitation of the current analysis and as a research line that deserves further investigation.

Is biometrics as a service the next giant leap, as Jeremy Rose asks? New trends in consumer applications seem to testify this revolution. However, it is worth wondering to what extent both company infrastructures and the market are actually ready for this. This article explores the potential of cloud-based biometrics (biometrics as a service) for smart cities and nations.

Initial empirical research concerning the development of smart urbanism focused largely on smart city rhetoric, the marketing materials of companies promoting smart city products and services, and the policy and visioning documents of lobbying bodies and city administrations. This chapter examines how the smart city idea has been enacted through a set of smart city initiatives and brought into common discourse in the Dublin city region through the Smart Dublin programme. It charts how Dublin has moved from an 'accidental smart city' to an articulated vision with its own projects. So successful has this re-articulation been that Dublin was one of six shortlisted finalists for smart city of the year at the Smart City Expo and World Congress 2017. A key factor in the revival of Dublin's fortunes was the adoption of entrepreneurial urbanism to stimulate property development and attract service-based foreign direct investment.

In order to reach its objectives, smart cities (or whatever kind of smart urban environment) should be underpinned by complex cyber physical systems (CPS) able to discover needs and services and "smartly" combine them. Services may be thought as services offered by software components, of whatever nature, for instance software, bot, robot, app and so on. Searching for the best service depends on the need of the citizen(s) and also on the type of (smart) environment the citizens are in. Analysis and design of CPSs are more challenging than the only physical or the only cyber system. We propose a design paradigm shift towards runtime for identifying requirements of cyber physical systems for smart cities using the analysis of citizens' emerging needs.

This paper presents a preliminary study we have conducted to understand to which extent colors can influence the way we choose urban walking paths beyond the need to move reasonably quick towards our destinations. Building on a mobile application we discuss ColorPath, an application allowing walkers to choose their daily walking routes as a combination of different urban elements to pass through (pleasurable landscapes, historical buildings and monuments, parks and gardens), each corresponding to a specific primary color. After an evaluation campaign with some few avid walkers, we shortly present here our initial findings, showing that emotions and the pleasure enjoyed while walking along particular routes may play a role which is not secondary with respect to the need for speed and accuracy. As our study is still at an initial stage, we took the decision to communicate our first intriguing results through a short paper.

This chapter presents a comparison study among the metaheuristic algorithms most used in the task of solving complex smart grid optimization problems. To this aim, the optimal voltage regulation problem has been considered as a benchmark to test the accuracy, the convergence proprieties and the robustness of the metaheuristic algorithms. The implementation of a smart grid can be realized in different steps. The first step is the local control of the distributed generators. The second step concerns the problems relating to the voltage regulation. The chapter analyzes the effectiveness of the described metaheuristic algorithms in the task of solving the optimal voltage regulation problem on realistic power networks. The considered case studies include both IEEE test power systems, which have been considered in order to compare the performance of the optimization algorithms in standard operation scenario, and a real urban smart grid located in the south of Italy. © ISTE Ltd 2017. All rights reserved.

The vision of smart cities has became a reality. Technological advances in low power devices and reliable communication and overall system architectures made it happening. However, there are plenty of improvements that still can be employed to further increase the efficiency of relevant systems or to provide new approaches that improve existing solutions. This special issue on Enabling Architectures and Technologies for Smart Cities of the JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS aims to report on the recent advancements and developments in various aspects related to emerging hardware and software technologies enabling the IoT, such as RFID, WSN, system software architecture, integrated solutions, embedded systems, and so on. This issue recommended totally 10 papers for publication based on the standard reviewing process, where at least two constructive reviews and with guest editors comment have been received. Papers are split in two main groups focused mainly on system architectures that improve reliability in smart cities ([1- 5]), and hardware solutions ([6-10]) that are presented as either upgrades to exisiting solutions or new more efficient proposals. All of these were validated by analytics, simulations and/or testbed approaches.

The increasing demand for energy has stimulated the formulation of plans aiming at shifting to renewable energies, not only to save money, but also for the responsibility that the present population has towards future generations. Under this aspect, ICT-based solutions can be used to enable energy and money saving not only for a single building, but for the whole community of a neighbourhood. In this paper, we present an agent-based framework that allows the management and negotiation of decentralised energy production. We propose a P2P overlay network whereby the agents distributed within the community can negotiate the energy in a transparent way with respect to the different technologies used, thus, ensuring scalability of the overall architecture. We analyse the performance of the proposed solution in different scenarios by using a set of testbeds developed to evaluate the prototypal implementation of the framework and of the communication network.

We argue that the ideas, ideals and the rapid proliferation of smart city rhetoric and initiatives globally have been facilitated and promoted by three interrelated communities: (i) ‘urban technocrats’; (ii) a smart cities ‘epistemic community’; (iii) a wider ‘advocacy coalition’. We examine their roles and the multiscale formation, and why despite their influence they encounter a ‘last mile problem’; that is, smart city initiatives are yet to become fully mainstreamed. We illustrate this last mile problem through a discussion of plans to introduce smart lighting in Dublin.

Machine learning techniques will take an increasingly central role in the distributed sensing realm and specifically in smart cities scenarios. Pervasive air quality monitoring as one of the primary city service requires a significant effort in term of data processing for extracting the needed semantic value. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the emerging relevant literature, we compare several machine learning tools for the purpose of devising intelligent calibration components to be run on board or in cloud computing architectures for pollutant concentration estimation. Two cities field experiments provide the needed on field recorded datasets to validate the approaches. Results are discussed both in terms of performance and computational impact for the specific application. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

A considerable amount of research has addressed Internet of Things and connected communities. It is possible to exploit the sensing capabilities of connected communities, by leveraging the continuously growing use of cloud computing solutions and mobile devices. The pervasiveness of mobile sensors also enables the Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) paradigm, which aims at using mobile-embedded sensors to extend monitoring of multiple (environmental) phenomena in expansive urban areas. In this article, we discuss our approach with a cloud-based platform to pave the way for applying crowd sensing in urban scenarios. We have implemented a complete solution for environmental monitoring of several pollutants, like noise, air, electromagnetic fields, and so on in an urban area based on this paradigm. Through extensive experimentation, specifically on noise pollution, we show how the proposed infrastructure exhibits the ability to collect data from connected communities, and enables a seamless support of services needed for improving citizens’ quality of life and eventually helps city decision makers in urban planning.

In this paper, a methodology is presented and employed for simulating the Internet of Things (IoT). The requirement for scalability, due to the possibly huge amount of involved sensors and devices, and the heterogeneous scenarios that might occur, impose resorting to sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques. In particular, multi-level simulation is regarded as a main framework that allows simulating large-scale IoT environments while keeping high levels of detail, when it is needed. We consider a use case based on the deployment of smart services in decentralized territories. A two level simulator is employed, which is based on a coarse agent-based, adaptive parallel and distributed simulation approach to model the general life of simulated entities. However, when needed a finer grained simulator (based on OMNeT++) is triggered on a restricted portion of the simulated area, which allows considering all issues concerned with wireless communications. Based on this use case, it is confirmed that the ad-hoc wireless networking technologies do represent a principle tool to deploy smart services over decentralized countrysides. Moreover, the performance evaluation confirms the viability of utilizing multi-level simulation for simulating large scale IoT environments., Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, Elsevier, vol. 73 (April 2017)

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is considered as the key player to move forward the Smart City vision. Indeed, pervasive devices can enable a fain-grained monitoring of buildings and energy distribution networks. Thus, such information can be used to enhance energy optimization in our cities. However, interoperability among heterogeneous devices is a challenging task. Furthermore, all these IoT devices produce a huge amount of data that must be collected and post-processed, thus entering into the Big Data domain. Therefore, a distributed IoT platform for energy management has to be designed for i) enabling the interoperability among heterogeneous IoT devices and ii) handling such huge amount of data. In this paper, we describe the requirements to be addressed in order to develop an IoT platform for Smart City. We also present two distributed IoT platforms we developed to improve the energy management in Smart City. Finally, based on our experience in a real-world case study, we provide an estimation of the amount of energy-related information our presented platforms have to manage.

Distribution systems are evolving towards fault self-healing systems which can quickly identify and isolate faulted components and restore supply to the affected customers with little human intervention. A self-healing mechanism can considerably reduce the outage times and improve the continuity of supply; however, such an improvement requires a fast fault location method and also a communication and measurement infrastructure. In this paper the feasibility of fast service restoration through a fast fault location method is studied. A fast fault location method is proposed which is applicable to any distribution network with laterals, load taps and heterogeneous lines. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by simulation tests on a real 13.8 kV, 134-node distribution system under different fault conditions. The results verify the applicability of the proposed architecture. We show that the communication delay plays a less important role in overall restoration time, and we stress the contribution of a fast fault location method in keeping the overall interruption time less than 1 minute.