Special Issue "Next Generation Technologies for Building Sustainable Smart Cities"

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2022.

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Pradeep Kumar Singh
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Jaypee University of IT, India
Interests: Smart Cities; IoT; WSN; Soft Computing and Data Science
Dr. Dhananjay Singh
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
ReSESNE Labs, Department of Electronics Engineering, Hankuk (Korea) University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Seoul 02450, Korea
Interests: future data mobility; connected vehicles; smart city; future internet/5G; IoT; WSN; blockchain; wireless communication; cognitive computing; cybersecurity; artificial intelligence; adaptive security for cities
Special Issues and Collections in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Pradip Sharma
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, UK
Interests: Blockchain Technology; SDN; IoT; Security; Sensors; Edge Computing and Smart Cities
Dr. Paulo J. Sequeira Gonçalves
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Associate Professor (Professor Coordenador) of Electrotechnical and Industrial Engineering with the School of Technology in the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco, Portugal.
Interests: Robotics; Computer Vision; Image Processing; Computational Intelligence; chiefly when applied to Healthcare and Industry.
Dr. Pao-Ann Hsiung
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
Interests: Embedded System; Smart Cities; Multi-core Programming; CPS, AI and Deep Learning

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Recent studies have revealed that the population of the world’s cities is expected to almost double, from today's 3.5 billion to 6.5 billion urban citizens population by 2050. As the population grows, there will be many more challenges in context to natural resources, risk of disasters due to environmental change, infrastructure issues due to population growth, traffic, healthcare, energy, and in many more areas. So, there is a great demand for technology-based solutions in sustainable smart cities. Sustainable smart cities integrate the technology and resources into a strategic manner for sustainable development for the well being of citizens with economic development. The goal of sustainable cities is to develop policies, building smart industries and services supported by smart infrastructure.  A sustainable smart city is a novel concept for cites that uses ICTs to improve quality of life, building smart infrastructure, uses the efficiency of urban operations and services to meets the needs of present and future generations concerning economic, social, environmental, and technological aspects.

To develop sustainable cities engineering and technology play a vital role. So, this special issue covers the novel developments based on emerging technologies for building sustainable smart cities. Innovations related to intelligent transport, communication, computing, and secure solutions for cities will primarily be considered. The main focus is to identify the scientific-technological innovations and developments using the internet of everything (IoE), data analytics, artificial intelligence smart cloud, smart energy and infrastructure, and related technologies.  These technologies can meet the demands of smart homes, hospitals, parking, waste management, and environmental issues, intelligent traffic monitoring, innovative solutions for monitoring video surveillance, and other related requirements. In addition to this, smart transportation, smart energy solutions, disaster management, and smart healthcare are the key requirements for sustainable smart cities that will be explored further based on next-generation technologies in this special section. This special issue will cover the sustainable aspects for future sustainable smart cities in the context of emerging technologies. This special issue seeks original and unpublished research articles reporting all aspects including theoretical studies, practical applications, and experimental prototypes to build sustainable cities using emerging technologies.

Specific topics include, but not limited to, the following: 

Digital and connected cities; Sustainable smart cities infrastructure; Digital transformation - strategy and roadmap; IoT, fog/edge computing for sustainable infrastructure solutions; Smart transportation, traffic prediction for smart cities; Energy efficiency through smart grids; Energy-efficient networking for smart environments; Energy-efficient cloud computing technologies; Big data processing for energy-efficient mobile computing; Efficient data management for sustainable mobile computing and communications; Security, trust, and privacy in sustainable mobile computing and communications; Sustainable mobile networks and communication technologies (5G & 6G); Analytics and data management for sustainable cities; Smart cloud and intelligent data processing; Smart industries and Industrial IoT (IIoT); Knowledge representation and reasoning for robotics and automation; Ontologies for IoT, IIoT, and robotics and automation; Cyber-secured cities; Blockchain-based secure transactions for smart cities and related topics for smart cities applications; AI and Big Data and how they tackle the health impacts of urbanization; Smart healthcare and smart health monitoring devices for smart cities; IoT and sustainable computing for smart healthcare and smart cities; Social media for smart cities; Smart governance and smart education.

Prof. Dr. Pradeep Kumar Singh
Dr. Dhananjay Singh
Prof. Dr. Pradip Sharma
Dr. Paulo J. Sequeira Gonçalves
Dr. Pao-Ann Hsiung
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Sustainable Smart Cities
  • Sustainable Smart Grid Sensors
  • Smart Contracts
  • Sustainable Smart Cloud & Mobile Computing
  • Intelligent Storage
  • Sustainable and Intelligent Traffic Monitoring Wireless Sensor Networks & Internet of Things for Sustainable Cities
  • Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics for Sustainable Cities Applications
  • Smart Cities Technologies & 5G Communication

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

Article
Urban Rain Flood Ecosystem Design Planning and Feasibility Study for the Enrichment of Smart Cities
Sustainability 2021, 13(9), 5205; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13095205 - 06 May 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 644
Abstract
The urban flooding situations have arisen in the modern scenario of urbanization due to climatic changes. This work contributes to designing a planned and feasible urban rain flood ecosystem to promote the construction of a sponge city. It has various advantages of improving [...] Read more.
The urban flooding situations have arisen in the modern scenario of urbanization due to climatic changes. This work contributes to designing a planned and feasible urban rain flood ecosystem to promote the construction of a sponge city. It has various advantages of improving the water environment, controlling urban waterlogging, reducing runoff pollution, improving river and lake water quality, recycling rainwater resources, replenishing groundwater, and many more. This paper combines the design methods and advantages of the design results formed in decades using traditional regulation and utilizing it for the present study. It reconstructs and integrates the traditional regulation and sponge city construction requirements, thereby providing a feasible urban rain-flood ecosystem in the industrial and smart city scenario. Finally, the regulation of new paddy areas in Yanjin city of China is considered for experimentation, and the design of the regulation is applied using this setup. The design results obtained from the test of sponge city construction have operability and can improve the urban environment and enhance the vitality of the city. The control plan’s design results integrating the sponge city idea can provide effective technical support and guarantee the overall urban environment. The work presented in this article can assess and plan the flood mitigation measures to monitor this type of situation leading to flooding risk reduction in smart cities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Next Generation Technologies for Building Sustainable Smart Cities)
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Article
Design of Multi-Information Fusion Based Intelligent Electrical Fire Detection System for Green Buildings
Sustainability 2021, 13(6), 3405; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13063405 - 19 Mar 2021
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 728
Abstract
Building management systems are costly for small- to medium-sized buildings. A massive volume of data is collected on different building contexts by the Internet of Things (IoT), which is then further monitored. This intelligence is integrated into building management systems (BMSs) for energy [...] Read more.
Building management systems are costly for small- to medium-sized buildings. A massive volume of data is collected on different building contexts by the Internet of Things (IoT), which is then further monitored. This intelligence is integrated into building management systems (BMSs) for energy consumption management in a cost-effective manner. Electric fire safety is paramount in buildings, especially in hospitals. Facility managers focus on fire protection strategies and identify where system upgrades are needed to maintain existing technologies. Furthermore, BMSs in hospitals should minimize patient disruption and be immune to nuisance alarms. This paper proposes an intelligent detection technology for electric fires based on multi-information fusion for green buildings. The system model was established by using fuzzy logic reasoning. The extracted multi-information fusion was used to detect the arc fault, which often causes electrical fires in the low-voltage distribution system of green buildings. The reliability of the established multi-information fusion model was verified by simulation. Using fuzzy logic reasoning and the membership function in fuzzy set theory to solve the uncertain relationship between faults and symptoms is a widely applied method. In order to realize the early prediction and precise diagnosis of faults, a fuzzy reasoning system was applied to analyze the arcs causing electrical fires in the lines. In order to accurately identify the fault arcs that easily cause electrical fires in low-voltage distribution systems for building management, this paper introduces in detail a fault identification method based on multi-information fusion, which can consolidate the complementary advantages of different types of judgment. The results demonstrate that the multi-information fusion method reduces the deficiency of a single criterion in fault arc detection and prevents electrical fires in green buildings more comprehensively and accurately. For the real-time dataset, the data results are presented, showing disagreements among the testing methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Next Generation Technologies for Building Sustainable Smart Cities)
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Article
Opinion Prediction of Hungarian Students for Real-Time E-Learning Systems: A Futuristic Sustainable Technology-Based Solution
Sustainability 2020, 12(16), 6321; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166321 - 06 Aug 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1165
Abstract
This work is a new step towards the understanding of students’ opinions about the use of technology in learning and improvements to provide sustainable E-learning solutions. Every higher educational university tries to provide well-suited, updated, and trending technology-based education facilities to its students. [...] Read more.
This work is a new step towards the understanding of students’ opinions about the use of technology in learning and improvements to provide sustainable E-learning solutions. Every higher educational university tries to provide well-suited, updated, and trending technology-based education facilities to its students. The task of analyzing the student’s sentiment about technology delivers benefits not only to ICT administrators, but also to management to become aware of the technological concerns. The opinions of Hungarian university students were analyzed using the regression method. We investigated 165 primary samples supported by the four hypotheses. The reliability of the data sample was calculated as 0.91 with Cronbach alpha testing. The Pearson Momentum Correlation (PMC) proved that the suggested technology benefits had a linear positive association with the student’s opinion. Furthermore, technology usability was positively correlated with the benefits. The supporting results of the regression model evidenced the significant impact of technology usability and benefits on the opinions. Using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), we proposed significant features for the model that predicted students’ opinions using the educational benefit and usability parameters. These parameters statistically significantly predicted student’s opinions: F (2, 162) = 104.9, p < 0.05, R2 = 0.559. This study may be supportive of implementing the opinion mining model online and useful to university authorities to understand better the students’ sentiments about the current technological facilities provided. The authors proposed an opinion mining model to deploy on the university’s real-time “E-lection” sustainable technology. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Next Generation Technologies for Building Sustainable Smart Cities)
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Planned Papers

The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.

Title: Image recognition-based architecture to enhance inclusive mobility of visually impaired people in smart and urban environments
Authors: Sara Paiva
Affiliation: Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Viana do Castelo, Portugal
Abstract: The demographic growth that we have witnessed in recent years, and which is expected to increase in the years to come, raises emerging challenges worldwide with regard to urban mobility, both in terms of transport and in pedestrian movement. The sustainable development of cities is also intrinsically linked to urban planning and mobility strategies. The tasks of navigation and orientation in cities is something that we resort to today with great frequency, especially when we are in unknown cities and places. Current navigation solutions refer the precision aspect as a big challenge, especially between buildings in city centers. In this paper we focus on the segment of visually impaired people and how they can obtain information about where they are when, for some reason, they have lost their orientation. Of course, the challenges are different and much more challenging in this situation and with this segment of the population. GPS, a technique widely used for navigation in outdoor environments, does not have the precision we need or the most useful type of content because the information that a visually impaired person needs when lost is not the name of the street or the coordinates but a reference point. Therefore, this paper includes the proposal of a conceptual architecture for outdoor positioning of visually impaired people using the Landmark Positioning approach. The main challenges of Smart Mobility, its principles and services, as well as future trends, are also included in this paper.

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