A Smart City Economy Supported by Service Level Agreements: A Conceptual Study into the Waste Management Domain

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have proposed a model of how to revise SWM services by integrating ISP into the relationship between home, business customers and the city council, which is proposed to be achievable using personalized and flexible SLAs. The paper is nicely written and comprehensively detailed. My only comment would be to add more references in the paper. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Please find our response to the comments received in the separately attached file. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise our work, and for helping to push our thoughts forward in relation to this system through the feedback given. If any of the review comments have not been addressed to sufficient depth, we would appreciate the opportunity to further revisit this work. We look forward to hearing again from MDPI Smart Cities with regard to the status of our paper.

Best wishes,
Cathryn

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper contains major shortcomings. In order to improve, the following should be considered:

1. The paper is too generic. The research does not propose new or innovative services, products or technologies. Please improve.
2. The paper is not properly structured by including: Materials and Methods, Methodology, Discussion and Results. The authors should consider restructuring the paper.
3. Authors should consider extending the literature review. For example, by presenting similar solutions/models already implemented in cities around Europe and or around the world.
4. The authors did not research in detail whether the business model presented can be implemented in any city (large or small) in the UK or anywhere, considering the challenges and the differences in implementing the proposed model in large cities compared cu small cities. Also, the authors should consider possible special regulations of local administration.
5. The proposed business model described in chapter 3 considers households, small business and large business by giving similar scores without considering the big differences between main actors. For example, why ”partner with neighbor (s)” should be scored for large businesses? Large businesses already generate large amount of waste.
6. Citizens should be encouraged to use selective waste collection (paper, glass, plastic etc.). Why give a higher score for those who are opting for collection of different types of waste? For those who are choosing one bin is it allowed to mix the waste?
7. The authors should describe the platform’s main functions and processes for supporting the services from Figure 2.
8. Smart bins are already used in many cities for smart collections and route optimization. The city council and/or the waste collection companies, based on data received from smart bins are able to optimize the routes. Does the research start from the assumption that currently smart bins are not used?
9. Authors should clearly explain how a city council may be convinced to use/implement this model. How long will it take from the proposal to final implementation?
10. Authors should detail the implementation costs.
11. The research should include some preliminary analysis (based on questionnaires) to check if citizens are willing to participate, to see how they perceive the model etc.
12. The authors should improve the conclusion. The conclusion must give clear answers on: what the problem was, how was it solved, what are the results/solutions, what is solved, what future plans are.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Please find our response to the comments received in the separately attached file. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise our work, and for helping to push our thoughts forward in relation to this system through the feedback given. If any of the review comments have not been addressed to sufficient depth, we would appreciate the opportunity to further revisit this work. We look forward to hearing again from MDPI Smart Cities with regard to the status of our paper.

Best wishes,
Cathryn

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors present a business model for smart waste management that involves city governance, citizens and internet service providers. The article shows a possible approach to give incentives for smart waste management into a city.

The problem of working business models is important for the IoT world and the smart city application and this paper has the merit to target such problem.

Besides the topic very interesting, the content and the contribution of the article is very weak. The reasons for introducing ISP into the picture of the business models are not explained. Why the smart waste management application should be bound to a specific (or a subset of) ISP? Why not simply leaving the SWM at application level (so decoupled with the underlying network provider)?

Let’s assume that every smart service (e.g, SWM, mobility, energy) is bound to a specific (or a subset) of ISP, it will be not possible for a user to adhere to all the possible smart city services since she can use only one single ISP (so choosing either on SWM or mobility or energy etc.)

Assuming that the authors have some reason to bring this binding for their design, they should explain and demonstrate them. The article lacks of convincing rationales.

Further, there are many incorrect statements:

- “we might characterize a city’s citizens from a number of perspectives, which can include their location in relation to a city center, the number of people they live with, and their level of education – this type of information builds a profile surrounding citizens, and is detail which can indicate their likelihood of participating in smart city technology.” Can the authors demonstrate these correlations?

- “This [Blockchain] will also add a level of security by giving specific actors in the waste management system access levels to various data shared across the waste management domain. For example, actor A in a waste management scenario cannot access a section of the data posted by actor B and C in the waste management system but actor B can access all sections of data of actor A data completely but not actor C.”. Blockchain is not bringing anything about access control differently to what the authors are stating.

- “An ISP might prioritize the availability of SWM data”. What does prioritize data availability mean? How ISP should do that?

- “The evidence suggests that the expectations of smart cities will not be realized in a consistent way.” What evidences?

- “One reason that the internet took off dramatically as it did was due to its design simplicity. In saying this, reference is made to the couple of protocols which were able to be used to support worldwide communications. Similar to the few protocols, the number of applications being supported was relatively modest and their requirements were not real-time intensive. Deployments could therefore be readily made.”. I do not see any relation between Internet with SWM. Also the advantages of Internet (simplicity of design and standards protocols) are not reproduced by the contributions of this article.

The evaluation and analysis is also very limited. It does not demonstrate how the propose business model might work on real scenarios. For example, how the city council might face the reduction of tax income with the proposed scheme? The authors shall study and analyse more all the involved cost and cost reductions. In other words, the authors should demonstrate the sustainability of their approach.

Regarding the style of text, sometimes there are very long sentences (5 lines) that are hard to digest.

Further, references are very scarce. Is Wilhelm and Ruhlandt (2018) a missing reference?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Please find our response to the comments received in the separately attached file. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to revise our work, and for helping to push our thoughts forward in relation to this system through the feedback given. If any of the review comments have not been addressed to sufficient depth, we would appreciate the opportunity to further revisit this work. We look forward to hearing again from MDPI Smart Cities with regard to the status of our paper.

Best wishes,
Cathryn

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper version is improved compared to the previous one but still contains shortcomings. The authors did not fully address some of the identified issues:

1. The paper is too generic. The research does not propose new or innovative services, products or technologies. Please improve.
2. The paper is not properly structured. For example, why is the literature review placed in the Results chapter?
3. The authors should describe the platform’s main functions and processes for supporting the services from Figure 2. – Added text does not fully describe the main functions.
4. Authors should detail the implementation costs. - Added text does not contain any cost analysis.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

Please find our response to the comments received in the attached letter. Please note that, where relevant, we have added as tracked changes the way in which we are responding to the reviewer comments in this second revision, when the comment was not responded to in an adequate manner in the first revision. Thank you for again giving us the opportunity to revise our work, and for helping to push our thoughts forward in relation to this system through the feedback given. If any of the review comments have again not been addressed to sufficient depth, we would appreciate the opportunity to further revisit this work. We look forward to hearing again from MDPI Smart Cities with regard to the status of our paper.

Best wishes,
Cathryn

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have addressed and responded to all my previous comments.

However the assumptions of the content of this paper, such as the coupling of ISP with SWM is still weak. Thus the content of the paper cannot be improved more if the assumptions are not changed and, therefore, the whole model.

Author Response

Dear Reviewers,

Please find our response to the comments received in the attached letter. Please note that, where relevant, we have added as tracked changes the way in which we are responding to the reviewer comments in this second revision, when the comment was not responded to in an adequate manner in the first revision. Thank you for again giving us the opportunity to revise our work, and for helping to push our thoughts forward in relation to this system through the feedback given. If any of the review comments have again not been addressed to sufficient depth, we would appreciate the opportunity to further revisit this work. We look forward to hearing again from MDPI Smart Cities with regard to the status of our paper.

Best wishes,
Cathryn

Author Response File: Author Response.docx