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Smart Cities, Volume 9, Issue 1

2026 January - 19 articles

Cover Story: Building Digital Twins (BDTs) often lack support for concurrent interactions among multiple users, physical entities, and digital counterparts. We propose MIO-BDT—a formally verified framework that explicitly models dynamic, multi-party interactions within a unified architecture. At the system level, it enables coupled coordination across “human–twin–physical” triads; at the component level, each twin integrates visual, physical, and interaction sub-models. Rigorous formal verification using timed automata confirms the model is logically consistent and deadlock-free. MIO-BDT thus provides enhanced representational capacity, structural clarity, and a validated foundation for next-generation, interaction-aware BDT systems. View this paper
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Articles (19)

  • Article
  • Open Access
1,449 Views
42 Pages

Visual Context and Behavioral Priming in Pedestrian Crossing Decisions: Evidence from a Stated Preference Experiment in Ecuadorian Urban Areas

  • Yasmany García-Ramírez,
  • Fernando Arrobo-Herrera,
  • Alejandra Cruz-Cortez,
  • Luis Fernández-Garrido and ,
  • Joshua Flores,
  • Wilson Lara-Bayas,
  • Carlos Lema-Nacipucha,
  • Diego Mejía-Caldas,
  • Richard Navas-Coque and
  • Kevin Zambrano-Delgado
  • + 6 authors+ 1 author

Pedestrian safety in developing countries faces critical challenges from rapid urbanization and infrastructure deficiencies. This study investigates how visual context influences pedestrian crossing preferences through a controlled stated preference...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Paving the Future: Sustainable Road Design and Urban Mobility in Smart Cities, 2nd Edition)
  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
2,021 Views
26 Pages

Intelligent Control Framework for Optimal Energy Management of University Campus Microgrid

  • Galia Marinova,
  • Edmond Hajrizi,
  • Besnik Qehaja and
  • Vassil Guliashki

This study proposes a smart energy management framework for a university campus microgrid aimed at reducing dependence on the main power grid and increasing the utilization of photovoltaic (PV) generation under dynamic load and environmental conditio...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,321 Views
19 Pages

Development and Field Testing of an Acoustic Sensor Unit for Smart Crossroads as Part of V2X Infrastructure

  • Yury Furletov,
  • Dinara Aptinova,
  • Mekan Mededov,
  • Andrey Keller and ,
  • Sergey S. Shadrin and
  • Daria A. Makarova
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

Improving city crossroads safety is a critical problem for modern smart transportation systems (STS). This article presents the results of developing, upgrading, and comprehensively experimentally testing an acoustic monitoring system prototype desig...

(This article belongs to the Section Physical Infrastructures and Networks in Smart Cities)
  • Article
  • Open Access
2,802 Views
25 Pages

As a high-fidelity digital mapping of the physical built environment, the Building Digital Twin (BDT) relies on physical–virtual interaction as a core enabler for lifecycle management. However, existing BDT conceptual models predominantly focus...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
1,978 Views
18 Pages

Smart city initiatives increasingly rely on interoperable and high-quality urban data, yet many cities lack systematic methods for prioritizing which datasets should be developed first. This study proposes an evidence-based framework for smart city d...

(This article belongs to the Section Urban Digital Twins and Urban Informatics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
1,547 Views
22 Pages

Smart Sensing in Italian Historic City Centers: The Liminal Environmental Monitoring System (LEMS)

  • Valentina Diolaiti,
  • Leonardo Sollazzo,
  • Giulio Mangherini,
  • Nazim Aslam and ,
  • Diego Bernardoni,
  • Marta Calzolari,
  • Pietromaria Davoli,
  • Valentina Modugno and
  • Donato Vincenzi
  • + 4 authors+ 0 author

Historic city centers host dense ensembles of heritage buildings where conservation goals must coexist with sustainable and smart urban development, yet the semi-outdoor “liminal” spaces of these complexes, such as cloisters, loggias and...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Innovative IoT Solutions for Sustainable Smart Cities)
  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
3,635 Views
28 Pages

Unstructured POI name texts are widely used in fine-grained urban analysis, yet missing labels and semantic ambiguity often limit their value for spatial inference. This study proposes a large language model-based semantic–spatial inference fra...

  • Article
  • Open Access
4 Citations
2,649 Views
31 Pages

Federated Learning Frameworks for Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Comparative Adaptation Analysis

  • Mario Steven Vela Romo,
  • Carolina Tripp-Barba,
  • Nathaly Orozco Garzón,
  • Pablo Barbecho and ,
  • Xavier Calderón Hinojosa and
  • Luis Urquiza-Aguiar
  • + 1 author+ 0 author

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have progressively incorporated machine learning to optimize traffic efficiency, enhance safety, and improve real-time decision-making. However, the traditional centralized machine learning (ML) paradigm faces...

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Big Data and AI Services for Sustainable Smart Cities)
  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,694 Views
32 Pages

Comparative Experimental Performance of an Ayanz Screw-Blade Wind Turbine and a Conventional Three-Blade Turbine Under Urban Gusty Wind Conditions

  • Ainara Angulo,
  • Unai Nazabal,
  • Fabian Rodríguez,
  • Izaskun Rojo and ,
  • Ander Zarketa,
  • David Cabezuelo and
  • Gonzalo Abad
  • + 2 authors+ 0 author

To address the scientific gap concerning optimal urban wind turbine morphology, this work presents an experimental performance comparison between two small-scale wind turbine designs: a conventional three-blade horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) and...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,543 Views
16 Pages

Accurate detection and localization of traffic objects are essential for autonomous driving tasks such as path planning. While semantic segmentation is able to provide pixel-level classification, existing networks often fail under challenging conditi...

(This article belongs to the Section Artificial Intelligence and LLM Agents for Data-Driven Decisions in Smart Cities)
  • Article
  • Open Access
3 Citations
4,007 Views
27 Pages

Autonomous lane-changing is one of the most critical and complex tasks in automated driving. Recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong potential to help autonomous vehicles (AVs) make safe and flexible lane-change decisions in r...

(This article belongs to the Section Smart Urban Mobility, Transport, and Logistics)
  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
2,346 Views
21 Pages

Floods are among the most destructive natural disasters, posing major challenges to human safety, property, and urban resilience. Effective communication of flood risk is therefore crucial for disaster preparedness and the sustainable management of s...

(This article belongs to the Section Smart Urban Energies and Integrated Systems)
  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
1,565 Views
18 Pages

Air pollution is a growing environmental issue in densely populated urban areas worldwide. Rapid population growth and the consequent increase in energy demand, emissions from industrial activities and vehicular traffic, and the reduction in vegetati...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
1,765 Views
33 Pages

Constrained Metropolitan Service Placement: Integrating Bayesian Optimization with Spatial Heuristics

  • Tatiana Churiakova,
  • Ivan Platonov,
  • Mark Bezmaslov,
  • Vadim Bikbulatov and ,
  • Ovanes Petrosian,
  • Vasilii Starikov and
  • Sergey A. Mityagin
  • + 2 authors+ 0 author

Metropolitan service-placement optimization is computationally challenging under strict evaluation budgets and regulatory constraints. Existing approaches either neglect capacity constraints, producing infeasible solutions, or employ population-based...

  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
1,950 Views
21 Pages

Cloud-based platforms form the backbone of smart city ecosystems, powering essential services such as transportation, energy management, and public safety. However, their operational complexity generates vast volumes of system logs, making manual ano...

(This article belongs to the Topic Artificial Intelligence Models, Tools and Applications: 2nd Edition)
  • Article
  • Open Access
2 Citations
2,881 Views
32 Pages

On-demand public transport systems are increasingly adopted to improve service flexibility, reduce operating costs, and meet emerging mobility needs. Evaluating their performance under realistic demand and operational conditions, however, remains a c...

  • Review
  • Open Access
16 Citations
4,485 Views
45 Pages

Smart cities generate vast multimodal data from IoT devices, surveillance systems, health monitors, and environmental monitoring infrastructure. The seamless integration and interpretation of such multimodal data is essential for intelligent decision...

  • Systematic Review
  • Open Access
13 Citations
6,131 Views
26 Pages

Cities increasingly utilise digital technologies to tackle climate risks and urban shocks, yet their real impact on resilience remains uncertain. This paper systematically reviews 115 peer-reviewed studies (2012–2024) to explore how smart city...

  • Article
  • Open Access
1 Citations
982 Views
23 Pages

A sustainable city requires a sustainable means of transportation. This ambition is leading towards higher penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) in our cities, in both the private and commercial sectors, putting an ever greater burden on the existin...

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Smart Cities - ISSN 2624-6511