Smart Cities Applications and Requirements

Smart Cities gained importance as a means of making ICT enabled services and applications available to the citizens, companies and authorities that are part of a city's system. It aims at increasing citizens' quality of life, and improving the efficiency and quality of the services provided by governing entities and businesses. This perspective requires an integrated vision of a city and of its infrastructures, in all its components. A Smart City can be taken according to six characteristics: All these domains raise new challenges in security and privacy, since users implicitly expect systems to be secure and privacy-preserving. One of the critical elements is which role(s) the city will take up as an actor within an increasingly complex value network. New players enter the market, actors shift their business strategies, roles change, different types of platforms emerge and vie for market dominance, technological developments create new threats and opportunities, etc. An element related to the trend of platformisation is cloud computing, which is increasingly helping the private sector to reduce cost, increase efficiency, and work smarter. One particular challenge relates to open data business models. Activities necessary for Public Sector Information provision can be identified. The development of efficient and effective e-government is a prerequisite. Transnational authentication systems for citizens and businesses, agreed frameworks for data privacy, and the sharing and collection of individual and business data, are key. Smart Cities need to be able to integrate themselves into national, regional and international infrastructures. Although the implementation aspects depend strongly on the authorities of these infrastructures, European wide recommendations and directives will definitely contribute to accelerate the deployment of Smart Cities. Health, inclusion and assisted living will play an essential role, since the demand for related services is rising, because ageing is changing disease composition. Requirements address a number of technologies, beyond the ones related to mobile and fixed networks. An integrated perspective on healthcare solutions for the near-to long-term can be foreseen, bridging a direct gap in between the health area and the technological development of communications (radio and network components). The needs for mobility in urban areas result into a number of problems, such as traffic congestion and energy consumption, which can be alleviated by exploiting Intelligent Transportation Systems and further adoption of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication networks. The information being managed in this area can be relevant to other domains, which increases its potential. An effective deployment …