Yehia Ibrahim Alzoubi, Ahmad Al‐Ahmad, Ashraf Jaradat
<span lang="EN-US">Due to the expansion growth of the IoT devices, Fog computing was proposed to enhance the low latency IoT applications and meet the distribution nature of these devices. However, Fog computing was criticized for several privacy and security vulnerabilities. This paper aims to identify and discuss the security challenges for Fog computing. It also discusses blockchain technology as a complementary mechanism associated with Fog computing to mitigate the impact of these issues. The findings of this paper reveal that blockchain can meet the privacy and security requirements of fog computing; however, there are several limitations of blockchain that should be further investigated in the context of Fog computing.</span>
Sustainable development can be attained at a microlevel and having smart campuses around the world presents an opportunity to achieve city-wide smartness. In the process of attaining smartness on campuses, the elements requiring attention must be investigated. There are many publications on smart campuses, and this investigation used the bibliometric analysis method to identify such publications produced over the last decade. A matrix of 578 nodes and 3217 edges was developed from 285 publications on smart campus construction and procurement. Fifteen cluster themes were produced from the bibliometric analysis. The findings revealed that China contributed 48.4% of all published articles on the smart campus. The findings presented a framework from the cluster themes under the four broad infrastructure areas of building construction or repurposing, technology and IT network, continuous improvement, and smart learning and teaching management. The implications of the findings identified that IT project management, traditional procurement strategy, and standard forms of contracts such as the New Engineering Contract (NEC) and the Joint Contract Tribunal (JCT) are applicable in the procurement of smart cities.
Open access
Smart Cities and Technologies
Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development
Vitor N. Coelho, Thays A. Oliveira, Wellington Tavares, Igor Machado Coelho
This paper introduces state-of-the-art possibilities for using smart contracts capabilities for governance. Assisted by blockchain, the use of these tools can provide a transition that society currently needs due the huge amount of information that reaches citizens. The core mechanism of this study lies within the scope of smart accounts and digital identities. These topics enclose smart cities trends that seek to increase citizens’ participation in the social decision making process, in a transparent way that is usually managed throughout decentralized systems. We define a set of available features that can automatically guide the flow of resources, after the conclusions of voting processes also conducted on trusted environments of distributed ledgers. By presenting innovative ideas and didactically describing the possibilities, we aim to promote awareness of blockchain capabilities among readers, students, decisions makers and, mainly, the younger generation.
Abstract In the process of rapid development of information technology, to promote the further construction of new smart cities, comprehensive utilization of cloud computing technology, big data technology and Internet of Things technology will help improve the convenience of residents’ lives. The development of blockchain technology provides more possibilities for the construction of new smart cities. The use of blockchain and other new technologies to build a smart city big data platform can realize a point-to-point communication mechanism. At the same time, this can also establish a more reliable trust agreement. It is conducive to the realization of applications such as smart IoT, government affairs, and big data. Using the blockchain big data platform to build a new type of smart city can break information islands and achieve the purpose of data sharing and information security. This is a key issue that must be paid attention to in the current construction of new smart cities. In this link, it is necessary to strengthen the research and analysis of blockchain technology to understand the problems that exist in the process of building a smart city on a big data platform. This article discusses the application advantages and related strategies of a smart city big data platform based on blockchain technology.
In construction, BIM (Building Information Modeling) promises to increase quality of data and to provide a shared, uniform view to all parties. While BIM tools and exchange formats exist, the distribution and safeguarding of data is an ongoing challenge. Distributed Ledger Technology and Blockchains offer a possible solution to this task, and they promise quality attributes such as tamper resistance, traceability/auditability and safe digitalization of assets and intellectual property. However, the practical application and adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology in the built environment requires a good understanding of tool maturity, performance and standardization. Also, user-oriented integration of BIM tools with the blockchain backend needs attention. The contribution of this paper is an overview over both industrial and academic progress at the intersection of BIM and blockchains/DLT.
Smart government is an important means of optimizing government management, improving the government decision-making capacity, and pushing forward the public service. When the smart government process applies, the dire straits of collaborative governance among the different participants could not be ignored usually caused by maximizing their profits. Based on the current research, this paper introduces the blockchain technology into the smart government system and establishes a smart government platform architecture. Meanwhile, to analyse the evolutionary and stable strategies of the three parties under the blockchain technology, the evolutionary game model including functional departments, local governments, and end users as the main players is established on account of the bounded rationality. By examining the “blockchain + government service” in Beijing with the systemic dynamics theory, this paper changes the influencing factors simulated by changing the parameter assignment, to determine the evolutionary stable equilibrium under different external conditions. The results show that local government supervision plays a leading role in the process of collaborative governance of smart government based on blockchain technology; meanwhile, effective cost control is a key factor affecting the evolutionary stability strategy (ESS). Besides, the “decentralized” structure, “distrust” architecture, and “precision” mechanism of the blockchain are verified for the effect of the evolution process. Among them, precision service and flat management improve the possibility of collaborative governance, but the impact of the trust mechanism is not obvious. Therefore, the collaborative governance model of smart government based on blockchain technology is loaded with far-reaching significance for promoting the modernization of China’s governance capacity and governance system.
Zhen Liu, Ziyuan Chi, Mohamed Osmani, Peter Demian
‘Smart cities’ are a new type of city where stakeholders are jointly responsible for urban management. City Information Management (CIM) is an output tool for smart city planning and management, which assists in achieving the sustainable development of urban infrastructure, and promotes smart cities to achieve the goals of stable global economic development, sustainable environmental development, and improvement of people’s quality of life. Existing research has so far established that blockchain and BIM have great potential to enhance construction project performance. However, there is little research on how blockchain and BIM can support sustainable building design and construction. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore the potential impact of the integration of blockchain and BIM in a smart city environment on making buildings more sustainable within the context of CIM/Smart Cities. The paper explores the relationships between blockchain, BIM and sustainable building across the life cycle stage of a construction project. This paper queries the Web of Science (WoS) database with keywords to obtain relevant publication, and then uses the VOSviewer to visually analyze the relationships between blockchain, BIM, and sustainable building within the context of smart cities and CIM, which is conducted in bibliometric analysis followed by micro scheme analysis. The results demonstrate the value of this method in gauging the importance of these three topics, highlighting their interrelationships and identifying trends, giving researchers an objective research direction. Those aspects reported in the paper constitute an original contribution.
Nowadays, smart cities are using advanced technologies to control and coordinate physical, social, and commercial enterprise systems to deliver high-quality services to their residents while guaranteeing the effective usage of available resources. Numerous major corporations, as well as government bodies, are involved in the construction of smart cities because smart city activities also need information that is obtained from organizations. Blockchain-based technology allows for peer-to-peer exchanges as a public ledger that maintains records of transactions, smart contracts, agreements, and shipments without third-party mediators. In the future, smart cities will be equipped with several innovative technologies, a huge amount of data, a lot of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and a heterogeneous environment. However, data processing among IoT devices in futuristic smart cities is a challenging task. In this paper, the author proposed a blockchain-based big data integrity service framework for IoT devices data processing in smart cities. The author collected the necessary data from various resources and applied three experiments to evaluate the key performance indicators. K-mean algorithm was used to classify the data, and blockchain strategy was applied to ensure secure communication among IoT devices. The framework was simulated and tested using 100 devices. The proposed framework allowed IoT devices to efficiently use information collected from different resources to engage in operational processes and exchange information.
The concept of smart city refers to the improvement of the quality of life of the city by making full use of idle resources by sharing. However, limited by the technical level, the current resource sharing system mostly adopts centralized data storage mode. Systems managed in this way are vulnerable to multiple threats. The tested blockchain technology with the characteristics of decentralization and tamper resistance can effectively prevent various risks. Starting with the architecture of blockchain intelligent contract, this paper puts forward a structural optimization factor model of intelligent contract. To optimize the structure of blockchain intelligent contract, the gas optimization theory is put forward by changing the order, reducing the use of costly EVM data fields, reducing redundant fields, and optimizing intelligent contract codes. Experimental analysis of the proposed model is carried out, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing the transaction execution time of cost calculation with the cost of executing gas, which can provide reference for the selection of intelligent contract organization structure of smart city resource sharing system.
In a world of nonstop developing technology, Blockchain has become a trusted tool to apply transparency in the public sector. The consensus mechanism provides trusted data that can support clear and adjusted as well as well-structured procedures. Nowadays, the public sector can increase trust by adapting Blockchain applications in the services offered to be e-government portals. In this paper, the researchers review the literature to identify the potential use cases and application of Blockchain in e-government services. This new technology along with its related applications will be discussed and defined. Moreover, the possibilities of using Blockchain in the public sector and its impact on organizational transformation, financial management, and performance are increasing. The study concluded that the use of blockchain technologies and applications is still limited in the public sector. Obstacles and barriers are related mostly to (security and privacy) and law and by-laws support. This paper will provide a useful reference for researchers in blockchain applications and their impact on e-government and propose future research questions that need to be addressed to inform how the public sector should approach the blockchain technology adoption.
Horst Treiblmaier, Abderahman Rejeb, Andreas Strebinger
The term “Smart City” denotes a comprehensive concept to alleviate pending problems of modern urban areas which have developed into an important work field for practitioners and scholars alike. However, the question remains as to how cities can become “smart”. The application of information technology is generally considered a key driver in the “smartization” of cities. Detailed frameworks and procedures are therefore needed to guide, operationalize, and measure the implementation process as well as the impact of the respective technologies. In this paper, we discuss blockchain technology, a novel driver of technological transformation that comprises a multitude of underlying technologies and protocols, and its potential impact on smart cities. We specifically address the question of how blockchain technology may benefit the development of urban areas. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we present a framework and research propositions. We identify nine application fields of blockchain technology in the smartization of cities: (1) healthcare, (2) logistics and supply chains, (3) mobility, (4) energy, (5) administration and services, (6) e-voting, (7) factory, (8) home and (9) education. We discuss current developments in these fields, illustrate how they are affected by blockchain technology and derive propositions to guide future research endeavors.
Nikolai Siniak, Tom Kauko, Sergey Shavrov, Ninoslav Marina
Abstract The real estate industry is currently undergoing a digital transformation that not only changes its nature in terms of the markets and work environments, but is also influencing its growth. What are the main trends and concerns related to this transformation? To what extent is the real estate industry already prepared for this? This paper reviews the situation in terms of the emergence of a phenomenon known as PropTech. PropTech is characterized by the massive implementation of emerging technology such as home matching tools, drones, virtual reality, building information modelling (BIM), data analytics tools, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, smart contracts, crowdfunding in the real estate sector, fintechs related to real estate, smart cities, regions, smart homes and shared economy. This survey of changes in the real estate industry due to PropTech covers four areas: (1) PropTech applications in the real estate industry; (2) implications of PropTech for real estate market transparency; (3) how PropTech could give a region or a company a competitive advantage; and (4) concerns on the wider implications of these changes on a labour market and education. In a plausible scenario, changing the real estate technologies could change system dynamics and improve real estate market transparency. Moreover, it can be asserted that, in a broader sense, PropTech is beneficial for territorial competition and territorial growth strategies. And lastly, under different institutional arrangements, PropTech can affect the changing structure of the real estate market, the demand for hi-tech, new skills as well as emerging policy challenges for the real estate industry.
The transformative turn of innovation policy has resulted in calls for a more entrepreneurial and directional role of the state. However, the multiple roles that the state might play remains underexplored. This paper studies the embedded role of the state in four distinct modes of governance of socio-technical systems. Using a three-pillar analytical model, the paper examines four illustrative cases: cryptocurrencies, smart cities, automated vehicles, and nuclear power. The paper identifies 13 different roles of the state: observer, warner, mitigator, opportunist, facilitator, lead-user, enabler of societal engagement, gatekeeper, promoter, moderator, initiator, guarantor and watchdog. The conceptualization of these roles serves to understand that the transformative agency of the state is leveraged/constrained by the modes of governance, and that it is also ultimately exercised through specific mixes of roles.
Thays A. Oliveira, Miquel Oliver, Helena Ramalhinho
The way citizens interact with cities affects overall life quality. Their participation in social decisions is of paramount importance for helping on public decisions that affect governance, regulation and education. This interaction has the potential of being boosted within the scope of smart and digital cities, especially by recent advances in blockchain technology. This work introduces insights about how smart cities’ concepts and innovative technologies can help society to face daily challenges for improving citizens’ awareness. Digital technologies are able to drive social and economic development by employing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to promote innovation. In this context, e-governance, in conjunction with disruptive concepts such as blockchain, is showing up as a fundamental tool for a decentralized democracy. This study reviews, discusses, raises open points and presents suggestions towards an efficient, transparent and sustainable use of technology, applied to future cities.
Blockchain technology can be termed as a revolutionary innovation that has transformed the manner of data sharing by making it more secure and immutable. The existence of a mutual trust model which includes every participating entity makes it a widespread adopted technology in recent years. Due to i
Fog computing (FC) is used to reduce the energy consumption and latency for the heterogeneous communication approaches in the smart cities’ applications of the Internet of Everything (IoE). Fog computing nodes are connected through wired or wireless medium. The goal of smart city applications is to develop the transaction relationship of real-time response applications. There are various frameworks in real-world to support the IoE in smart-cities but they face the issues like security, platform Independence, multi-application assistance, and resource management. This article is motivated from the Blockchain and Fog computing technologies and presents a secured architecture Blockchain and Fog-based Architecture Network (BFAN) for IoE applications in the smart cities. The proposed architecture secures sensitive data with encryption, authentication, and Blockchain. It assists the System-developers and Architects to deploy the applications in smart city paradigm. The goal of the proposed architecture is to reduce the latency and energy, and ensure improved security features through Blockchain technology. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture performs better than the existing frameworks for smart-cities.
Abstract The rise of global urbanisation has led to massive pressures on resources such as food, water, infrastructure, and energy demand to support growing populations. It brings adverse impacts on the liveable condition and economic growth of a country if this problem remains unsolved. Smart city is a potential solution to address the challenges of urbanisation by leveraging the technological breakthrough such as internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, big data, and cloud computing to facilitate scarce resources planning and management. With numerous connected devices and vast communication networks, it poses a challenges of security threat which cannot be addressed by the conventional cybersecurity solutions. Blockchain offers a solution in securing the huge numbers of connected devices in smart city network. The application of blockchain technology is leading in the banking and financial industry. However, the uses and implementations in smart city have emerged in recent years. The combination of blockchain technology and smart city has offered a great potential for sustainable development. Thus, it is imperative to discuss the potential of these two elements in making the city safer and sustainable. This paper explores how the blockchain technology application can help in managing smart city and achieve sustainability. The findings revealed that there are five key areas of blockchain application in smart city which are smart governance, smart mobility, smart asset, smart utility and smart logistic. A framework for smart sustainable city with blockchain technology is presented as an outcome of this study. It gives a clear overview for the policy makers and regulators of how blockchain supports within smart city framework. It facilitates the transition towards smart and sustainable cities through the use of blockchain.
Insurance is one of the fundamental services offered to the citizens to reduce their costs and assist them in case of an emergency. One of the most important challenges in the insurance industry is to address liability challenge and the forging of documents by the involved parties, i.e., insurance company or the users, in order to increase financial gain. Conventional methods to address this challenge is significantly time consuming and costly and also suffers from lock of transparency. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution for the insurance industry in smart cities (BIS). BIS creates a big umbrella that consists of the smart city managers, insurance companies, users, and sensors and devices. The users are known by changeable Public Keys (PKs) that introduces a level of anonymity. The data collected by the sensors is stored in cloud or local storage and is shared with insurance company on demand to find the liable party that in turn increases the privacy of the users. BIS enables the users to prove and share the history of their insurances with other users or insurances. Using Proof of Concept (POC) implementation we demonstrated the applicability of blockchain in insurance industry. The implementation results prove that BIS significantly reduces delay involved in insurance industry as compared with conventional insurance methods.
Saleh Albahli, Rehan Ullah Khan, Ali Mustafa Qamar
eHealth is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to enhance health quality access. Health care innovations are an essential element of Vision 2030 and National Transformation Program (NTP) 2020 operational plan that will lead to an improvement in the quality of health care in Saudi Arabia. The objective of this paper is to address the healthcare system limitations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in general and the Qassim region in particular to global standards. In practice, the creation of an infrastructure for storing and seamless sharing of health data between different entities is studied. Furthermore, an in-depth analysis of current practices w.r.t. the health data, as well as finding similarities between NTP 2020 and Health 2020 (European Union) has been performed. A multi-level blockchain eHealth system is proposed to provide seamless electronic health records to the patients. Moreover, the current practices being employed in Qassim province, KSA has been analyzed. It was found that private hospitals give access to medical reports to their patients besides allowing them to manage their appointments. On the other hand, access to the government hospitals' medical records is minimal.
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed numerous, lasting adverse effects on the global tourism industry. At the same time, it exposed the competitive advantages that existing smart tourism infrastructure could provide for addressing urgent health issues and providing meaningful smart services. This paper initially provides examples of smart geospatial services based on COVID-19 pandemic-related data, such as algorithms for measuring social distancing through CCTV and proximity contract tracing protocols and applications. Indeed, smart destinations, as an evolutionary step of smart cities, very quickly became a practical and research framework in various other disciplines, from leisure and service-oriented to technical and geospatial domains. However, various technologies employed and interests of different stockholders create a constant need for rescaling of smart data to facilitate their usability in providing optimized smart tourism services. One of the pressing concerns is the functional alignment of geospatial data with tourism-related data. Thus, we aim to pinpoint the growing importance of smart geospatial services, by pointing to the main downturn of the current smart destination issue with geospatial data resolutions, and, by building upon the relations of the geospatial layer of data with the tourism-specific layer. To this end, we pinpoint two further research directions - reinvestigating spatial and temporal resolution as a core of data smartness and the need for contextual (tourism-oriented) scaling of smart technology. This could be of keen interest in post-pandemic tourism, where smart geospatial services will be of pressing concern, but also it still an issue to be resolved in further smart destination development.
Emmanuel Boateng Sifah, Hu Xia, Christian Nii Aflah Cobblah, Qi Xia · 6 authors
In recent years, the use of blockchain has gained attention in industrial interventions and research. Blockchain technologies can be particularly utilized in the domain of Smart Governance, which is a critical component of Smart Cities. Smart Governance aims to ensure smarter decision making, openness and collaborative participation of all entities involved as well as help minimize resource usage, reduce consumption and save cost. Smart Governance involves putting in place systems for monitoring and evaluating the performance of government workers. However, government workers lack trust in these systems because they are mostly centralized systems which are prone to single-point of failure problems and also data fed into these systems can be tampered with by the higher-ups or employers to favour individual workers. With these problems, there is a need for a decentralized system that can ensure trust, tamper-resistance, accountability, reliability, transparency and security. In this paper, we propose a decentralized employee evaluation system based on blockchain. We utilized a 3-chain model, namely; ID-Chain, Behavior Chain and Credit Chain fused to make a single unified chain. Our system also makes use of an automated game-based employee evaluation approach. Our system is based on Hyperledger Fabric as the blockchain platform and operating mechanism. Our Proof of Concept (PoC) results shows that in utilizing the Blockchain system, security concerns such as trust, privacy, accountability, among others, that are present in current employee performance evaluation systems are tackled and also in the adoption of the game-based automated system, our system can make an effective decision regarding employee performance. Our system achieves trust, transparency, security and accountability among government workers under a Smart City governing environment.
Malmö aims to become Sweden’s most climate-smart city and Hyllie, its newest city district, is to lead the way. This ambition is front and centre in the 2011 Climate Contract that envisioned Hyllie as a climate-neutral city district. Malmö signed the Climate Contract with Eon, a multinational energy company. But five years after signing the Climate Contract, Malmö and Eon gave up their goal of a making Hyllie climate-neutral by 2020. The Climate Contract resembles other smart city initiatives that many researchers have criticised for promoting technology-centric, corporation-controlled visions of cities. Assemblage urbanism and the sociology of expectations help to analyse the techno-political dynamics between organisations, visions and urban infrastructure. The realisation of a vision is a techno-political process that requires the coordination of multiple groups around multiple promises. At first, it was the Climate Contract that helped Eon and the city administration to coordinate their activities. Subsequently, Eon made a promise to build wind turbines, and that promise then took precedence in the coordination of their activities. But controversies arose with two publics that emerged in opposition to Eon’s promise: neighbours to the site of the proposed wind turbine and the city’s Property Department. Unable to resolve these controversies, Eon and Malmö acknowledged that they lacked the resources need to make Hyllie climate-neutral. They adapted their original promise to the current state of socio-material assemblages, and Hyllie was demoted from a role model for the climate-smart city to a source of lessons learned.
Open access
Smart Cities and Technologies
Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development