Designing, Developing, and Facilitating Smart Cities

Mostly, current works on smart cities focus on a vision that is based on technology, forgetting social aspects. Cities have reached their current form after centuries, and only with an analysis of why certain developments happened in the past (even in the very recent one) will help us in defining how future urban developments should look like, and how the technology should be used to overcome current spacial barriers among cities.

This chapter starts with the premise that the design and development of an artefact (a system or tool) is a process that assumes certain users and usages Akrich (Managing technology in society: the approach of constructive technology assessment. Pinter, London, pp 167–185, 1995) [1]. The assumed user of an artefact shapes the affordances and limitations of the artefact; designers and developers strive to create a system that balances their understanding of the needs of the assumed user and the material limitations of the technology itself. Inspired by critical perspectives towards design, development and use of technological artefacts drawn from science and technology studies, this chapter will ask: who is the assumed user in the contemporary smart city? Illustrating this critical framework with examples from contemporary smart cities projects, this chapter will encourage the reader to reflect on the characteristics of the assumed user, and which users may have been unwittingly overlooked during design and development. It poses the question: which citizens’ needs are not adequately addressed because they do not constitute the assumed user(s)? Foley and Ferri (J Res Spec Educ Needs 12:192–200, 2012) [6], Strengers (Interactions 21:24–31, 2014 [19].

The EU project SocIoTal research identified the following as main barriers to broad IoT adoption in ‘smart’ cities: (i) lack of understanding by SME’s and City Councils, (ii) lack of third-party trust providers and (iii) lack of involvement of end users in building use cases and developing new services. The project conceived the following measures to overcome them: meetups, to address the lack of understanding introducing research questions and listening to the local stakeholders, and co-creation workshops to involve citizens from the city of Novi Sad in Serbia together with researchers from University of Cantabria, Santander. These measures and solutions warrant an ethical framework to inform and educate decision-making regarding #IoT system architectural options, and the Onlife Manifesto and initiative of the European Commission might be relevant in this context.

Since the beginning of the current millennium two concepts have fuelled the prospects and expectations of science, engineering and business; namely the Internet of Things and Big Data. These concepts indeed pose a number of technological challenges, but even more they raise a number of business and societal questions. Early deployments are stimulating the fantasy for new business opportunities and at the same time they trigger a wider discussion about the impact on society and unforeseen side-effects. This article names some of the developments and tries to ask the questions that need to be answered in the near future, in order that the prospects and expectations are met.

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents itself as a promising set of technologies to support a wide range of applications that aim to improve the quality of life of humans. IoT aims to simplify the way that users receive information providing a unique way of bringing them close to the source of information, hiding the complexity of knowing who or what one should ask to get that information. For this reason, IoT has become a key enabler for smart city applications, and municipalities are very interested to invest in IoT for providing advanced applications to their citizens, who might not be at all familiar with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It is quite common in the last few years that large cities are forming strategic agendas for becoming “smarter” through IoT technologies. Their main goal is to build IoT-based infrastructures that can be reused for supporting a plethora of smart city applications, for, i.e., monitoring the weather conditions, the traffic, the citizens’ needs, or for managing the wastes, the city waters, etc. All these applications are indeed very promising for making the cities smarter, but as they are becoming more and more mainstream, they are turning into attractive targets for attackers that aim to exploit the constrained nature of IoT devices toward stealing personal data or performing physical attacks on critical infrastructures. IoT deployments pose severe challenges with regard to ensuring the security of the overall system and the privacy of the users’ data, and only lately there have been advances toward designing secure IoT architectures for smart city applications. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the challenges, the methodology, and the latest attempts for securing the IoT architectures in smart city environments.

Privacy, a fundamental human right, is a key nonfunctional requirement to every electronic service and applications designed for smart societies. Informational privacy, the right of individuals to control information related to them, in smart societies is at the core of this chapter. A key aspect in the layout of smart societies and smart cities is the understanding and prediction of human behavior, which is nowadays fundamentally based on collecting and processing personal data. Hence, smart societies need to accommodate individuals’ rights and the data collection needs. We provide an overview of the existing models and techniques for protecting individuals’ privacy, such as privacy policies, transparency tools and anonymous communication systems, and discuss the needs and limitations of Privacy by Design (PbD) in the layout of smart societies and Internet of Things.

Growing SmartCities means that the amount of information processed and stored to manage a city’s infrastructure (e.g., traffic, public transport, electricity) is growing as well. To manage this, SmartCities are deploying truly distributed and highly scalable information and communication (ICT) infrastructure, connecting a conglomerate of smart devices and ‘smart things’. In recent years, the term Internet-of-Things (IoT) was coined to describe constrained systems that react via sensors to physical changes in its environment and may be able to influence that environment via actuators. While ICT generally helps to ‘mine’ collected information, the IoT complements this with direct access to a sensor’s data or even taking immediate corrective action. Using the capabilities of the IoT to monitor and control the SmartCity implies numerous devices communicate data about the city its citizens. The communicated data is used to make decisions that will affect many citizens, and if not secured correctly, attackers (or other ‘errors’) could disrupt operation of the SmartCity. Moreover, collected data possibly impinges on basic privacy rights if not gathered, communicated and processed correctly. This chapter provides a primer on general information security, its main goals, and the basic IoT security challenges in the SmartCity. Built upon the basic IT security goals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, this chapter addresses security and privacy problems faced in the communication aspects of the SmartCity. We highlight that security is a crucial enabler for the ICT-dependent SmartCity to base the decisions on reliable data and to execute commands securely. We specifically point out that security starts at the very beginning of the data collection and communication process. On top of this, we focus on major issues related to private communication, as privacy is a key acceptance factor for an ICT-enabled SmartCity by its citizens.

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is expected to play a key role in the realization of Smart Cities characterized by heterogeneous service and stakeholders. The IoT ecosystem is further characterized by multiple available communication technologies and solutions with distinctive features in terms of network architectures, performance, cost, flexibility, and availability. We provide here an overview of the main IoT-based communication technologies which can enable smart services for Smart Cities, further commenting on the main advantages, disadvantages, and open challenges involved in applying each technology to the Smart City ecosystem.

In the future internet era, the Internet of Things (IoT) has consolidated its presence in the smart cities with a variety of innovative IoT platforms for the provisioning of relevant services. The provisioning of such services requires ubiquity, reliability, high-performance, efficiency, scalability. In order to accomplish this popular trend is to merge IoT and Cloud concepts by combining multi-Cloud IoT architectures. The introduction of cognition was the first step for the IoT success, as it brought essential self-management and awareness capabilities combined with knowledge-generation functionality. The Cloud-IoT architectural vision is paving the way to the next/vital step for the IoT success and for new business value propositions for the IoT world leveraging cloud principles. Towards this direction, in this effort, a set of challenges have been identified, with a set of different research initiatives that aim to address them. A promising architecture for enabling Cloud-IoT services in smart cities is presented together with a case study that reveals the high potential that Cloud-IoT can achieve in the context of smart cities. The work concludes with the lessons learnt through the study and the elaboration of the Cloud-IoT concepts.

In recent years, Cloud Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) have been rapidly advancing as the two fundamental technologies of the Future Internet (FI) concept. Different IoT systems are designed and implemented according to the IoT domain requirements, thus not taking into consideration issues of openness, scalability, interoperability, and use case independence. This work focuses on the presentation of a framework that integrates future IoT systems in smart cities by utilizing state-of-the-art architectures, technologies, solutions, and services developed by the IoT-A and FIWARE FP7 projects of the EU. We expect that in future smart city environments, an IoT infrastructure will act as a key enabler for the revolution of smart networked systems with embedded devices. Also, the proposed solution overcomes the fragmentation of vertically oriented closed systems, architectures, and application areas and move towards open systems and platforms that support multiple applications. This is a key requirement for smart city infrastructures that can be reused by a plethora of applications in various domains, such as transportation systems, energy, waste management, environmental monitoring, buildings, etc. The proposed system will encompass FIWARE and IoT-A to develop innovative IoT platforms and services and it will include generic IoT devices that are independent of connectivity modes and are not coupled to specific IoT protocols. It will further supply interoperability with emerging connectivity protocols based on actions regarding standardization and requirements. We expect that future solutions will simplify data transfer by supporting the vast majority of transfer protocols and will allow effective utilization of network capabilities for transition and reception of real-time data. Using FIWARE services will ensure reliability, modularity, and uniform APIs independent of the underlying hardware and it will move beyond current solutions that are platform dependent, and vendor specific. The result will be a dynamic configurable infrastructure, scalable, interoperable, heterogeneous, and secure that could also seamlessly integrate other existing and future platforms and devices. Information can flow among IoT systems in a secure and privacy-preserving way, allowing for extracting context for developing cross-domain applications and breaking the domain silos of today’s IoT world.

Smart cities, participatory sensing as well as location data available in communication systems and social networks generates a vast amount of heterogeneous mobility data that can be used for traffic management. This chapter gives an overview of the different data sources and their characteristics and describes a framework for utilizing the various sources efficiently in the context of traffic management. Furthermore, different types of traffic models and algorithms are related to both the different data sources as well as some key functionalities of active traffic management, for example, short-term prediction and control.

Modern cities are embracing cutting-edge technologies to improve the services they offer to the citizens from traffic control to the reduction of greenhouse gases and energy provisioning. In this chapter, we look at the energy sector advocating how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and signal processing techniques can be integrated into next generation power grids for an increased effectiveness in terms of: electrical stability, distribution, improved communication security, energy production, and utilization. In particular, we deliberate about the use of these techniques within new demand response paradigms, where communities of prosumers (e.g., households, generating part of their electricity consumption) contribute to the satisfaction of the energy demand through load balancing and peak shaving. Our discussion also covers the use of big data analytics for demand response and serious games as a tool to promote energy-efficient behaviors from end users.

Instead of a systematic review on the progress of the smart built environment, some of the key milestones of professional or scientific development and use cases of intelligent buildings in the context of smart city concept will be addressed—describing also the intended interaction with the primer users: (1) citizens, (2) residents either as home owners or tenants and (3) occupants in commercial and public buildings. Smart and user-oriented environment, as defined in the 1980s to be fully integrated or in the millennium of 2000 considering user as an innovator, cannot be concluded to be the mainstream today in housing or in workplaces in commercial or public buildings or in industrial facilities. Nevertheless, the development of smart technology during last 4–6 decades has resulted to a strong “smart back end”—borrowing the term in software development. This technological readiness bears a good potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living and working conditions even beyond the currently targeted energy efficiency. New applications for digitalized societies are expected to chance all paths of life. Service fusion based on individual rights on one’s own data is a key parameter for deep connectivity in information flows and consequently in operations. Platformization together with equitable and secured heavy open data exchange is employed in production, decision-making, smoothening of daily living, etc. to make current silos disappear. As well the IT giants as the large fauna of newly established startups urge to make new business in digitalization affecting positively on the economic situation since 2008 demanding structural reforms.

It can be tempting to think about smart homes like one thinks about smart cities. On the surface, smart homes and smart cities comprise coherent systems enabled by similar sensing and interactive technologies. It can also be argued that both are broadly underpinned by shared goals of sustainable development, inclusive user engagement and improved service delivery. However, the home possesses unique characteristics that must be considered in order to develop effective smart home systems that are adopted in the real world [37].