Dear Colleagues,

Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of respiratory viruses that can cause mild to moderate diseases, from the common cold to respiratory syndromes such as MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). They are so called because of the crown-shaped tips that are present on their surface. The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) has given the new coronavirus the name Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Instead, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that the respiratory disease caused by this virus has been called COVID-19, which stands for CO-rona VI-rus D-isease, and the year of identification, 2019. Currently, the Covid-19 pandemic is already the most serious problem in the world and has not yet exploded in developing countries, where health care systems will not be able to guarantee the contrast offered by developed countries.

To limit the impact of COVID-19 on the social and economic life of the world population, it is urgent to collect, share and disseminate any research result. In fact, even if this field is mainly studied by doctors, biologists, epidemiologists, and so on, nevertheless, other experts such as engineers, informatics, physicists, etc., can also make an important contribution to eradicate it. In this view, the joint Special Issue is focused on the challenging issues covered by the journals “Smart Cities” and “Sustainability”. Big data-based technologies can monitor the contagion speed globally and locally, as well as technologies can dynamically classify places or contexts (e.g. outdoor or indoor concert) on a different risk level of infection at Covid-19. Moreover, these technologies could also extend to other dangerous viruses, albeit different.

These solutions can be effectively exploited in smart cities, i.e. cities with digital infrastructures that enables a real-time dialogue among individual devices, providing and receiving information and updates on the virus and/or on the most dangerous contexts. Contagion trackability by App or web-based technologies is one of the main tools used by the countries that have started to reduce the limitations. Forecasting models of the contagion and strategies to reduce the contagion speed must be discussed in a wider field of expertise. The comparison of the results from the data-driven and the model-driven approaches can support the important and urgent decisions of the governments. The different speed of contagion resulting from the decisions of different governments could also be used to create policy-driven models. For example, some governments that initially applied no or slight restrictions were faced with a more rapid spread of contagion and subsequently had to follow the Italian model, which was the most drastic in Europe. Other related issues concern pollution in a dual role. On the one hand, pollution is hypothesized as a vehicle of contagion, because the virus binds with some polluting substances; on the other hand, pollution is significantly reduced after the restrictions applied by governments (as visible from satellite images), due to the reduction of the circulating vehicles and the closure of the factories. Again, the restrictions have impact on all the human activities that involve the energy consumption, from the industries to the houses, because the restrictions impose to stay at home; then, the residential consumption is totally changed with respect to the average consumption of the same period in the previous years. Consequently, the power flows in distribution and transmission lines are totally changed with respect to the previous years. Considering that, in several countries, the energy produced by the Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and injected into the grid must be used before the energy produced by fossil fuel based generators, it results that nowadays – with a reduced energy demand – the contribution (in per cent) of the energy supplied by the unpredictable RES is greater than the standard threshold; therefore, new settings are needed. This situation has impacts on the operation of the grid and on the financial aspects of the business plans of generators based on renewable energy and on fossil fuel.

Topics of interest for this issue include, but are not limited, to the areas:

• big data
• data-fusion
• sensor fusion
• IoT
• image processing
• electronic devices
• telemedicine
• wearable devices;
• artificial intelligence;
• machine learning;
• deep learning;
• forecasting models;
• data-driven models;
• policy-driven models;
• model-driven strategies;
• impact of pollution and on pollution;
• climate effects;
• impact on distribution lines;
• impact on transmission lines;
• smart-grids and micro-grids.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Smart Cities.

Prof. Silvano Vergura
Guest Editor

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