In the last few years, numerous research efforts have been conducted to merge the Internet of Things (IoT) with smart city environments. The goal to make a city “smart” is arising as a possible solution to lessen the issues caused by the urban population growth and fast urbanization. Attention also has focused on the pedestrian crossings because they are one of the most dangerous places in the transport field. Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) can undoubtedly be an excellent support in developing infrastructures that can best manage pedestrian crossing. For this reason, this paper introduces a fuzzy logic-based solution able to manage dynamically the traffic lights’ phases in signalized pedestrian crossings. The proposed approach provides the possibility to change the phases of the traffic light taking into account the time of the day and the number of pedestrians about to cross the road. The paper presents a thorough description of the fuzzy logic controller configuration, an in-depth analysis of the application scenario and simulative assessments obtained through Vissim simulations.

Smart Pedestrian Crossing Management at Traffic Light Junctions through a Fuzzy-Based Approach

Internet of Things (IoT) has left the experimental field and is reaching the final consumer in areas such as residential automation, health, transportation and government support. Since these are applications intrinsically linked to the physical world, they require more attention in aspects related to their dependability. Focusing on its availability and reliability, we present a proposal to apply the Microservices architectural pattern in an IoT middleware with web services in the monolithic architecture. We describe the reengineering that must be done in this middleware and, finally, we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, highlighting the availability improvement, optimization of the infrastructure resources, the ease of maintenance and evolution, as well as the inclination to the elasticity that the architecture allows.

Increasing the Dependability of IoT Middleware with Cloud Computing and Microservices

The recent demographic trends indicate towards a rapidly increasing population growth and a significant portion of this increased population now prefer to live mostly in cities. In connection with this, it has become the responsibility of the government to ensure a quality standard of living in the cities and also make sure that these facilities trickle down to the next generation. A program named Smart City Mission has been started for this purpose. With an extremely diverse population, that is only second to China in the world in terms of size, the Indian government has engaged in serious thinking for a better city planning and providing numerous opportunities for the citizenry. It was, therefore, planned that the Smart City Mission program will be able to provide a highly responsive infrastructure, network security, a good living environment and the like. Internet of things (IoT) application in smart cities turns out to be the most challenging in this phase. The information available in the internet has made accessible to many devices through IoT and it also aware the citizen in many aspects. But with the increasing number of devices and information, it is now becoming increasingly difficult to depend on IoT to manage things in the internet space with a similar degree of ease. As a result, cloud-based technologies have given preferences over the existing one and IoT has been replaced by the newly introduced Cloud of Things (CoT) paradigm. This paper intends to connect different smart city applications for the betterment of city life with the Cloud of Things (CoT). Our proposed smart city architecture is based on Cloud of Things, and the focus is also given to identify the existing as well as the forthcoming challenges for the concerned program of the government. By identifying the difficulties it is expected that the project will be materialized with a great success.

The Role of Cloud of Things in Smart Cities.

The rapid rise and implementation of Smart Systems (i.e., multi-functional observation and platform systems that depict settings and/or identify situations or features of interest, often in real-time) has inversely paralleled and readily exposed the reduced capacity of human and societal systems to effectively respond to environmental hazards. This overarching review and essay explores the complex set of interactions found among Smart, Societal, and Environmental Systems. The resulting rise in the poorly performing response solutions to environmental hazards that has occurred despite best practices, detailed forecast information, and the use and application of real-time in situ observational platforms are considered. The application of Smart Systems, relevant architectures, and ever-increasing numbers of applications and tools development by individuals as they interact with Smart Systems offers a means to ameliorate and resolve confounding found among all of the interdependent Systems. The interactions of human systems with environmental hazards further expose society’s complex operational vulnerabilities and gaps in response to such threats. An examination of decision-making, the auto-reactive nature of responses before, during, and after environmental hazards; and the lack of scalability and comparability are presented with regard to the prospects of applying probabilistic methods, cross-scale time and space domains; anticipated impacts, and the need to account for multimodal actions and reactions—including psycho-social contributions. Assimilation of these concepts and principles in Smart System architectures, applications, and tools is essential to ensure future viability and functionalities with regard to environmental hazards and to produce an effective set of societal engagement responses. Achieving the promise of Smart Systems relative to environmental hazards will require an extensive transdisciplinary approach to tie psycho-social behaviors directly with non-human components and systems in order to close actionable gaps in response. Pathways to achieve a more comprehensive understanding are given for consideration by the wide diversity of disciplines necessary to move forward in Smart Systems as tied with the societal response to environmental hazards.

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/11/3/72/pdf

Environmental Hazards: A Coverage Response Approach

Information Society is advancing along a route of ecosystemic evolution. ICT and Internet advancements, together with the progression of the systemic approach for enhancement and application of Smart Systems, are grounding such an evolution. The needed approach is therefore expected to evolve by increasingly fitting into the basic requirements of a significant general enhancement of human and social well-being, within all spheres of life (public, private, professional). This implies enhancing and exploiting the net-living virtual space, to make it a virtuous beneficial integration of the real-life space. Meanwhile, contextual evolution of smart cities is aiming at strongly empowering that ecosystemic approach by enhancing and diffusing net-living benefits over our own lived territory, while also incisively targeting a new stable socio-economic local development, according to social, ecological, and economic sustainability requirements. This territorial focus matches with a new glocal vision, which enables a more effective diffusion of benefits in terms of well-being, thus moderating the current global vision primarily fed by a global-scale market development view. Basic technological advancements have thus to be pursued at the system-level. They include system architecting for virtualization of functions, data integration and sharing, flexible basic service composition, and end-service personalization viability, for the operation and interoperation of smart systems, supporting effective net-living advancements in all application fields. Increasing and basically mandatory importance must also be increasingly reserved for human–technical and social–technical factors, as well as to the associated need of empowering the cross-disciplinary approach for related research and innovation. The prospected eco-systemic impact also implies a social pro-active participation, as well as coping with possible negative effects of net-living in terms of social exclusion and isolation, which require incisive actions for a conformal socio-cultural development. In this concern, speed, continuity, and expected long-term duration of innovation processes, pushed by basic technological advancements, make ecosystemic requirements stricter. This evolution requires also a new approach, targeting development of the needed basic and vocational education for net-living, which is to be considered as an engine for the development of the related ‘new living know-how’, as well as of the conformal ‘new making know-how’. The papers of the special issue are significant contributions samples within the general ecosystemic view above highlighted. The first group of papers ([1–5]) pertain the focus on human and social factors through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches, which look for enhancing quality of life supported by the smart system environment. The second group of papers ([6–9]) pertains to some relevant technological infrastructure enhancements, based on exploitation of the Internet of Things the 5G network paradigms. Several contributed papers widely point out also the relevance of smart city context for grounding and developing the ecosystemic approach, through advancement of both intangible and tangible infrastructures. Contributions made by each paper is below outlined. The first paper—by Martelli [1]—exposes and grounds an initiative point of view about new education needed for smart citizenship. Education has to cope indeed with citizen awareness lack. The paper’s primary concern is about privacy and freedom requirements connected with the knowledge bases generated by the IT services. For such a purpose, an original education methodology

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/10/3/28/pdf

Ecosystemic Evolution Fed by Smart Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) seems a viable way to enable the Smart Cities of the future. iNUIT (Internet of Things for Urban Innovation) is a multi-year research program that aims to create an ecosystem that exploits the variety of data coming from multiple sensors and connected objects installed on the scale of a city, in order to meet specific needs in terms of development of new services (physical security, resource management, etc.). Among the multiple research activities within iNUIT, we present two projects: SmartCrowd and OpEc. SmartCrowd aims at monitoring the crowd’s movement during large events. It focuses on real-time tracking using sensors available in smartphones and on the use of a crowd simulator to detect possible dangerous scenarios. A proof-of-concept of the application has been tested at the Paleo Festival (Switzerland) showing the feasibility of the approach. OpEc (Optimisation de l’Eclairage public) aims at using IoT to implement dynamic street light management and control with the goal of reducing street light energy consumption while guaranteeing the same level of security of traditional illumination. The system has been tested during two months in a street in St-Imier (Switzerland) without interruption, validating its stability and resulting in an overall energy saving of about 56%.

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/8/2/18/pdf

Juergen Ehrensberger

Papers

iNUIT: Internet of Things for Urban Innovation