Advances in Orchestrating Sustainable Smart Cities (Part 2)

RAPID urbanization is a global megatrend with 66 percent of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050. The staggering exponential increase in urbanization is leading to more people migrating to major cities in the search of better opportunities and quality of life. Cities need to increase the efficiency in which they operate and use their resources sustainability in order to meet the demands imposed by rapid urbanization. The challenge is to continue providing basic resources such as sufficient fresh water; cleaner energy; transportation alternatives to commute efficiently from one place to another; adaption to changing climatic conditions; safety and security; while also ensuring economical, social, and environment sustainability. Advances in disruptive digital technologies ranging from cyber-physical systems, Big Data analytics, clouds, edges, internet of things etc., is widely accepted as the backbone for addressing these growing problems by impacting all city services and making cities smart. Smart cities [1] are envisioned as a wide-scale concord of internet of things [2] with sensors monitoring cyber and physical indicators; actuators that allow dynamic adaption to the changing complex urban environment; and cloud and edge computing offerings affordable easy to tap computing resources. Recently, we are witnessing an increased investment towards the development and deployment of intelligent and sustainable environments. In order to develop sustainable smart city solutions, smart cities must have an open, flexible, and secure platform on which consolidate siloes and services. Such advances opens new opportunities for improving the efficiency of services offered by smart cities while simultaneously exposing novel vulnerabilities. For example, environments that are embedded with millions and billions of dedicated things (such as sensors) and communication capabilities provide real-time access to finegrained consumer data while exposing new privacy and security risks. Furthermore, as connected things grow, we will witness a significant increase in data that will require novel data processing pipelines, architectures, methods, and techniques. These challenges represent a huge opportunity for a paradigm shift that will require the need for data processing, analysis, and security close to the connected “things” i.e., towards the edge of the network in-order to support the growing smart city ecosystem. This paradigm shift will lead to an explosive growth of independent, owned and operated things and services including gateways, repeaters, smart infrastructure, and systems. Such a paradigm needs to be architected in a way that is easy to operate and dramatically simplifies the management of service offerings through scalable orchestration and proper automation. It must allow management, integration, and deployment of different tenants (such as services and things independently owned) within the smart city ecosystem in a uniform way. It should also have a suitable policy framework, letting specific stakeholders have access to data produced by other tenants, and analyze and extract values from the data. In order to address these challenges, this special issue solicits high quality original research papers (including smart city experience papers) that made significant contributions to the state-of-the-art in “method and techniques to build sustainable smart city solutions” research area. The call for papers received a number of submissions. After a two-phase peer review process, we have accepted five high-quality papers related to the aforementioned areas of interest which will be published in the October-December 2017 as Part 1.