editorial: welcome to the first issue of volume 7 of the eai endorsed transactions on smart cities eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 editorial: welcome to the first issue of volume 7 of the eai endorsed transactions on smart cities mohammad derawi1 1 professor, department of electronic systems, faculty of information technology and electrical engineering, ntnu gjøvik, norway received on 01 march 2023, accepted on 15 march 2023, published on 30 march 2023 copyright © 2023 mohammad derawi, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v7i1.3389 it is indeed a matter of great honour for me to write the preface in the first issue of 2023 for eai endorsed transactions on smart cities. launched in 2016, the journal is now into its 7th volume which adds a sense of pride and confidence. promoting smart cities is advantageous in terms of national benefits as it creates competitiveness, enables the business sector, improves living standards, directs proper utilization of resources, and the like. smart cities aim to make optimal and sustainable use of all resources while maintaining an appropriate balance between social, environmental, and economic costs. the smart city concept represents an irrepressible platform for it-enabled service innovation. it offers a view of the city where service providers use information technologies to engage with citizens to create more effective urban organizations and systems that can improve the quality of life. the emerging internet of things (iot) model is foundational to the development of smart cities. the integrated cloud-oriented architecture of networks, software, sensors, human interfaces, and data analytics are essential for value creation. iot smart-connected products and the services they provide will become crucial for the future development of smart cities. the smart cities are aligned with un sustainable development goals. smart cities are expected to ensure harmlessness to the environment and be beneficial in whatever aspect possible. there is a broad scope of improvement in the development techniques that are currently in use. these limitations ought to be directed to potential future ideas. multiple cities around the world have been converted to smart cities. there are varied examples of smart cities, and a lot can be learned from their experience and achievements. i am extremely delighted to note that this journal emphasizes on smart cities and smart city projects, success stories and lessons learned from cities around the world. the contents in this issue have been organized in a reader friendly manner and the articles are worthy of further references and citations. this issue has attracted contributions from several regions of the world, and i would like to thank the authors for submitting their works. i extend my appreciation to the reviewers and the editorial team for their focused review comments and editing. i congratulate the team of eai endorsed transactions on smart cities and wish good luck for the future issues. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ proceedings template word detection and alleviation of driving fatigue based on emg and ems/eeg using wearable sensor hong wang*, zuoqiu qi, rongrong fu, fuwang wang, qingwen yu and chong liu school of mechanical engineering and automation, northeastern university, shenyang, china *hongwang@mail.neu.edu.cn abstract we present a new technique to detect and relieve drivers’ fatigue by using electromyography (emg) and electrical muscle stimulation (ems) respectively, while drivers are driving without any interruption. driving fatigue was detected by emg from the biceps femoris of drivers’ legs through a noncontact acquisition system. the peak factors (fc) of the emg were used as the feature of driving fatigue state. when the threshold of fc is met or exceeded, the abductor pollicis muscle and thumb flexor muscle of drivers’ hands can be stimulated by ems without affecting the normal driving. the experiment results show that the brain fatigue of drivers can be effectively alleviated by this ems while driving. keywords emg, electrical muscle stimulation, eeg, driving fatigue, highway 1. introduction with the development of motor industry and transportation, traffic safety is becoming a serious problem. traffic accidents have caused enormous damage to family and society. according to relative report, driver fatigue is the main cause of traffic accidents [1]. therefore, it is very important to detect driving fatigue and then alleviate this fatigue efficiently. a driver’s physiological state can be measured in various ways. the sensor such as the electromyography (emg) is the popular method for evaluating the muscle tension, and is much less expensive and more portable [2]. the electrical muscle stimulation can enhance the muscle and brain activity [3-4]. eeg is also an electrical change recorded from the brain in relation to an event that occurs either in the external world or within the brain itself. eeg could describe the brain fatigue state [5-9]. could the ems alleviate the driving fatigue? here, we have studied how to detect and relieve driver fatigue by using emg and ems/eeg respectively, while drivers are driving without any interruption. the relationship between the emg and ems/eeg was reported. 2. experiments the whole system is composed of two parts, including the noncontact detection of driving fatigue based on emg and the driving fatigue alleviation by ems. in this study there were two types of the experiments. one type of the experiment was the bus driving on the highway (about 252km) from shenyang (41.93 ◦ north latitude, 123.43 ◦ east longitude) to dandong (40.04 ◦ north latitude, 124.35 ◦ east longitude), china (fig.1). twenty healthy male subjects (age: 24 ± 2.76) participated in the experiments. the experiment time involved 2-2.5 h per subject. for the noncontact detection of driving fatigue, the surface emg recording electrodes (two pieces of conductive knit fabric of silver-plated nylon with the size of 12 cm × 22 cm and a surface resistivity of < 1ω/sq) were placed on the top surface of car seat cushion, while the reference electrode was located on the left ankle bone. the physiological signals were then acquired from the biceps femoris muscle of each leg without direct contact while the subjects were driving without any interruption. in the driving section, every 10min, 30-s length of data were extracted. other two 30-s length of data were also extracted from post-driving part and post-rest sitting part, respectively. fast independent component analysis (fast ica) and digital filter were utilized to process the original signals. the peak factor of emg can be defined as follow: fc=a/x (1) where a is the amplitude of emg and x is the square root of emg. fc was selected as the characteristic feature to detect fatigue of drivers based on the statistical analysis results given by kolmogorov-smirnov z test. (a) (b) (c) fig.1 bus driving on the highway (about 252km) from shenyang (41.93 ◦ north latitude, 123.43 ◦ east longitude) to dandong (40.04 ◦ north latitude, 124.35 ◦ east longitude), china; (a) the driving rout, mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261628 mailto:hongwang@mail.neu.edu.cn (b) the bus driver, (c) schematic diagram of the noncontact acquisition system for emg. the other type of the experiment was the simulation driving on the driving simulation (fig.2). fifty healthy subjects (twenty males and thirty females, age: 22 ± 2.10) were included in the study. they were recruited within the university and free of medication at the time of the recording session, as well as had no history of neurological diseases. for the driving fatigue alleviation by ems, the two conductive knit fabrics were fixed on the steering wheel as stimulation electrodes (fig.2). when the threshold of fc was met or exceeded, the abductor pollicis muscle and thumb flexor muscle in drivers’ hands can be stimulated by ems without affecting the normal driving. bipolar square wave pulses were as the stimulation current. the pulse amplitudes within the range from 1 to 3 ma were chosen according to the comfort of subjects, and the pulse (0.2 ms width) frequency was set as 1 hz. the effect of the driving fatigue alleviation was evaluated by the features of electroencephalogram (eeg) evoked by ems. meanwhile, a mobile phone can also send out a sound alarm about the driving fatigue. in this work, after a one-hour drive, the abductor pollicis muscle and thumb flexor muscle in the experiment group began to be stimulated by ems without affecting the normal driving. the control group chose normal driving during the experiment. θ subband (4~8hz) and β subband (12~32hz) of eeg from the subjects were selected as the evaluation criterion for judging the effect of the driving fatigue alleviation by using ems. in this experiment, every 12 min, 3-min length of eeg data were extracted. 3. results the signals recorded by two channels from biceps femoris muscles of the subject while driving are shown in fig. 3 (a and b). the signals included emg, electrocardiograph (ecg) and noises. fast ica was used to extract emg (fig. 3d) from the raw data. the peak factors (fc) from the emg show upward trend as the driving time increases (p < 0.05, fig. 4). the effects of driving fatigue alleviation using ems are shown in both fig. 5 and fig. 6. in control group, the relative power spectra of θ subband in eeg present general upward trend while increasing the driving time (fig. 5). in ems group, during the ems section, the relative power spectra of θ subband in eeg show a downward trend until the alert driving state at the beginning of the experiment (fig. 5). there is a significant difference of the relative power spectra between ems group and control group during the ems section (p < 0.05, fig. 5). the relative power spectrum ratio of θ/β is shown in fig. 6. fig.2 schematic diagram of the noncontact detection for driving fatigue by emg and driving fatigue alleviation by ems. fig.3 the two-channel raw signals (a, b) from biceps femoris muscles while driving, ecg (c) and emg (d) separated by fast ica from a and b. fig. 4 the peak factor (fc) (mean ± s.d.) from the emg. abscissa axis shows the calculation time of fc (*post-driving section, ** post-rest sitting data). 4. discussion in this work, the noncontact detection of driving fatigue based on emg and the driving fatigue alleviation by using ems are presented. in order to collect physiological signals from subjects while they were driving without any interruption, the system adopted a type of non-contact electrode based on the capacity coupling theory. recording sensors were placed into the surface of car cushion to collect physiological signals from biceps femoris of each driver, which has made the long-term collection easy to realize. the peak factor (fc) of emg from the biceps femoris muscle can be selected as the characteristic feature to detect fatigue of drivers. the results show that the method proposed can give well performance in distinguishing the normal state and fatigue state. the brain fatigue of drivers can be effectively relieved by the electrical stimulation to the abductor pollicis muscle and thumb flexor muscle. the ems could evoke less slow waves (θ) and more fast waves (β). theta wave from brain should be produced when human is the shallow sleep state or half awaken consciousness or unconscious activity. beta wave from brain should be produced when human is consciousness and nervous tension. the inhibition of theta wave from brain could show that the ems can inhibit the unconscious activity of brain. this means that ems could lead to cognitive enhancement and may help remission of the driver fatigue. our experiment results could have guiding significance on the detection and alleviation of driving fatigue. fig.5 relative power spectrum (mean ± s.d.) of θ subband in eeg as the evaluation of effect of ems. abscissa axis shows the recording time of eeg. fig.6 relative power spectrum ratio θ/β (mean ± s.d.) as the evaluation of effect of ems. abscissa axis shows the recording time of eeg. 5. acknowledgments we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of k. c. wong education foundation and the state key laboratory of process industry automation of china (pal-n201304). 6. references [1] gastaldi m, rossi r and gecchele g. 2014. effects of driver task-related fatigue on driving performance. procedia-social and behavioral sciences. 111 (february 2014): 955-964. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.01.130. [2] cronin nj, kumpulainen s, joutjaervi t, finni t and piitulainen h. 2015. spatial variability of muscle activity during human walking: the effects of different emg normalization approaches. neuroscience. 300 (august 2015): 19-28. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2015.05.003. [3] guzman m, rubin a, cox p, landini f and jackson-menaldi c.2014. neuromuscular electrical stimulation of the cricothyroid muscle in patients with suspected superior laryngeal nerve weakness. journal of voice. 28 (march 2014): 216-225. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2013.09.003. [4] kim yhb, lonergan sm, grubbs jk, cruzen sm, fritchen an, della malva a, marino r and huff-lonergan e. 2013. effect of low voltage electrical stimulation on protein and quality changes in bovine muscles during postmortem aging. meat science. 3 (july 2013): 289-296. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.meatsci.2013.02.013. [5] tokudome w and wang g. 2012. similarity dependency of the change in erp component n1 accompanying with the object recognition learning. international journal of psychophysiology. 83 (january 2012): 102-109. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.10.012. [6] qamir h and ing-marie j. 2007. a multi-modal architecture for intelligent decision making in cars. springer-verlag berlin heidelberg. [7] lange k and schnuerch r. 2014. challenging perceptual tasks require more attention: the influence of task difficulty on the n1 effect of temporal orienting. brain and cognition. 84 (february 2014): 153-163. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2013.12.001. [8] yeo mvm, li x, shen k and wilder-smith epv. 2009. can svm be used for automatic eeg detection of drowsiness during car driving? safety science. 47 (january 2009): 115124. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2008.01.007. [9] herring s and hallbeck ms. 2007. the effects of distance and height on maximal isometric push and pull strength with reference to manual transmission truck drivers. international journal of industrial ergonomics. 37 (august 2007): 685696. doi= http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ergon.2007.05.003. paper title (use style: paper title) i. introduction after starting full-scale vehicle life in the 1970s, society has required the development of transport system for safety and efficiency. automotive industry has obtained not only accelerating industrialization but also expanding of living area. but, behind the scenes, social costs were increased by traffic accidents. to prevent these situations, we need a more advanced its system then the current scenario. this paper presents the basic requirements of safety engineering infrastructure of roadside infrastructure in its for intelligent vehicles. intelligent vehicles has network infrastructure to communicate with vehicle-to-vehicle (v-tov), vehicle-to-infrastructure (v-to-i), lane correction system, and traffic information system etc. the intelligent vehicles has a good model for learning demands of infrastructure for its process because the system have a lot of use-cases and we must understand relationship between public institutions, people, companies in order to proceed its system. this paper has organized into sections as follows: section ii provides problem in intelligent vehicles and their challenges in v-to-v communication system. section iii, provides the requirement specifications of safe and secure engineering design architecture. in the section iv, we discussed the novel safe and secure engineering model for intelligent vehicles. finally, in the section v, we have concluded final remarks and impact of intelligent vehicles with the respect of social, technical and business. ii. problem statements and challenges current its technique optimize traffic management and highway capacity by introducing spatial-temporal distribution of traffic flow to provide information through various media such as vms, broadcast, internet, and etc. after its collects real-time traffic information through detection devices and cctv on the highway in 2,804km of 23 routes. however, republic of korea has operated highway traffic management system, since public infrastructure investment fig.2. vehicle-to-vehicle communication system. a. current infrastructure and challenges in its  information content: there is no condition of information exchange type between road and vehicle therefore we need to provide point-based traffic information (vms-oriented) and indirect information such as ars, internet, etc.  communications: there is no demand control function for preventing excess capacity. therefore lack of traffic flow distributed technology of whole road in case of emergency , lack of real-time sensing function in case of emergency, lack of estimated function of traffic, condition when delaying.  security: restrictive crackdown of unit point about violator's vehicles which are the main culprit of big accident passive management systems such as use of manpower when road maintenance management (safety issue)  others : interchange (ic) system that abnormally add to the etc, difficulty of differentiated services about the etc vehicle, limited payment structure (prepaid), uniform way to settle the charges on ic system, lack of velocity-based and high-tech traffic condition model, however, there is no information service for road manager. requirement engineering for intelligent vehicles at safety perspective eai endorsed transactions smart cities research article madhusudan singh yonsei institute of convergence technology, yonsei university, songdo, incheon, south korea abstract abstract— in the coming years, transportation system will be revamped in a manner that there will be more intelligent and autonomous vehicle phenomenon around us such as smart cars, auto driving system, etc. some of automotive industries are already producing smart cars. however, the main concern of this paper is on the infrastructure for intelligent vehicles, which can support such intelligent transportation. current transportation system lacks proper infrastructure to support intelligent vehicles. hence in this article, we have surveyed and analysed the current transportation system in developed and developing countries. in contrast, we are going to introduce secure intelligent transportation (roadside) infrastructure that is user centric (driver, autonomous driver etc.) for intelligent vehicles. in this paper we present the basic requirements of safety engineering infrastructure of roadside infrastructure in its for intelligent vehicles. intelligent vehicles has network infrastructure to communicate with vehicle-to-vehicle (v-to-v), vehicle-to-infrastructure (v-to-i), lane correction system, and traffic information system etc. the intelligent vehicle is a good model for learning demands of infrastructure for its process because the system having many use-cases and we must understand relationship between public institutions, people, companies in order to proceed its system. received on 13 june 2017; accepted on 03 august 2017; published on 20 december 2017 keywords: intelligent vehicles; requirement engineering; its copyright © 2017 madhusudan singh , licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eai.20-12-2017.153496 planning group to the president introduced its in 1993 [7]. however, its infrastructure has to consider road, it, and vto-v communication such as shown in fig.2. 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e2 the basic requirements of intelligent transportation world such as intelligent transportation system, infrastructure, smart vehicles, intelligent vehicles requirements and their challenges are given in fig. 3. fig. 3. specification of intelligent vehicles. iii. engineering model for safety the overview infrastructure of a secure intelligent vehicles in its has shown in fig. 4, where the communication tower collect the data such as traffic data, weather data on highway, car data on highway based on data of mobile device that mounted in the car, radio tower send data to main data normalization and event analyzers system. after the analysis of data, the information forwarded to the information storage cloud to mobile device again. then mobile device provides user interfaces to check easier with input value of the driver (user). fig. 4. telematics based safe intelligent vehicles. the major requirements of the telematics based safe and intelligent vehicles system are required mainly four words of system which is as follows  subject roadside: the subject matter of the information system.  system roadside information: charge, traffic jam and so on.  usage driver: the environment within which the planned system will operate.  network system: driver who use the high-way, and stakeholder who related on the high-way system.  system intelligent roadside: what the system does within its operational environment, what information it contains and what function it performs.  data management system: system manages all information related on smart high-way such as smarttolling, transfer information that make a more efficient system to driver. a. use case diagram of engineering modeling in its grasp related behavior between the driver and the smart highway group, we will find detailed in following use case descriptions about the action run which order and what’s related towards to each behavior. based on these, we expect to get final goal of analysis the behavior and purpose of each sub-goal on goal based approach. table i has shown description of use case of secure engineering design for intelligent vehicles. table i. usecase descripition of secure engineeirng use case name pre-condition post -condition uc1. smart-tolling connected successfully between mobile device in vehicle and main system calculate smart highway toll by minimizing decrease of vehicle speed uc2. preventing of car accident network between terminal application and command center application always should be maintained all of users are must enrolled in smart highway’s member prevention of car accident’s function provide intelligence information which can prevent car accident by integrating terminal application’s data and sensor’s data using in smart highway uc3. supporting information for emergency and disaster situation connected successfully between mobile device in vehicle and main system improve efficiency by checking information that is identified by sensor, and it builds a database uc4 weather forecast connected successfully between mobile device in vehicle and main system to prevent accidents due to bad weather uc5 urgent emergency notify the emergency vehicle enter the smart highway, and main system detect the entry of vehicle handle the emergency successfully, so decrease threat of smart highway uc6 using additional service in smart highway network between terminal application and command center application always should be maintained actor’s convenience and satisfaction arise by using additional service in smart highway madhusudan singh 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e2 iv. impact and final remarks in upcoming years transportations system will be completely modify. it will be more intelligent and autonomous vehicle around us such as smart car, auto driver, etc. some of automotive industries already produce smart car. but our main concern about infrastructure of transportation system which support intelligent transportation. current infrastructure will be not support intelligent transportation system. so, in this article, we are going to introduce secure intelligent transportation (roadside) infrastructure of user’s (driver, autonomous driver etc.) point of view. it’s called intelligent transportation infrastructure. the impact of intelligent vehicles in its will proved to be a break through on the existing infrastructure of transportation system. these are some of the following effects. a. social impact  provide better and effective transportation life.  provide safe and rapid transit information service under high speed driving conditions.  satisfy the driver's driving service and improve the quality of life  provide traffic information service that fuses with telematics  provide continuous its service in time and space through expansion and linkage of existing its technologies b. business impact  core technology pre-emption related to its service as next-generation growth power and synergy effect of technical  by exporting developed technology, be more competitive in the world market and exploit a way out of export with all technology that need to build test bed  expect creating a ripple effect of related industry: have direct and indirect influence on widespread industry such as vehicle, wireless communication, mobile communication terminal, internet, mcommerce and etc.  promote the national economy by reducing personnel and materiel cost in traffic congestion and traffic accidents that may occur in road under the goal of its technical development of ‘accidentfree’ and ‘nonstop’  inducement the creation of new employment about spreading industry related to its: by invigorating the its services, promote domestic industry and induce the creation of new employment c. technical impact  in high-speed driving environment, guiding role of technology related to real-time db processing technology development and middleware technology development  guarantee of technology caused by alliance of telematics services as part of the national policy and intelligent roadside infrastructure.  globally source technology secure caused by developing the domestic technology by designing the architecture related to developing a traffic monitoring and traffic information fusion technology under the high-speed traffic condition the domestic technology references [1] d. singh and m. singh, "internet of vehicles for smart and safe driving," 2015 international conference on connected vehicles and expo (iccve), shenzhen, 2015, pp. 328-329. [2] z. junping, w. fei-yue, w. kunfeng, l. wei-hua, x. xin and c. cheng, "data-driven intelligent transportation systems: survey", ieee transactions on intelligent transportation systems, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 1624-1639, 2011. [3] d. singh and a. alberti, "developing novagenesis architecture for internet of things services: observation, challenges and itms application", international conference on ict convergence 2014. [4] woong cho, hyun-seo oh, byeong-joo park, “wireless access technologies for smart highway : requirements and preliminary results”, the journal of the institute of internet, broadcasting and communication, vol. 11, no. 2, pp.237-244, april, 2011. [5] d. singh, m. singh, i. singh and h. j. lee, "secure and reliable cloud networks for smart transportation services," 2015 17th international conference on advanced communication technology (icact), seoul, 2015, pp. 358-362. [6] sujin kwag, sangsun lee, “a survey of v2x communication technologies and project”, journal of the korea society of automotive engineers, vol. 33 no. 5, pp.24-31, may, 2011. [7] jung-hoon song, jae-jeong lee, seong-ryul kim, jung-joon kim, dae-wha seo, “design of u-transportation communication system for next-generation its services”, the journal of the korea institute of intelligent transport systems, vol. 12, no. 5, pp.61-72, october, 2013. requirement engineering for intelligent vehicles at safety perspective 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e2 security surveillance and home automation system using iot 1 security surveillance and home automation system using iot a. sanjay1, meenu vijarania2,* and vivek jaglan3 1student, amity university haryana, manesar, india 2assistant professor, amity university haryana, manesar, india 3professor, graphic era hill university, dehradun, india abstract internet of things provides connectivity and user interoperability among different systems, devices, networks and services in particular control systems. iot can be envisioned as a network of connected devices which are capable of providing intelligent services. this paper presents a security surveillance system in buildings based on iot using raspberry pi. it can be used at industries, homes and office etc, where the camera records the movement of objects and using iot devices and the data is stored on to the server. the idea is to lock the door even from outside the house and it can be opened using the android phone itself. if some intruder tries to break or to get in anonymously, the system will detect the person and photo will be clicked by the security camera and send the message along with photo on to the owner’s mail, thus creating the evidence for our safety. some additional features for automation like rain sensing windows using rain sensor and servo motor and automatic light on/off for saving electricity and reduce human effort with ir senor and a simple led have also been implemented in this paper. hardware implementation has been done for the proposed model and it will be applicable for monitoring home, industry, office etc. in the absence of user. keywords: iot, sensors, home automation, security, android, surveillance, raspberry pi handling editor: akshat agrawal (amity university gurgaon, india) received on 06 july 2020, accepted on 25 july 2020, published on 06 august 2020 copyright © 2020 meenu vijarania et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.21-7-2020.165963 *corresponding author. email: meenuhans.83@gmail.com 1. introduction now a days, digital technologies have been revolutionized where different things and people are interconnected in order to send/receive the information. it intends to benefit the people with the help of internet services. in iot, various things like sensors and other devices are connected through internet to exchange and collect the information with each other. it enables various devices to collaborate, interact, and, learn from each other’s experiences just like humans do. using iot billions of objects are intelligently connected in variety of applications. iot is broadly deployed in variety of domains namely: agriculture, healthcare, smart cities. smart buildings and smart security are becoming a reality with the combination of underlying communication and monitoring infrastructure that comprises of smart devices such as actuators, cameras, sensors, meters and rfids. now days, societies have high demand for security and surveillance as there is rapid developments of embedded system and security awareness. much research is still going on to improve the design of intelligent surveillance and security system to enhance monitoring capabilities and security of remote places. the main focus of this paper is to implement the functionality of wireless home automation features and home security. the model of the currently built system sends the alert message to the owner using iot if some intruder tries to break or to get into the home anonymously. the system will detect the person and photo will be clicked by the security camera and sends the message along with photo on to the owner’s mail. whereas, the person entering in the house is identified as guest, then the owner can open the door using his mobile phone instead of triggering security alarms. the owner can do various activities like switching on various appliances inside the house, which are eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ 2 also connected and controlled by the micro-controller in the system to welcome his guest. these are main key features and the main objectives of the paper : 1. this project has been included with a face detection module with the help of raspberry pi. 2. open cv with the cascades for the face which is combined with a camera. it can a detect a face of the person standing for a long time in front of the house. 3. for automation it a preprogrammed process in which it does take input from the sensors and take the action as per the command give for the action for example when a sensor gives a output through gpio 4. pins (general purpose input/output). 5. for android door lock i have used a socket connection for the raspberry pi to communicate with a android device which sends command for the raspberry pi to lock or unlock the door. 6. using sensors like (rain sensor, ir sensor) for rain sensing windows and to automatic switch on and off the light when there are needed. 2. related work various models for building surveillance have been proposed earlier. these models optimized the surveillance system by using ultrasonic sensors [2], photovoltaic array [3], wireless sensor networks [4]. by introducing tel monitoring, intelligent fish eye camera techniques surveillance system was improved. though, these techniques were not able to control the surveillance operation sitting at remote place whenever the event occurred. in [5] author suggested a intelligent and automatic system for smart home using sensor networks. the author used zigbee and ieee 802.15.4 to develop energy efficient smart home system and it collect the data using passive infrared (pir) sensor, occupancy sensor and photo sensor. in [6] author proposed a smart home automation scheme using iot and raspberry pi. home appliances are connected and monitored using internet. surveillance and sensing operation is conceded by raspberry pi. motion sensor and camera were used for detecting motion and intruder at the door. 3. proposed work in home security there are two modules: • smart security camera • android door lock. in this project face detection module has been implemented with the help of raspberry pi and open cv with the cascades for the face which is combined with a camera, it can a detect a face of a person standing for a long time in front of the house. then it takes a photo of the persons face and email it to the owner’s mail id through smtp protocol (simple mail transfer protocol). the architectural diagram is shown in the figure 1. for android door a socket connection is created for the raspberry pi to communicate with a android device which sends command for the raspberry pi to lock or unlock the door. a socket provides end to end connectivity between two programs running on the network. every socket has a associated port number so that the transport layer can recognize the application for which the data is destined. the endpoint address is combination of port number and ip address. a. sanjay, meenu vijarania and vivek jaglan eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e1 3 figure 1. architecture of security surveillance and home automation system figure 2. block diagram of smart security camera and android door lock security surveillance and home automation system using iot eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e1 4 2.1. home automation features for home automation there are two modules: i) rain sensing windows ii) automatic light on and off. for rain sensing windows a rain sensor is used to check the rain and then when the value of the sensor become 0 (which means it is raining .) then the windows of the house automatic closes and when the value becomes 1 again(which means the rain has stopped.) the windows will automatically open itself. the rain sensor is shown in figure 3. for automatic lights off/on a led and a ir sensor has been used, it is simple a but a useful feature that saves electricity. the value of the ir is 1 then led will glow and if the value is zero then the led will not glow. in simple words if there is any person enters the room the light will switch on and it will automatically switch off when the person leaves the room. figure 3. rain sensor figure 4. block diagram of rain sensing windows table 1. development environment hardware configuration software requirement raspberry pi 3b model 64gb memory card micro servo 9g(2) ir sensor pi camera led with resistor breadboard rain sensor android studio vnc viewer python 3.7.9 rasbian os (jessie) core java xml for desgin opencv 3.1.1 3. experimental setup the basic hardware setup of the proposed system is shown in figure 4. it consists of a raspberry pi, relay, motor, pir sensor. the raspberry pi communicates with all the other devices attached to it. the pir sensor detects when an intruder enters in the range of it and sends that information to the raspberry pi. after that, the raspberry pi sends a signal to the web camera to take a photo. the photo taken by the web camera is temporarily stored in the local storage of the raspberry pi, then raspberry pi sends a mail to the corresponding mail id with an attachment of the image taken. 1. all the connections are connected to raspberry pi through jumper wires male and female respectively. 2. all the sensors are connected to separate gpio pin and ground connection. 3. and the camera is connected to specific connector provided with the raspberry pi. figure 5. connections of the sensors a. sanjay, meenu vijarania and vivek jaglan eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e1 security surveillance and home automation system using iot 5 3.1 pi camera raspberry pi supports a light weight and portable pi camera module. using the serial interface protocol mipi camera communicate with pi. it is normally used in image processing, machine learning or in surveillance projects. it has a fixed focus lens. the advantage of miniature size camera is that it can be installed in a small space. the most important benefit of this camera over a usb webcam is that it is able to make use of the graphics processing capability of the broadcom cpu. figure 6. smart camera and door lock figure 7. mail received from pi eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e1 6 4. conclusion & future scope the proposed method provides a low power and low cost solution for monitoring the human presence and controlling the device from anywhere in the world. this is useful for monitoring home, industry or office etc, in the absence of the user. this can be easily controlled from anywhere by knowing the ip address of the network connected to the raspberry pi, so that door will be locked when intruder is inside the room. acknowledgements. dr. meenu vijarania is currently working in amity university haryana. she has done b.tech, mtech and ph.d in computer science. she has published various papers in international journals and conferences. her area of interest are wireless networks, internet of things, genetic algorithm. dr. vivek jaglan is currently working as professor , graphic era hill university, dehradun. he has completed his b.tech,m.tech in computer science. he has published various papers in reputed international journals and conferences. his area of interest are soft computing, machine learning. references [1] k.s. pachpor, c.n.deshmukh, home automation and surveillance: a review, international journal of science and engineering applications, 8(4):111-114. [2] bai, y.-w., xie, z.-l., li, z.-h., 2011. design and implementa-tion of an embedded home surveillance system with zero alertpower using a photovoltaic array. in: 2011 ieee 15th interna-tional symposium on consumer electronics (isce), 14—17 june,pp. 373-378. [3] sulc, v., 2011. home automation with iqrf wireless communicationplatform: a case study, no. c., pp. 212— 217. [4] wibowo, s.b., putra, g.d., hantono, b.s., 2014. development ofembedded gateway for wireless sensor network and internetprotocol interoperability. in: 2014 6th international conferenceon information technology and electrical engineering (icitee),7—8 october, pp. 1—4. [5] dae-man han and jae-hyun lim, “smart home energy management system using ieee 802.15.4 and zigbee, ieee transactions on consumer electronics, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 1403-1410, august 2010 [6] v.patchava, h. b. kandala, and p. r. babu’“a smart home automationtechnique with raspberry pi using iot”, international conferenceon smart sensors and systems (ic-sss), pages 1–4, dec 2015. [7] n. oza, n. gohil, "implementation of cloud based live streaming for surveillance", proc. int. conf. commun. signal process. (iccsp), pp. 0996-0998, apr. 2016. [8] r. rameshwar, a. solanki, a. nayyar, b. mahapatra, green building management and smart automation, india: igi,2020, 7, green and smart buildings: a key to sustainable global solutions, 146-163. [9] setiya purbaya , dodi wisaksono sudiharto ,catur wirawan wijiutomo, “design and implementation of surveillance embedded ip camera with improved image quality using gamma correction for surveillance camera”, 3rd international conference on science and technology computer (icst), 2017. [10] a. ahuja, integration of nature and technology for smart cities, 3rd ed.; springer international publishing:basel, switzerland, 2016; p. 390. [11] p. rajiv, r. raj, m. chandra, email based remote access and surveillance system for smart home infrastructure, perspectives in science, 2016, 8, 459—461. [12] gayathri, p. , krishna paramathma, m., paramathma, m.k., 2014.design and implementation of embedded home surveillance sys-tem by using mms modem. in: electronics and communicationsystems (icecs), 13—14 february, pp. 1—5. [13] nguyen, d.v., le, h.t., pham, a.t., thang, t.c., lee, j.y., kugjin, y. ,2013. adaptive home surveillance system using http streaming.in: 2013 international joint conference on awareness scienceand technology and ubi-media computing (icast-umedia), 2— 4november, pp. 579—584. [14] pawlak, a., horoba, k., jezewski, j., wrobel, j., matonia, a., 2015.telemonitoring of pregnant women at home — biosignals acqui-sition and measurement. in: 2015 22nd international conferenceon mixed design of integrated circuits & systems (mixdes),25—27 june, pp. 83—87. a. sanjay, meenu vijarania and vivek jaglan eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e1 performance analysis on popularity based, content based and collaborative filtering utilizing recommendation framework 1 performance analysis on popularity based, content based and collaborative filtering utilizing recommendation framework deepkiran munjal1,*, anju gera2 and pawan kumar singh2 1 master of computer application, g. l bajaj institute of technology and management, greater noida, india 2 computer science and engineering, g. l bajaj institute of technology and management, greater noida, india abstract in today's computerized world, it has become an irritating undertaking to locate the substance of one's loving in an interminable assortment of substance that are being devoured like art, education, media and so on. then again there has been a developing development among the computerized substance suppliers who need to connect the same number of clients on their administration as feasible for the most extreme time. a tune proposal is significant in our public activity because of its highlights, for example, in building smart cities recommending a lot of melodies to clients dependent on their advantage, or the popularity of the tunes. in this paper we are proposing a song suggestion framework that can prescribe song to another client just as the other existing clients. we use popularity based, content based separating, and collaborative filtering, which is a blend of application of communication systems, to develop a framework that gives progressively exact proposals concerning melodies. *corresponding author. email:deepa.munjal@gmail.com 1. introduction concerning a huge informational collection over the web, where the quantity of administrations are given, than in order to improve the issue of data over-burden, it is expected to channel, organize and effectively convey pertinent data, which has made an idle issue to numerous internet clients. so as to convey clients with customized substance and administrations recommender frameworks take care of this issue via looking through huge volume of enthusiastically created data. this proposition investigates the various attributes and possibilities of various expectation strategies in suggestion frameworks so as to fill in as a extent for research and practice in the field of proposal frameworks. give c a chance to be set all things considered and let s be set of all conceivable recommendable things. give u a chance to be an utility capacity evaluating the value of component s to client c, i.e., u: c x s→r, where r is a completely requested set. for every client c є c, we need to pick things s є s that expand u. the primary assignment is to appraise an utility capacity (u) that by configuration predicts how a client will like a thing. in light of past conduct, associations to different clients, item similarity, context and so forth. with the ascent of advanced substance appropriation, individuals presently approach music assortments on an exceptional scale. business music libraries effectively outperform 15 million tunes, which monstrously surpasses eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article keywords: art education and media recommender system, popularity based, content based filtering, collaborative filtering, smart cities, application of communication systems. handling editor: akshat agrawal (amity university gurgaon, india) received on 24 july 2020, accepted on 13 august 2020, published on 25 august 2020 copyright © 2020 deepkiran munjal et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.18-8-2020.166001 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e2 mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:author@emailaddress.com deepkiran munjal, anju gera, pawan kumar singh 2 the listening ability of a specific individual. with a large number of melodies to browse, individuals some of the time feel overpowered. therefore, an effectual music recommender framework is basic in light of a legitimate concern for both music specialist co-ops and clients. clients will have no more agony to settle on choices on what to tune in while music organizations can keep up their client gathering and draw in new clients by improving client's fulfilment. the fundamental goal of this paper is to give customized proposal, to build the degree of fulfilment of the client and to assist the clients with searching and listen the tunes in compelling and responsive way. 2. related work there is hazardous development in the measure of existing advanced data and the quantity of guests to the internet have made a potential test of data over-burden which hampers opportune access to things of enthusiasm on the internet. data recovery frameworks, for example, google, devil finder and altavista have in part tackled this issue however prioritization and personalization (where a framework maps accessible substance to client's inclinations and inclinations) of data were missing. this has expanded the interest for recommender frameworks like never before previously. recommender frameworks are gainful to both specialist co-ops and clients. they lessen expenses of finding and choosing things in an online music portal. recommendation frameworks have additionally demonstrated to improve basic leadership procedure and quality. in online music portal, recommender frameworks improve incomes, for the way that they are successful methods for selling more items. in logical libraries, recommender frameworks bolster clients by enabling them to move past inventory look. in this way, the need to utilize proficient and exact proposal strategies inside a framework that will give significant and trustworthy suggestions to clients can't be over-accentuated. engineering of requirements is one of the most basic phase of a product improvement process and inadequately actualized prerequisites building is one of the significant explanations behind venture disappointment [10]. center prerequisites building exercises are elicitation and definition, quality confirmation, exchange, and discharge arranging [17]. these exercises can be upheld by suggestion advances, for instance, the (cooperative) proposal of prerequisites to partners taking a shot at comparable necessities [11] and the gathering based suggestion of necessities prioritizations [12]. model: content-based recommendation based on content requirements. in the accompanying, we will represent the use of substance based separating [13] with regards to necessities designing. a recommender can bolster invested individual, for instance, by prescribing prerequisites that have been characterized in effectively finished programming ventures (necessities reuse) or have been characterized by different partners of a similar undertaking (excess and reliance recognition). table 3 gives a diagram of necessities characterized in a product venture. every necessity is described by a class, the quantity of assessed individual days to execute the prerequisite, and a printed depiction. persuasive innovations [18] plan to trigger changes in a client's dispositions and comportment based on the ideas of human pc collaboration. the effect of enticing innovations can be fundamentally expanded by moreover coordinating proposal advancements into the plan of persuasive systems. such a methodology pushes enticing advances ahead from a one-size-fits all way to deal with a customized domain where client explicit conditions are taken into translation while creating convincing messages [19]. instances of the use of proposal innovations in the viewpoint of enticing frameworks are the execution of physical action while playing pc games [7] and moving programming engineers to improve the nature of their product modules [8]persuasive systems games. games concentrating on the inspiration of physical exercises incorporate extra reward systems to urge players to perform genuine real exercises. berkovsky et al. [7] show the effective utilization of collaborative filtering recommendation innovations [6] for assessing the individual trouble of playing. 3. proposed system music recommendation system utilizes popularity based, collaborative filtering based and content based recommender to discover relationships among clients figure 1.1. recommendation system methods popularity recommender collaborati ve filtering recommen der content based recommend user recommended song song tabl e album table usersong relationsh ip table profile table eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e2 performance analysis on popularity based, content based and collaborative filtering utilizing recommendation framework 3 and tunes. each of this recommender has certain preferences and impediments. this implementation is attempted to make a coordinated recommender which is blend of all these recommender to give better suggestions. to defeat this, top spilling administrations utilize a mix of calculations to shape recommender framework. our first approach is to make a proposal system using content examination. first assignment is to remove the dataset suitable for desire. for this, we have taken the fma and million tune dataset from columbia.edu and github. our recommender system is a cross breed approach between collaborative isolating, popularity based, and content based separating the dataset was pre-processed using r and python. the groups used for in r were readr, dplyr and catools while pandas and numpy were used in python. the recommendation algorithms mainly follow collaborative filtering, content-based and filtering approaches: 1. popularity based : the most trifling suggestion calculation is to just present every melody in relative request of its prevalence bouncing those tunes previously devoured by the client, paying little mind to the client's taste profile. 2. content based filtering: use highlights of the two items just as clients so as to estimate whether a client will like an item or not. 3. collaborative filtering: it can be either client based or thing based. in client based underwriting, clients who tune comparable interests and will most likely tune in to similar tunes in future. in the thing based suggestion technique, melodies that are regularly tuned in by a similar client will in general be comparative and are bound to be listened reserved in future by some other client. on basis of popularity based, content based and collaborative filtering the data is filtered and recommend the music for users. by combining the three evaluated result is filtered through and provide better recommendation. 4. result and analysis the result outcome module is shown in this paper. it is implemented in python with the separate results of each filtering. this evaluation is shown for popularity based recommender analysis. figure 1.2. showing the correlation between features for song to simply present each song in descending order of its popularity skipping those songs already consumed by the user, regardless of the user’s taste profile. 4.1 popular songs scoring formula score = ([non_unique_user_listen_count* non_unique_users_weight] + [unique_user_listen_count * unique_users_weight]) / song_ age whereunique_users_weight:1 non_unique_users_weight:0.25 table1.1 popular songs score evaluation: song_ title listen_ count unique_ users song_ age score set fire to the rain 5 3 2 1.75 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e2 deepkiran munjal, anju gera, pawan kumar singh 4 figure 1.3. showing the values of various features of corresponding songs it very well may be either client based or thing based. in client based suggestion, clients who tune in to similar melodies in the past will in general have comparative interests and will presumably tune in to similar tunes in future. in the thing based proposal procedure, tunes that are regularly tuned in by a similar client will in general be comparable and are bound to be listened together in future by some other client. by controlling the informational collection, changing the learning set and testing set, changing a few parameters of the issue and breaking down the outcome, we acquire a great deal rehearsing aptitudes. figure 1.4. showing the song co-occurrence matrix eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e2 performance analysis on popularity based, content based and collaborative filtering utilizing recommendation framework 5 figure 1.5. showing the summation across columns in song co-occurrence matrix figure 1.6. showing the normalized song recommendations 5. conclusion in music recommender system there are various ways to deal with this issue and we become acquainted with certain calculations in detail and particularly the models that we have clarified previously. by utilized the informational index, changing the learning set and testing set, changing a few parameters of the issue and breaking down the outcome, we win a great deal rehearsing abilities. we have confronted a great deal of issues in managing tremendous dataset, how to investigate it in a superior way and we likewise experienced issues in some program configuration subtleties. in any case, with parcel of efforts, we have conquered these. as far as research, despite everything we have a ton to do to make our examinations a superior one. music recommender system is such a wide, open and intricate matter that we can take a few activities and do significantly more tests in future. we likewise got the chance to understand that developing a recommender framework is certainly not a unimportant errand. the way that enormous scale dataset makes it troublesome in numerous perspectives. right off the bat, suggesting pertinent tunes out of large dataset for various clients isn't a simple errand. also, the metadata incorporates gigantic data and while investigating it, it is hard to dig important highlights for melody. thirdly, in fact talking, preparing such a tremendous dataset is memory and cpu serious. every one of these troubles because of the information and to the framework itself makes it all the more testing and furthermore increasingly appealing. 6. future work in future, firstly we want to work upon segmentation of data set. there is a huge set of data available. to classify and segment data is the toughest job. we will work on this area to make data set clear and segregated. this will increase the performance of recommendation system more fast and accurate. for this we can apply many clustering algorithms. in future the proposal framework can be utilized for different applications like in restorative field for directing the best medicinal analyse for fix of a patient and in future ( in medical field ) this will be relevant to work in space of man-made consciousness. building capable suggestion set of rules and the comparing uis requires a profound comprehension of human choice procedures. this objective can be accomplished by investigating existing mental plans of human basic leadership and their impact on the development of recommender frameworks. references [1] book: schafer, j.b., konstan, j.a. & riedl, j. ecommerce recommendation applications. data mining and knowledge discovery 5, 115–153 (2001). [2] journal article: pazzani, m., billsus, d, a framework for collaborative, content-based and demographic filtering learning and revising user profiles, the identification of interesting web sites. machine learning,1998. [3] conference: h. f. hofmann and f. lehner, "requirements engineering as a success factor in software eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e2 deepkiran munjal, anju gera, pawan kumar singh 6 projects," in ieee software, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 58-66, julyaug. 2001. [4] book chapter: fogg, persuasive technology – using computers to change what we think and do. morgan kaufmann publishers , 2003. [5] journal article: schafer j.b., konstan j.a., riedl j.t. (2006) recommender systems for the web. in: geroimenko v., chen c. (eds) visualizing the semantic web. springer, london.. [6] conference: berkovsky, s., freyne, j., coombe, m., bhandari, d.: recommender algorithms in activity motivating games. acm conference on recommender systems (recsys’09) , 2010. [7] journal article: mobasher, b., cleland-huang, j, using data mining and recommender systems to scale up the requirements process, recommender systems in requirements engineering. ai magazine 32(3), 2011. [8] journal article: elfernig, a., zehentner, c., ninaus, g., grabner, h., maalej, w., pagano, d., weninger, l., reinfrank, f.: using answer set programming for feature model representation and configuration, 2011. [9] journal article: janssen, j., broek, e., westerink, j.: tune in to your emotions: a robust personalized affective music player. user modeling and user-adapted interaction (umuai) .2011. [10] conference: adomavicius, g., bockstedt, j., curley, s., zhang, j.: recommender systems, consumer preferences, and anchoring effects. in: recsys 2011 workshop on human decision making in recommender systems, 2011. [11] conference: pribik, i., felfernig, a.: towards persuasive technology for software development environments: an empirical study. in: persuasive technology conference, 2012. [12] journal article: berkovsky, s., freyne, j., oinaskukkonen, h.: influencing individually: fusing personalization and persuasion. acm transactions on interactive intelligent systems 2(2), 2012 [13] conference: lalita sharma and anju gera a survey of recommendation system: research challenges international journal of engineering trends and technology (ijett) – volume 4 may, 2013 [14] conference: shraddha b. shinde, mrs. m. a potey,research paper recommender system evaluation using coverage, international research journal of engineering and technology (irjet), 2016. [15] conference: hinde u., and shedge r. comparative analysis of collaborative filtering technique, iosr journal of computer engineering, volume 10, 2013. [16] conference: jiang, c., & he, y. (2016). smart-dj: context-aware personalization for music recommendation on smartphones. 2016 ieee 22nd international conference on parallel and distributed systems (icpads) [17] journal article: haruna k, akmar ismail m, damiasih d, sutopo j, herawan t , a collaborative approach for research paper recommender system. plos one 12(10): e0184516, 2017. [18] conference: pirkka åman, lassi a. liikkanen, interacting with context factors in music recommendation and discovery, computer science international journal of human–computer interaction, 2017. [19] conference: åman, pramila m. chawan int. journal of engineering research and application www.ijera.com issn : 2248-9622, vol. 8, issue5, may 2018 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e2 https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/pirkka-%c3%85man/31680990 https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/lassi-a.-liikkanen/1732403 future feasibility of using wearable interfaces to provide social support natalie wilde*, hamed haddadi*†, akram alomainy* *queen mary university of london, uk †qatar computing research institute, qatar n.wilde@qmul.ac.uk abstract social support has a positive influence on a person’s overall wellbeing. the recent creation of mobile and online social networks have changed the methods used to obtain such support. previous wearable devices have focussed on increasing an individuals perceived level of social support by either encouraging new social relationships or strengthening those already existing. with the release of the apple watch, wearable interfaces are becoming popular but there is little research into the current attitudes of using these interfaces as a social support medium. in this paper we present the results of our survey to establish the attitudes of current smartwatch owners. results show owning a smartwatch has no effect on the levels of social support a person feels they have. the most commonly used method of support was through smartphone, which was true for people regardless of whether they own a smartwatch. a large number of smartwatch owners stated using their device was their last preference in seeking emotional (61%) and informational (57%) support from others. results from the survey indicate that more research is needed to establish exactly what factors make technological devices well suited to accommodate social support and how these can be applied to wearable interfaces in the future. categories and subject descriptors h.5.m [information interfaces and presentation]: miscellaneous; j.3 [computer applications]: life and medical sciences—consumer health general terms social support, wearable technology, social relationships keywords smart watch, wearable interfaces, social networks mobihealth ’15 london, great britain 1. introduction social support can be described as any type of communication, both verbal and non verbal, that reduces an individuals uncertainty. it helps an individual feel as if they have increased control of either themselves or the situation that is causing them distress [1]. long term social support is usually provided by the individual’s informal network, which includes their family and friends. but support can also be provided from more formal networks such as their doctor or a councillor. social support offers many benefits to an individuals overall wellbeing, regardless of stress levels [3]. this is because social support meets basic human needs for a sense of belonging and reassurance of one’s self worth. having adequate social support available ensures that stressful events are handled and coped with in a way that minimises the negative effects on one’s health. this is called the buffering effect and helps to keep both short and long term health consequences low [11]. there are two distinct measurements of social support. actual support is the amount of support that is given to the individual, either in what others have said or done for them. but another measurement which is proven to be of greater importance is that of perceived social support; the amount of support that the individual feels is available to them. in previous studies, it has been found that perceived social support is what actually contributes to good health and wellbeing within an individual [17]. this shows the perception of support to be subjective, what works for one person may not be perceived so beneficial by the next. an individual obtains social support by accessing and utilising their social networks. previous research has stated that offline social networks can have a positive effect on a person’s wellbeing [8]. recent advances in technology have changed the whole structure of social networks and how they are accessed. the development of internet based support groups and online social networks (osn) have recently gained in popularity [9]. these online virtual communities come together to share common interests, experiences and to offer support to each other. osn offer benefits for an individual as they can seek support at any time and from any geographical location. there are also mobile social networks (msn) that allow groups of people to be accessed and engaged with from one’s mobile device [4]. previous studies have found msn to be beneficial in offering social support mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261584 in both verbal and non verbal communication [6, 13]. as wearables become more widely available to the consumer, this may give rise to a new type of wearable social network. there is little work within this area and how wearable technology is perceived to affect levels of social support in the user. with the recent release of the apple watch, this paper aims to highlight the current attitudes of smart watch owners with using a wearable interface for seeking social support. opinions are collected in the form of an online survey. the survey focusses on two main types of social support; emotional and informational. emotional support includes needing reassurance, affection and someone to show concern about specific issues. informational support includes advice, guidance, suggestions and useful information about an issue. the rest of the paper is organised as follows. the current methods used by wearable technologies to aid social support are discussed. the methodology behind the survey and analysis are outlined. then the results of the survey are presented and discussed to offer directions for future work. 2. background currently there are two methods used by wearables to strengthen the users perceived level of social support. the first is to help the user create new social relationships and links within their social network. the more people they have in their network, the more likely they are to have someone they can turn to in times of needing support. the memetag device is worn around the users neck and allows users to share their ideas and opinions with each other [4]. the tag consists of a lcd screen with red and green buttons for accepting and deleting memes. users wearing the same tag can like each others memes when they meet. these small devices are all connected to community mirrors. these are large public displays that show real time visualisations of the community dynamics. from looking at the community mirror, an individual may be able to pick out people they feel they want to form relationships with. studies held at a conference found the device to be effective at supporting the users in the formative stages of social network building. more recently in [10], kan et al. developed a t-shirt that also aims to make it easier to form new social relationships. the t-shirt has letters on the front printed with thermochromic ink, which is coloured ink that turns transparent at 89◦f. when two users wearing the t-shirt high five, certain words are highlighted. these words reveal common interests between the wearers and aim to serve as a social catalyst. in [7], chambers et al. focussed on easing the problem of social isolation. they developed a wearable application that used play as a method to increase an individuals levels of social support. it did this by awarding badges and points every time the user carried out social gestures on others, such as shaking hands. the second method used to increase perceive social support is to enhance the social relationships that an individual already has. one way to achieve this is by facilitating social support between people over great distances. technologies developed have allowed people in two different geographical locations to support each others running sessions [12]. devices have also started to use touch to strengthen relationships between users. previous studies have shown touch to play an important role in interpersonal communications and therefore the maintenance of social support networks [16]. devices created such as the smartstones touch1 allow communication through touch and gestures to be sent in the form of vibrations. sociometric badges are wearable devices that automatically track the wearers face to face interactions and conversational times [14]. they achieve this through analysing social signals obtained from vocal features, relative location and the wearers body motion. this data can then be presented back to the wearer for reflection and to provide support on their social behaviour. examples of sociometric badge uses include conferences [4, 5] and analysing childrens social behaviour in kindergarden [15]. 3. survey methods the study conducted aimed to highlight smartwatch owners thoughts towards using wearable interfaces to obtain social support. participants to the survey were recruited through the osn platforms reddit and facebook. on reddit, online communities based around smartwatches such as the pebble, moto 360 and apple watch were selected as potential participants. the survey itself was created and shared through the google forms platform for ease of distribution across the internet via online forums. the survey questionnaire contained 17 questions split into three parts; a, b and c. before the survey each participant was presented with an information page and consent form to sign. part a of the questionnaire asked the participant about the technological devices that they own and their current social support habits. the final question of part a asked the participant if they ever ask for help and advice from others. if the participant responded to this with a ‘yes’ they were required to fill out both parts b and c. if they answered ‘no’ only part c was required. before part b, the participants were given a definition of social support to aid them in answering the survey. part b of the survey asked more in depth questions regarding the participants preferences in ways of receiving social support. respondents where given a list of mediums to rate in order of preference for receiving different types of social support. this list included face to face, desktop computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone and smartwatch. the types of social support questioned were emotional and informational types of social support. before answering the questions, a definition and example of each type of social support was explained to the participant. it also asked how easy they find obtaining social support through their smartwatch devices. finally, part c of the survey contained a set of demographics questions. 4. results a total of 266 respondents completed the survey. of these, 177 (66.5%) already owned a smartwatch device. when studying the demographics of smartwatch owners there were a couple of observations. a high majority of smartwatch owners were male (87.5%), which was found to be statistically significant (p < .001). the age group of smartwatch 1http://www.smartstones.co/ figure 1: method of communication currently used for social support owners was also found to be significant (p < .001), rejecting a null hypothesis that age and gender of smartwatch owners is equally distributed. of smartwatch owners, 96 (54.2%) were aged 18 25 and there were a further 59 (33.3%) within the 26 35 category. 258 (97%) of the respondents state that they use technology to communicate with friends and family at least every day. for the next section, only the data from respondents who owned smartwatches was analysed. 126 (77.3%) respondents agreed with the statement ‘social support is very important to my overall happiness and wellbeing’. this was found to reject a null hypothesis that social support has no effect on happiness levels (p < .001). when asked if they agreed with the statement ‘i am fully socially supported’, 105 respondents (70.5%) answered ‘yes’. when comparing data between groups, there was no significant difference between owning a smartwatch and not. this means that the owning of a smartwatch has no effect on perceived levels of social support. 109 (61.6%) respondents stated that they do seek support and advice from others so were able to continue to complete part b of the survey. when asked what method of communication they use to talk to family and friends, 48 respondents (44%) stated their smartphone, making it the most common method as shown in figure 1. significantly, no one stated their smartwatch as a preferred communication device (p<0.01). at this stage, data from smartwatch owners and non smartwatch owners were compared. when comparing commonly used devices for obtaining social support, the smartwatch option was omitted from the significance test to eliminate bias. no difference was found between the two groups most commonly used method for receiving social support. when the smartwatch owners were asked to rank technological devices in order of preference for receiving emotional and informational support, figure 2 shows the results. for emotional support the smartwatch was not anyone’s first or second preference. a majority of respondents (61%) stated it as their last preference in seeking emotional support from others. preferences were similar for informational support also, with 59 (57%) of respondents placing figure 2: preference of using smartwatch for support over other mediums figure 3: ease of use of smartwatch in obtaining social support smartwatches in last place. these rankings of preference for both emotional and informational support were found to be statistically significant (p < .001). when asked how easy they found obtaining social support through their smartwatch, there were mixed responses as shown in figure 3. roughly equal numbers of respondents found smartwatches both difficult and easy to use for social support. 31 (28.4%) respondents had never used their smartwatch for obtaining social support. there was no difference with regards to gender or age as perceived ease of use of a smartwatch was fairly evenly distributed. 5. discussion and future work when referring to the technology adoption lifecycle [2], smartwatches appear to be in the early adopters stage. when looking into the demographics of people who make up these early adopters, the majority are male and aged between 18 25. this could indicate the current average user profile, indicating that wearable smartwatches are not appealing to the female consumer at the current moment. this could be because of aesthetics or function. a large amount of respondents use technology to communicate with family and friends and obtain social support currently. a majority of smartwatch owners agreed that social support is important for their happiness which suggests that they would prefer social support on a regular basis. 70.5% of owners felt that they were fully socially supported but this is no different to the proportion when looking at people that do not own smartwatches. this could suggest that wearable technology is not enhancing social support levels at the current time. this could be down to the fact that the technology is still relatively new, there are not many current applications that deal with social support specifically. it may also be down to the fact that the user is getting support, but the wrong kind for what they require at the time. for example they may be getting informational support when they desire emotional. also applications that allow support are still in the early stages development wise and they are improving their designs on a daily basis. another possibility could be that the watch interface and form itself is just not effective in raising the levels of social support a person feels that they have. the fact that 61.6% say that they actively seek social support would suggest the need for more research into wearable interfaces that can accommodate these needs. the fact that nobody chose their smartwatch as their most commonly used device for social support could be down to it been a relatively new technology. but observing that there is no difference in usage regardless of whether they own a smartwatch suggests that it does not offer the needed ease and functionality that other devices such as the smartphone do. future work could focus on the exact reasons why people prefer certain mediums and use this to build a stronger application for the smartwatch. for example, do people prefer texting or talking? smartwatch owners also do not prefer to use their smartwatch for seeking emotional or informational support from others. this further backs up that the current interfaces used are not suitable. future work could focus on why it is not working for them and generate systems that encourage the use of wearable interfaces for social support. there was no difference between type of support and preference, which suggests future work should look into how the two types of support differ from each other and the best way support can be given through wearable devices. there are a large number of smartwatch users that are not using their device at all for seeking social support. this is a statement that needs questioning further. is it because of their personal attitudes towards the device or because the device does not work for social support at the current time? users are finding the interface both difficult and easy to use, suggesting that there is no current system designed for seeking social support through these devices. research into designing an interface that makes it easy for everyone could be beneficial for future developers. overall preference is towards smartphones when it comes to seeking social support, possibly due to portability. over the years devices have got smaller and more ubiquitous; fitting around peoples lifestyles and social networks. it would appear that the smartwatch is not building on the smartphones previous success [13, 6]. much more research into the future interface design of these devices is needed to encourage the use of wearable devices for social support. 6. acknowledgments the authors would like to thank all the people that participated in the survey questionnaire. this work is supported with funding from engineering and physical sciences research council (epsrc) and the arts and humanities research council (ahrc). 7. references [1] t. l. albrecht and m. b. adelman. communicating social support. sage publications, inc, 1987. [2] g. m. beal, j. m. bohlen, et al. the diffusion process. agricultural experiment station, iowa state college, 1957. [3] l. f. berkman and t. glass. social integration, social networks, social support, and health. social epidemiology, 1:137–173, 2000. [4] r. borovoy, f. martin, s. vemuri, m. resnick, b. silverman, and c. hancock. meme tags and community mirrors: moving from conferences to collaboration. in proceedings of the 1998 acm conference on computer supported cooperative work, pages 159–168. acm, 1998. [5] r. borovoy, m. mcdonald, f. martin, and m. resnick. things that blink: computationally augmented name tags. ibm systems journal, 35(3.4):488–495, 1996. [6] l. m. brown and j. williamson. shake2talk: multimodal messaging for interpersonal communication. in haptic and audio interaction design, pages 44–55. springer, 2007. [7] t. chambers. promoting social interactions through a wearable computing application. [8] m. greenblatt, r. m. becerra, and e. serafetinides. social networks and mental health: an overview. the american journal of psychiatry, 1982. [9] c. a. heaney and b. a. israel. social networks and social support. health behavior and health education: theory, research, and practice, 4:189–210, 2008. [10] v. kan, k. fujii, j. amores, c. l. zhu jin, p. maes, and h. ishii. social textiles: social affordances and icebreaking interactions through wearable social messaging. in proceedings of the ninth international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction, pages 619–624. acm, 2015. [11] m. mattson and j. g. hall. health as communication nexus: a service-learning approach. 2011. [12] f. mueller, s. o’brien, and a. thorogood. jogging over a distance: supporting a jogging together experience although being apart. in chi’07 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, pages 1989–1994. acm, 2007. [13] a. u. mutsuddi and k. connelly. text messages for encouraging physical activity are they effective after the novelty effect wears off? in pervasive computing technologies for healthcare (pervasivehealth), 2012 6th international conference on, pages 33–40. ieee, 2012. [14] d. o. olguın and a. s. pentland. sociometric badges: state of the art and future applications. 2007. [15] s. park, i. locher, a. savvides, m. b. srivastava, a. chen, r. muntz, and s. yuen. design of a wearable sensor badge for smart kindergarten. in wearable computers, 2002.(iswc 2002). proceedings. sixth international symposium on, pages 231–238. ieee, 2002. [16] r. wang, f. quek, j. k. teh, a. d. cheok, and s. r. lai. design and evaluation of a wearable remote social touch device. in international conference on multimodal interfaces and the workshop on machine learning for multimodal interaction, page 45. acm, 2010. [17] e. wethington and r. c. kessler. perceived support, received support, and adjustment to stressful life events. journal of health and social behavior, pages 78–89, 1986. oil and gas supply chain optimization using agent-based modelling(abm) integration with big data technology 1 oil and gas supply chain optimization using agent-based modelling(abm) integration with big data technology jamal maktoubian1,*, mehran ghasempour-mouziraji2, mohebollah noori3 1international school of information management (isim), university of mysore, mysore, india. 2department of engeneering, islamic azad university of sari, sari, iran. 3zarghan branch, islamic azad university, zarghan, fars, iran. abstract the worldwide oil & gas industry is one of the world's most complex business networks, and is connected with almost every supply chain branch. it includes international and domestic transportation, materials handling, ordering and inventory visibility and control, import/export facilitation and social network, etc. traditionally, it has been influenced by big oilfield companies. however, in recent years the industry has been changing into a more heterogeneous and diverse network of businesses, and the oilfields are getting smaller and more diverse. one of the reason could be dwindling the oil reserves and growing specialized companies which are able to extract hydrocarbons; another reason is the restructuring and globalization of the entire business as well as some new technology implementing. using agent-based modelling and big data technology integrity, we are able to optimize supply chain in oil and gas industries. keywords: big data, agent-based m odelling, oil and gas sup p ly chain received on 10 j u l y 2018, accep ted on 02 august 2018, p ublished on 09 august 2018 cop y right © 2018 jamal maktoubian et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http ://creativecommons.org/licenses/by /3.0/), which p ermits unlimited use, distribution and rep roduction in any medium so long as the original work is p rop erly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.26-6-2018.155192 1. introduction the global demand of oil & gas followed by the ease of international trade and the inflexibility involved in the petroleum industry’s supply chain has made its management more challenging[1]. the oil and gas industry is principally a supply chain management (scm) industry, which involves the management of all steps in the delivery of a product or service to consumers. it consists of exploration, drilling, operation of pipelines, and operation of refineries for the production of fuel, plastics, and so on. trunk line or “transmission pipes” are the arterials that deliver refined products such as gasoline and aviation fuel to terminals at various locations. distribution refers to the sale and delivery of these products to consumers from storage terminals. forrest and et al[2], identified that the majority of oil industry still operates its planning, central engineering, upstream operations, midstream operations, downstream operations and refining, supply, and transportation units as complete separate entities. each part of these process provide huge amount of data and dealing with such them require a huge infrastructure. in view of this, systematic methods for efficiently managing the oil and gas supply chain as one continuous unit must be exploited. more efficient and cost effective scm practices in the oil & gas industry indicate critical issues for ensure the continuous supply of crude oil, lead time reduction, and lowering of production and distribution costs. due to the inflexibility involved in the petroleum industry’s supply chain network, cost containment, visibility, globalization, risk, information technology logistics, knowledge management and greening the supply chains are some of the challenges facing the scm in the oil marketing companies as advanced by other researchers. integrated process management(ipm), information sharing and management, variety and complexity of generated data by each sector, organizational restructuring, and cultural reorientation are crucial factors and equally important. research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities ∗corresponding author. email: jamal.maktoubian@gmail.com eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2018 02 2020 | volume 4 | issue 9 | e1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ jamal maktoubian et al. 2 a wide range of optimization models have been proposed in the oil and gas supply chains, often without taking the inherent risks and vulnerabilities from events, different routes and supply chain units/nodes into consideration. these uncertainties and risks often interrupt the supply chain operations, causing significant adverse effects in the energy sector. it is important to develop risk based optimization models using advance technology in order to predict, reduce or mitigate the impact of these uncertainties in the oil and gas critical infrastructure supply chain. although oil and gas supply chain has a simple procedure, a little optimization in each agent (storages, refineries, retailers, pipelines, suppliers, carriers, freight forwarders, tankers, to name but a few) could save millions of dollars in a month. moreover, visibility in the supply chain being the main issue, the key challenge lies in the process optimization of each enterprise. for the question of efficient supply chain for a mass production industry like that of petroleum industry, the solution lies in the adaptive supply chain, which make a more holistic approach to the supply chain optimization[3]. the integrity of big data technology, agent-based modelling(abm) and simulation is reliable and efficient methods for solving complex problems of today's world. many components of supply chain systems have been modelled utilizing an agent-based software. garcia-flores and wang constructed an abm to simulate dynamic behavior of cooperating agents along a single supply chain[4]. the specific operation of a warehouse system was designed by ito and abadi[5]. models of refinery supply chains have been used to determine optimal business processes and configurations in one specific plant[6, 7]. combining big data methodologies with particular, agentbased modelling first, would be employed to uncover new relationships and behaviour coping with agents in agentbased models that were not recognized by the traditional ones. secondly, it could be beneficial for extracting more parameters for agent-based models, as the size of data sets will be increased. and then finally, after providing the results, they can be utilized to validate and comparing simulation with existing agent-based models. by doing this, oil and gas supplier could take advantage of both approaches to identify agent behaviours and options in a n unprecedented manner. to do that, we need big data and simulation frameworks, and visualization tools allow enduser access simulations without being notified of the operations. hopefully, these types of analyses and computational challenges are already covered by data science experts. 2. big data in supply chain management nowadays, it gets more and more important for oil and gas companies to manage and oversee their supply chains in an effective manner in order to reduce cost as well as to enhance and guarantee efficient operations. due to the incipient digital transformation process, expected to radically alter business ecosystems, change management practice and revolutionize supply chain dynamics, the management of data and information, being the raw materials of the digital age, is becoming increasingly important for businesses. the rationale is that the amount of data and information generated by, available to and collected through companies is growing at an unforeseen fast pace. the term big data analytics has been coined in this respect, reflecting the volume, velocity, and variety surge of digital data which increasingly poses a challenge for companies, as it complicates the identification and extraction of the most relevant and valuable information required for managing the business and ultimately the supply chain[8]. however, having access to accurate and up-to-date information is paramount for informed decision-making at corporate as well as supply chain level. in turn, not having access to up-to-date, accurate and meaningful information represents a risk for companies and subsequently for the supply chain, as decisions need to be made on a reliable, evidence-driven basis. other factors being the increased need for end-toend visibility along the supply chain, enhanced automation levels as well as required efficiency gains at the manufacturing level. apart from the analysis, machine learning is helping to improve the accuracy and efficiency of supply chain management. the evolution to using artificial intelligence and machines that learn in supply chain planning is inevitable. in fact, there are early examples of the potential of ai to improve both supply chain planner efficiencies and provide better or optimized supply chain decisions. oil & gas supply and trading aims to optimize commercial margins in a diverse, dynamic, and global market environment. data mining, machine learning, and predictive analytics solutions could be provided that empower decision makers to analyze trading risks. effective optimisation requires analysis of the interaction of several variables in supply chain datasets. in supply chain machine learning, we need to measure relationships between attributes to find hidden patterns among them. for instance, how different factors such as materials, ordering and inventory visibility and control, import/export facilitation, and transportation, etc. can influence oil and gas industry. 3. agent-based modelling (abm) in oil & gas industry abms are computational systems with dynamic behavior and special characteristics that define as “interacting autonomous entities which is called agents”[9]. using agents, we able to show and employ individuals at several levels, learning capability, and make best decisions in both space and time. having this features, researchers are able to examine complex systems and environments, such as oil and gas supply chain. cutting costs by using new information technologies and creating conditions for better collaboration is a very actual problem. abm is a computational approach to model eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2018 02 2020 | volume 4 | issue 9 | e1 3 complex systems with numbers of agents such as oil and gas industries. it consists of modelers which define other parts with their behaviors and generate simulations of their interactions to identify how those sections influence the behavior of entire system. the main objective of this paper is to propose a framework using big data technologies to formulate principles for collaboration, develop tools for incorporation of all data into a single set and to visualize data for further analysis. to do that we need to investigate the relationships of different variables in oilfield data in risk and then develop a simulation to identify higher risks of this business. oil & gas organizations could employ analytics to optimize materials’ delivery, reducing inventory levels and supply chain costs to evaluate performance and optimize supply chain operations. one of the most flexible modelling methods is agent-based modelling. the basis for naming these methods is because agents play an essential role in the model. in this type of modelling, each of the real world agents is modelled as decision-making and fully automated entities, called agent. and repetitive competitive communication between agents and subagents are a feature of agent-based modelling which relies on the power of hardware to explore dynamics out of reach of pure mathematical methods. each of these factors has various sections for understanding the environment, analysing it, and ultimately acting. in fact, in modelling the underlying factor, i will attempt to simulate the decision making process in the real world by similar factors. in order to apply agent-based modelling, following procedure is essential: 3-1 data collection: first and most required data (major terminals, tanks, connectivity, commodity types, pools, defaults routes, business rules, batches in pipelines at any time, to name but a few) could be collected from online pages but the only factor in collecting data is the volume of information, complexity of the system as whole. secondly, detailed structured questionnaires could be designed to identify the way in which oil marketing companies manage their supply chain. and finally, data would be obtained through literature review of various publications of supply chain management and production and operations management which are related to oil and gas industry. 3-2 model the process: one of the most flexible modelling methods is agentbased modelling. the basis for naming these methods is because agents play an essential role in the model. in this type of modelling, each of the real world agents is modelled as decision-making and fully automated entities, called agent. each of these factors has various sections for understanding the environment, analysing it, and ultimately acting. in fact, in modelling the underlying factor, we try to simulate the decision making process in the real world by similar factors. all agents and subagents behaviour which are associated with oil & gas supply chain industry need to be designed and the challenges should be simulated. to analyse existing supply chain models and develop a risk model that will be used to categorize and derive the various types of risks from analyzing the impacts of prior events on the oil and gas supply chain and subsequently derive their ratings from the weighted risk. developing a risk based scm that will include a risk based network reliability analysis model using the modified minimum cut-set method to locate critical links/nodes in the network. also failure from some of events, activities and threats we are able to analyse their risk ratings and severely affect the supply chain networks. a risk based linear programming (lp) supply chain model (scm) for strategic and tactical planning in the oil and gas scm, by using the risk ratings obtained above to simulate different scenarios and alternatives, so as to get and incorporate the likely impact of these events and activities on the critical, links and nodes. finally, develop a fault tree and model based vulnerability analysis (fta and mbva) models that will be used to show how scarce resources can be allocated for optimum result in hardening/protecting these oil and gas sc nodes from failure because of the likely impacts of some of the events and threats analysed. however, agent-based models can also generate large amounts of data, which can be difficult to analyse and understand. hence the question arises whether agentbased models could be combined with big data methods in a way that helps address this problem. 4.how big data integrity oil and gas supply chain: oil and gas companies can analyse data streams from suppliers to evaluate performance and optimize supply chain operations. they can use analytics to improve “real-time” delivery of materials, reducing inventory levels and supply chain costs. in brief, this research project proposes to develop a framework(figure-1) to solve real-time big data management, storage, computation challenges, and predictive data analytics in oil & gas supply chain organization in order to predict and monitor different variables and customers’ behaviour. to deal with collecting real-time streaming data which is come from different agents, we need to use state-of-art technology such as apache kafka and flume[10] as a distributed messaging system to collect unstructured and semi-structured data. it is unrealistic to expect that data will be perfect after they have been extracted. before processing data, they should be go through different step s which is called “data cleaning”. data is cleaned through eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first oil and gas supply chain optimization using agent-based modelling(abm) integration with big data technology eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2018 02 2020 | volume 4 | issue 9 | e1 4 processes such as filling in missing values, smoothing the noisy data, or resolving the inconsistencies in the data. raw data need to be pre-processed in different steps including data-integration, data transformation, data reduction, and data discretization. since good models usually need good data, a thorough cleansing of the data is an important step to improve the quality of data mining methods. not only the correctness, but also the consistency of values is important. data preparation consists of techniques such as min-max normalization and standardizing or z-scoring or normalizing the data[11]. in many application areas, datasets can have a very large number of features. as the dimensionality of the feature space increases, many types of data analysis and classification become significantly harder, and, additionally, the data becomes increasingly sparse in the space it occupies which can lead to big difficulties for both supervised and unsupervised learning. cleaned data are delivered to spark streaming which is a distributed stream processing engine. in this stage, spark streaming breaks up the input data stream in small batches namely resilient distributed datasets (rdd). a continuous sequence of rdds pass through spark engine in order to be processed and could be used in machine learning libraries such as mllib for data analysis[12]. different clustering and classification algorithms could be applied to find disease pattern or predict risks. these analysis methods could help care sector to identify knowledge in order to predict various risk in real-time. in this research project, there is a lot of potential in delivering more targeted, wide-reaching, and costefficient healthcare by exploiting big data trends and technologies. figure 1big data analytics in optimizing oil & gas supply chain analytics is of course a very wide area; we would like to focus in this section on a technology that has not been implemented widely in supply chain until recently called machine learning and in particular how it can be combined with optimization to produce breakthrough results. a natural application of supervised machine learning in supply chain analytics is forecasting. they are poised to address important issues in areas such as capacity planning due to uncertainty in downstream capacities, inventory and supply-chain management by reducing uncertainities around material and part availabilities, and by reacting to (or anticipating) market and customer demand changes. 1. conclusion supply chain management could play a vital role in order to promote business profitability and decrease costs in every industry. recently, by emerging new generation of hardware(radio-frequency identification (rfid), different sensors, internet of thing(iot), tracking technologies, etc.) and new algorithm and its applications, managing supply chain of businesses could be much easier than before. due to the globalization, oil and gas supply chain has turned into one of the challenging industry as the number of agents and sun-agent involved in this branch, could generate huge amount of data. data-storage, process and management are critical concern in this era. in this work, agent-based modelling and big data integration have been demonstrated as one of the solution which could provide data availability, scalability and performance for this system. in the future research, collected data would be examined by implementing the architecture and the result will be published. references [1] m orton, r., good chemistry in the supply chain. logistics today , 2003. [2] forrest, j. and m . oettli. rigorous simulation sup p orts accurate refinery decisions. in proceedings of fourth international conference on foundations of comp utersaided p rocess op erations. 2003. [3] tomp kins, a., chain challenge. europ ean chemical news (december 23–january 12), 2003: p . 19-21. [4] garcía-flores, r. and x.z. wang, a multi-agent sy stem for chemical sup p ly chain simulation and management sup p ort. or sp ectrum, 2002. 24(3): p . 343370. [5] ito, t. and s.m .j. abadi, agent-based material handling and inventory planning in warehouse. journal of intelligent manufacturing, 2002. 13(3): p . 201-210. [6] srinivasan, r., m . bansal, and i. karimi, a multiagent approach to supply chain management in the chemical industry. 2006, sp ringer. p . 419-450. [7] julka, n., r. srinivasan, and i. karimi, agent-based supply chain management—1: framework. comp uters & chemical engineering, 2002. 26(12): p . 1755-1769. jamal maktoubian et al. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2018 02 2020 | volume 4 | issue 9 | e1 5 [8] giannakis, m ., et al., a multi-agent based system with big data processing for enhanced supply chain agility. journal of enterp rise information m anagement, 2016. 29(5): p . 706-727. [9] jones, c., m . m atarić, and b. werger, cognitive processing through the interaction of many agents. ency clop edia of cognitive science, 2002. [10] wang, c., i.a. ray an, and k. schwan. faster, larger, easier: reining real-time big data p rocessing in cloud. in proceedings of the posters and demo track. 2012. acm . [11] duda, r.o., p.e. hart, and d.g. stork, pattern classification. 2012: john wiley & sons. [12] kaveh, m ., etl and analy sis of iot data using op entsdb, kafka, and sp ark. 2015, university of stavanger, norway . oil and gas supply chain optimization using agent-based modelling(abm) integration with big data technology eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2018 02 2020 | volume 4 | issue 9 | e1 detection of cyber attacks using machine learning based intrusion detection system for iot based smart cities eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 detection of cyber attacks using machine learning based intrusion detection system for iot based smart cities maria nawaz chohan 1 , usman haider 2,* , muhammad yaseen ayub 3 , hina shoukat 3 , tarandeep kaur bhatia 4 and muhammad furqan ul hassan 3 1 national defence university, islamabad, pakistan 2 department of electrical engineering, national university of computer & emerging sciences, peshawar, pakistan 3 department of computer science, comsats university islamabad, attock, pakistan 4university of petroleum and energy studies, dehradun, india abstract the world’s dynamics is evolving with artificial intelligence (ai) and the results are smart products. a smart city has smart city is collection of smart innovations powered with ai and internet of things (iots). along with the ease and comfort that the concept of a smart city pointed at, many security concerns are being raised that hinders the path of its flourishment. an intrusion detection system (ids) monitors the whole network traffic and alerts in case of any anomaly. a machine learningbased ids intelligently senses the network threats, takes decisions about data packet legibility and alarm the user. researchers have deployed various ml techniques to ids to improve the detection accuracy. this work presents a comparative analysis of various ml algorithms trained over unsw-nb15 dataset. ada boost, linear support vector machine (lsvm), auto encoder classifier, quadratic support vector machine (qsvm) and multi-layer perceptron algorithms are being employed in the stimulation. ada boost showed an excellent accuracy of 98.3% in the results. keywords: iot, smart cities, uavs received on 09 april 2023, accepted on 17 june 2023, published on 28 june 2023 copyright © 2023 chohan et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.3222 *corresponding author: usmanhaider@ieee.org emails: m.n. chohan (maria.nawaz160@gmail.com), m.y. ayub (yaseen.ayub@ieee.org), h. shoukat (fa18-bcs-053@cuiatk.edu.pk), t. k. bhatia (tarandeepkaur42@gmail.com) m. f. ul hassan (sp19-bcs-011@cuiatk.edu.pk) 1. introduction technological inventions have changed the dynamics of world. infrastructure in every industry is automated with the use of iot and wireless communication networks. smart cities are based on wireless connectivity where infrastructure less topological scenario allows many cyber-attacks. therefore, vulnerabilities in smart cities need to be addressed with proper solution. the area of smart cities is quite diverse with having many applications which include e-government, smart homes, intelligent transportation, tele-medicines, smart grid, uavs monitoring, energy and many more [1-4]. data network security is the topic for many researchers around the world due to ever-increasing cyber-attacks. intrusion detection is the system which needs to identify fake data packets easily. optimal ids algorithm balance high accuracy with the metrics of false negative and false positive. also, the main goal of ids is to detect possible cyber-attacks. however, intrusion detection system is based on normal and eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:usmanhaider@ieee.org mailto:maria.nawaz160@gmail.com mailto:yaseen.ayub@ieee.org mailto:fa18-bcs-053@cuiatk.edu.pk mailto:tarandeepkaur42@gmail.com mailto:sp19-bcs-011@cuiatk.edu.pk m. n. chohan et al. 2 illegal data packets. moreover, smart cities need secure communication channels due to that ids plays important role [5-8]. figure 1, shows the concept of smart cities which further explains smart house, hospitals, vehicles and how a smart city is going to be connected. uavs can be merged with smart cities which can help in connectivity. secure communication links are designed to reduce end-to-end delay. while, false data injection attacks can be deployed with help of intruder to unbalance communication in remote surgery of high official patient. various technologies like markov chain, machine learning, deep learning, ant colony optimization and poisson distribution use to improve signature, anomaly or hybrid intrusion detection systems [913]. figure1: future connected smart cities 2. literature study the concept of smart cities is the need of today but due to automation there exist many connectivity problems. uavs operations are possible in smart cities to collect information from iot nodes and send to base station. therefore, uavs actively plays important role in smart cities. dsdv routing protocol is having the process of incremental updates which is helpful to improve and secure communication standards in uav enabled smart cities [14]. moreover, for secure communication protocols need to be designed to mitigate related problems of the network [15]. wireless connected technology like ieee 802.11 needs more improvements. rssi controlled machine learning approach decision tree is introduced which has shown better results in signal strength indicator [16]. iot networks in smart cities connect everything through wireless technology. block chain in smart cities can provide better solutions in many applications [17]. table 1, describes the security attacks/violation, related challenges in smart cities and gives an overview of researches in this area. 3. cyber threats on smart cities iot networks are vulnerable to the cyber-attacks, so in a smart city such threats are a big challenge to counter. dos, ddos, sybil attack, sql injection and malware attacks are common types of attacks in iot environment thus smart cities are also subjected to these attacks. so, the result of this insecure sensor node network can be system crashing or service termination if left solution less and unsecure. such technical failures can be a full stop to this advancement. fortunately, no one is left helpless over these threats because many solutions are been available of various nature can be used accordingly [28-29]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first detection of cyber attacks using machine learning based intrusion detection system for iot based smart cities 3 3.1. denial of service attack (dos) on smart cities no one is denial of service (dos) attack is most basic type of attack that can cause the victim system to crash down or become unavailable even for the legal users due is huge imbursement of the data packets by the hacker or intruder. thus, the purpose of this attack is the hang up victim services, like an attack on a smart grid in ukraine in 2015. in smart cities, such system unavailability can cause a havoc, so the monitoring of all network traffic is certain [30]. figure 2, explains dos attack mechanism in detail, how a system is being attacked in dos and represent the service termination as attack result. table 1: cyber attacks with related challenges reference security attacks/violations field of study description [18] ddos, access attack iot iot needs to be secure thus an analysis is necessary to be done on various kind of attacks and solution to them. [19] man-in-the-middle (mitm) attack, ping ddos flood attack, modbus query flood attack, and tcp syn ddos flood attack iot this paper proposed a deep leaning approach to detect the mentioned attacks and applies long shortterm memory (lstm) module. [20] ddos, malware iot this work analyzes the real time attacks and suggest a threefold approach. [21] ddos iot in a smart power system, iot managed load could be vulnerable to attacks. this paper presents a detailed report on threat analysis. [22] false data injection attack iot the security of smart electric vehicles is subject into account by this work and proposes semidefinite programming approach-based algorithm. [23] denial of service (dos) attacks, injections, man in the middle attacks, buffer overflow iot this paper proposed management-based solution to cyber-attacks. [24] dos, ddos, zero-day attacks, mitm iot growth of iot in the markets has given rise to cybercrime in this domain and this work offers detailed analysis of known defense techniques. [25] ddos iot this paper tries to cover the destruction of ddos attack with deep learning approach with an excellent efficiency [26] intrusion attacks iot this paper provides a hybrid approach for intelligent secure system. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first m. n. chohan et al. 4 figure 2: denial-of-service attack 3.2 distributed denial of service attack (ddos) on smart cities distributed denial of service (ddos) attack is type of dos attacked and it can be on single victim or group of victims with multiple systems operated via channels using various compromised systems or botnets. a victim compromised with such an attack in smart, drains out resources of the server or network infrastructure by entertaining overwhelming faulty packets in place legitimate packets thus they remain unpleased over the victim. in this way all communications can be disrupted with multiple consequences [31]. figure 3 shows the concept of ddos attacks on smart cities and understanding of attacker, handler, botnet and victim in this type of attack. [1] figure 3: ddos attack 3.3 sybil attack on smart cities in sybil attack, the hacker pretends multiple identities using them all at the same time thus these pseudoidentities compromise the system efficiency. so, in a smart city, aftershocks of this of attacks are privacy loss, fallacious report generation, spam encounter etc. moreover, sybil attackers incorporate various other types of attacks like phishing, social engineering, malware etc. and also encourage machine learning (ml) methods in their attack patters [32]. 3.4 sql injection attack on smart cities whenever the target is sensitive data, sql injective is famous way to proceed. this attack can read as well as delete data and also this intrusion has application to destroy sql databases. all the sensitive data from various ends and sensor nodes of smart appliances in a smart city can be at risk. so, the databases in a smart city must be highly protected for the users to have their privacy [33]. 3.5 malware attack on smart cities malware is one of the largest group of threats with various types and classes of intrusion and threats. famous classes of malware are ransomwares, trojans, worms etc. they actually infect the victim with various kind of viruses thus resulting in victims’ data loss. in a smart city, all the customer’s data can be at stack of destruction thus leaving the core cause of easing humanity smart cities [34]. 4. machine learning based intrusion detection system the finest approach in the detection and mitigation of various threats in smart cities is machine learning. we are using ml for the detection of cyber threats in networks of a smart city. there are three main types of ml approaches: anomaly-based, signature-based and hybrid. anomalybased detection is through the system intelligence trained through various techniques [35], signature-based approach cross compares the network traffic with existing signature or attack pattern thus results threat detection [36] and hybrid system is mixture of assets of both thus more effective and accurate than both of then [37]. depending on environment scenarios, various researchers have developed different types of idss using different approaches, algorithms with different target systems and compare the precision and accuracy of their proposed algorithm with other algorithms in their case study [38-39]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first detection of cyber attacks using machine learning based intrusion detection system for iot based smart cities 5 5. simulation environment & results python is used to create the simulation environment. the most popular dataset unsw-nb15 is used. however, machine learning algorithms like ada boost, auto encoder classifier, linear support vector machine, quadratic support vector machine and multi-layer perceptron are simulated to detect cyber-attacks [39-45]. table 2 shows accuracies of machine learning algorithms where ada boost shows better results in comparison with other traditional techniques. table 2, details are illustrated in figure 4. table 2: accuracy details of machine learning classifiers s/no. algorithms accuracy 1 ada boost 98.3431 2 auto encoder classifier 96.1133 3 linear support vector machine 97.8503 4 quadratic support vector machine 84.7305 5 multi-layer perceptron 97.9735 figure 4: comparative study of machine learning algorithms using unsw-nb15 6. conclusion smart cities are considered a novel concept while, cyberattacks can unbalance life of humans. therefore, most of the researchers have merged smart cities with uavs to provide better connectivity. machine learning based ids approach is used in the concept of smart cities. for experimentation, unsw australia based dataset is used to check the raw traffic problems and attacks. machine learning algorithms are used where ada boost has shown optimal results. 7. future direction in near future, the use of technology is increasing on daily basis. security is considered main issue in every field of study. therefore, machine learning based intrusion detection system will easily detect attacks in iot networks. moreover, deep learning, artificial intelligence, genetic algorithm-based ids need to be designed for future smart cities. references [1] çimen, h.; palacios-garcía, e.j.; kolaek, m.; çetinkaya, n.; vasquez, j.c.; guerrero, j.m. smart-building applications: deep learning-based, real-time load monitoring. ieee ind. electron. mag. 2020, 15, 4–15. 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"towards developing network forensic mechanism for botnet activities in the iot based on machine learning techniques." international conference on mobile networks and management. springer, cham, 2017. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7348942 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7348942 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7348942 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19393555.2015.1125974 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19393555.2015.1125974 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19393555.2015.1125974 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19393555.2015.1125974 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7948715 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7948715 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7948715 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-59439-2_5 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-59439-2_5 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-59439-2_5 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.09144 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.09144 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72802-1_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72802-1_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72802-1_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72802-1_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72802-1_9 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-72802-1_9 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8470090 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8470090 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8470090 https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8k5adwaaqbaj&oi=fnd&pg=pa30&ots=3nr5weyk1p&sig=0x03dtpq7u72nf3ixswjmmdhd_0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8k5adwaaqbaj&oi=fnd&pg=pa30&ots=3nr5weyk1p&sig=0x03dtpq7u72nf3ixswjmmdhd_0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8k5adwaaqbaj&oi=fnd&pg=pa30&ots=3nr5weyk1p&sig=0x03dtpq7u72nf3ixswjmmdhd_0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8k5adwaaqbaj&oi=fnd&pg=pa30&ots=3nr5weyk1p&sig=0x03dtpq7u72nf3ixswjmmdhd_0#v=onepage&q&f=false high availability of charging and billing in vehicular ad hoc network mohamed darqaoui1, slimane bah2, marouane sebgui3,∗ 1ecole mohammadia d’ingénieurs, electrical and communication laboratory, rabat, morocco 2ecole mohammadia d’ingénieurs, electrical and communication laboratory, rabat, morocco 3ecole mohammadia d’ingénieurs, electrical and communication laboratory, rabat, morocco abstract vanet (vehicular ad hoc network) is actually an important field for the development of a variety of services. in vanet charging and billing of services could not be enabled in the same way as in classical mobile and fix networks and manet (mobile ad hoc network) because of the characteristics of such network namely the high speed of nodes, frequent disconnection between nodes, rapidly changing topology and the large size of the network. the purpose of this work is to propose a flexible high level charging and billing scheme to allow a high availability of the charging and billing process in vanet. received on 6 december 2017; accepted on 18 december 2017; published on 12 february 2018 keywords: vanet, charging, billing, prepaid, on-line/off-line charging copyright © 2018 mohamed darqaoui et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.12-2-2018.154102 1. introduction in recent years, the field of vehicular ad hoc network (vanet) has attracted a growing amount of interest. vanet [1] is a term associated with technologies (architecture, data, and protocols) developed and standardized under the umbrella work of intelligent transport systems (its) [2]. standardization of its is done in various governmental and nongovernmental standard development organizations namely ieee, iso, itu. vanet comprise vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicleto-infrastructure communications based on wireless local area network technologies. vehicular networking offers a wide variety of applications [3], including safety, non safety and infotainment applications. the abundance of vanet applications is a benefit for a wide range of parties: governments, vehicle manufacturers, operators and consumers. for the operators promoting their services in vanet a robust charging and billing architecture is needed. although many works have been done in charging and billing in ad hoc environment, most of them does not addressed the high availability of charging and billing process when nodes move ∗corresponding author. email: darqaoui.med@gmail.com from vanet infrastructure to a pure infrastructureless vanet environment. charging and billing process relies on an existing infrastructure which constitutes a severe limitation and raises a highly complex problem for which no satisfying solution exists. to address this problem, we propose a scheme making the charging and billing control available even out of vanet infrastructure. we address this problem from two perspectives: first, when a vehicle under online charging and billing in vanet environment moves to an infrastructure-less environment; second, when a vehicle under online charging in vanet moves to a different autonomous vanet domain or network. . this paper is structured as follows: section 2 provides background information on vehicular networks and charging/billing systems in traditional mobile networks. section 3, proposes requirements for billing and charging in vanets and provides a critical overview of existing solutions. section 4 proposes a hybrid charging and billing mechanism to take into consideration vanet’s characteristics. we conclude our work in section 5. 2. background on vanet and charging/billing 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ mailto:<darqaoui.med@gmail.com> darqaoui m., bah s., sebgui m 2.1. vehicular ad hoc network ad hoc networks are communication networks that are formed in a more or less spontaneous way and comprise an arbitrary number of participating nodes. they typically comprise wireless communication terminals forming a wireless stand-alone network. examples of such networks are mobile ad hoc network (manet) [4] and vehicular ad hoc network (vanet). the current trend in ad hoc networks is vehicular ad hoc network. vanet is an emergent technology that receives, recently, the attention of the industry and research groups. it allows different deployment architectures in highways, urban and rural environments [5]. in vanet architecture, the communication can be either among nearby vehicles or/and between vehicles and roadside units leading to three possibilities: vehicle-to-vehicle (v2v) communication, vehicle-to-infrastructure (v2i) communication and hybrid architecture (as shown in figure 1): figure 1. vanet communication architecture vehicular ad hoc networks present some particular characteristics despite being a special case of classical mobile ad hoc networks namely the high speed of nodes, the rapidly changing topology, frequent disconnections between nodes [1] and in several cases the large size of the network. the particularities of vanet make it a very interspersing domain which deserves in the last years several studies addressing different aspects, such as: applications [6, 7], communication [8], security [9, 10], routing protocols [11, 12, 13], access [14] and cloud computing in vanets [15, 16,17]. although researchers have achieved much great progress on vanets study, there are still some challenges that need to be overcome and some issues that need to be further investigated (e.g., security, services.). especially, one aspect that has not been tackled by research namely the charging and billing issue. 2.2. charging and billing charging is the process of collecting, evaluating and accounting a network resource usage [18]. this resource usage is related to an event that can be either a voice communication or an internet session or a value added service. billing is the step that follows the charging operation, it consists of two mains steps: mediation step that collect, validate, filter correlate, aggregate and convert data to create data record called data detailed record (cdr) and rating step which is a process that puts a cost on a call or a service (monetary values). after the rating step bills are generated. there exist two modes of charging: postpaid and prepaid. in postpaid mode a bill is generated in arrears periodically stating what was owed to the service provider by the customer. the subscriber is then expected to settle the bill (payment). in prepaid mode of charging and billing, the customer pays a sum in advance. the paid amount is depreciated as telecoms services are consumed. in mobile networks (gsm/umts/lte) online and offline charging are two mechanisms used to charge subscribers for rendered services [18]. offline charging is a mechanism that consists of a chain of logical functions, this chain end by generating charging information (cdr) related to a resource usage in the network which is then transferred to the billing system to generate the subscriber bill. in this scenario the charging process does not affect, in real time, the service rendered. offline mode is used to charge a postpaid user. in the same fashion, the online charging information passes through a chain of logical functions. however, authorization for the network resource usage must be obtained by the network prior to resource usage to occur. the online mode is used to charge prepaid users. 3. requirements and critical overview of existing solutions 3.1. requirements the charging and billing system in vanet must be different from the charging and billing process in other mobile networks. we identified main charging and billing requirements to be fulfilled by a charging and billing system in order to carry out its basic tasks in vehicular ad hoc network: (a) the vanet charging/billing system should take into consideration the high speed of vehicles in terms of controlling the charging process and insuring its high availability. (b) the vanet charging/billing system should be flexible. in fact, due to frequent disconnections, the charging solution needs to be aware of the underlying environment updates and adapt to the network topology changes. (c) the vanet charging/billing system should allow the roaming of the charging function between different 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e1 high availability of charging and billing in vehicular ad hoc network vanet providers. in fact, when a vehicle travels long distance it is not unusual to traverse different vanet infrastructures belonging to different domains. a service should be charged continuously and accurately in this context. 3.2. related work to the best of our knowledge there is no solution dedicated to vanet environments for billing and charging issues. however, some research works have addressed this problem in peer-to-peer and manet networks. authors in [19] propose the mmapps (market-managed peer-to-peer services) charging solution for peer-to-peer networks. the mmapps accounting and charging system addresses, mainly, the issue of accountability in peer-to-peer environments and associated problems. the work [20] proposes a secure charging protocol (scp). scp aims at answering the complex authentication, authorization, accounting and charging (aaac) problem in manet. it provides a view based on a different business model. this later has been adjusted to cope with technological changes. the work also addresses the improvements made to the scp protocol in terms of quality of service (qos) and user interfaces. the work in [21] proposes a solution for charging in manet. the solution enables charging without any access to external networks. for example, when a communication is initiated by a mobile communication device within an ad hoc network, a small initiation fee is stored securely on the device, typically on a smart card. transfer of the charging information may then occur more or less automatically and/or when the device reaches a coverage area of the operator network. when the network operator’s system receives the charging information from a communication device (i.e. when it comes into contact with the infrastructure) the corresponding account is updated and charged with the activities that have occurred since the last update. 3.3. analysis and discussion generally, the works discussed above provide a suitable charging and billing solution for peer-to-peer networks and ad hoc environment but did not meet the requirements highlighted previously. specifically, the peer-to-peer architecture proposed in [18] does not consider mobility and then does not meet the requirement (a) and (b) in term of flexibility and high availability. the scp protocol proposed in the work [19] has only addressed the security issue in charging process assuming an existing solution. as far as the work in [20] is concerned, it does not take into consideration the requirement (b) and (c). in fact, this work focus on updating the operator charging system with data collected during offline charging. the cooperation between the offline and online charging systems is not considered. therefore, when a node roams from an environment with vanet infrastructure to an environment where the infrastructure of vanet is absent (i.e. no rsus and no possible connection with external networks) the charging process is interrupted. similarly, when the vehicle traverses different autonomous vanet systems the charging is interrupted or may not be possible to update the operator charging system. therefore the high availability of charging and billing is not considered at all. 4. proposed solutions for high availability charging in vanet the main goal of this work is to insure the high availability of charging and billing control in vehicular environment. first, we propose a high level mechanism to address the problem of a vehicle leaving the vanet infrastructure while it is under online charging and billing process. then, we propose a high level mechanism for seamless charging between vanet and 3gpp domains. both cases involve a context-aware charging and billing system. both mechanisms rely on a context-aware charging and billing solution. through this solution, the operator will be able to continuously control its resource usage in vanet and out of vanet. indeed, the roadside units will be responsible for detecting if a vehicle is under vanet control or not using some protocol (e.g. heartbeat protocol) or when the signal noise ratio (snr) reaches some predefined thresholds. before presenting our proposed schemes we highlight the vanet business model. 4.1. business model vanet as a new technology is coming with a new concepts especially regarding business part. vanet could be deployed according a business model, in this model we distinguish generally three partners;vanet provider, operator and end user. the vanet provider is the party which deploy the infrastructure of vanet ( roadside units, vanetenabled vehicles...) it can be for example a manufacturer. the operator is the service provider, it is the party marketing services through vanet, example of operator is telecommunication company providing internet access or cloud computing provider offering cloud service. the operator can also take on the role vanet provider. end user: the obu unit installed in the vehicle enabling vanet communications. 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e1 darqaoui m., bah s., sebgui m 4.2. online to offline charging and billing roaming in this scenario, vehicles establish a v2v session (e.g. direct voice call service between vehicles). we propose to equip the vehicles with a prepaid system(pps) such as smart card or virtual storage in the operating system running on the vehicle. however, the charging of the call is carried out by the vanet online charging and billing infrastructure (ocs), the rsu collects the charging data (v2i communication) and send them to billing domain bd (figure 2). the data charging are information related to the call such as start time, duration of the call and end time of the call. figure 2. online charging based system since the communication between vehicle a and b is vehicle-to-vehicle communication, the media channel is not controlled by the rsu. therefore, when the two vehicles leave the vanet charging area (i.e. the zone covered by vanet infrastructure namely rsus) to a non vanet charging area (i.e. area where there is no vanet infrastructure and where vanet become a pure peer-to-peer mobile environment) the communication is not interrupted but the charging of the call is lost (figure 3). figure 3. charging flow interruption from the vanet provider’s business perspective, the scenario above present a crucial problem since the wireless resource (bandwidth) is used for free. to avoid this problem, we propose that the vanet provider implements an on-line context-aware charging and billing system (context-aware ocs). this system will collect several parameters in order to decide to switch automatically to the prepaid charging system implemented in the vehicle (e.g. smart card). we propose to use two parameters: the snr (signal to noise ratio) between the rsus and the vehicles, and/or gps positions of rsu’s zone edges. for the snr, when the signal power reaches a predefined threshold the charging ocs system upload the charging profile to the prepaid system storage. as for the rsu edges’ gps positions, the system (eventually the rsu) records the vehicles’ gps positions in each instant and compare them with a preconfigured table containing the gps positions of rsu’ s zone edges. if the vehicle is near of these positions, the system switches the charging control to the prepaid by uploading the charging profile to the vehicle’s prepaid system. the charging profile consist of subscription information namely, vehicle id, owner of vehicle (subscriber), accounts, balances, services (voice, data, sms, video...), subscription time, expired time. the prepaid system is not necessarily a smart card it could be for example a virtual storage in an operating system implemented in the vehicle which stores the charging profile. once the charging profile information is uploaded from the ocs to the vehicle’s storage, the prepaid system will have a real-time control on the call. therefore, a credit, or an appropriate amount of credits, is deducted from the currently available credits (figure 4). consequently the user will be denied to make any vanet communication when it runs out of credits. figure 4. context-aware ocs and prepaid system charging signalling flow for such system is as described in figure 5. 1 : the vehicle is attached to rsu and under vanet charging 2 : the rsu collect charging data and send it to vanet charging and billing system (vcbs) 3 : the vehicle reach vanet edge’s gps positions 4 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e1 high availability of charging and billing in vehicular ad hoc network figure 5. vanet-to-pps switching charging signaling flow stored in rsu’s database and switch to pps mode 4 : the vehicle is under pps charging 5 : the session is ended or interrupted 6 : when the vehicle gains access to network next time the pps system send the charging data to vcbs for further and final treatment. 4.3. vanet-online charging to non-vanet online charging roaming similarly, in this scenario the service charging is carried out by the vanet online charging and billing infrastructure (ocs). but the vehicles a and b move from a vanet infrastructure domain to a non charging vanet domain but covered by external network such as 2g/3g or 4g or an other vanet (figure 6). when vehicle a and vehicle b leave the vanet charging environment to 3gpp domain, the operator loses the charging and billing control. to avoid this, the ocs system and the vehicle should include context-aware functions. for the ocs system, we propose to measure the signal power parameter between the rsu and the vehicle, and collect gps positions of rsu’s edges. for vehicles, we propose to measure the signal power parameter received from both rsu and radio access network (ran) node of external network. thus, when the vehicle reaches the rsu’s edges, it measures figure 6. vanet to 3gpp and compares the signal power of rsu and ran node, when the signal power of the ran node is higher, then the charging control is switched to the 3gpp network(figure 7). the charging switching is preceded by an authentication procedure of the vehicle in the visited 3gpp network. this authentication is, generally, performed by an authentication server of the operator such as authentication, authorization and accounting server (aaa). therefore the high availability of charging and billing is granted. figure 7. vanet-to-3gpp charging roaming the signalling flow will be in this situation : 1 : the vehicle is attached to rsu and under vanet charging 2 : the rsu collect charging data and send it to vanet charging and billing system (vcbs) 3 : the vehicle switch to external network when the signal of the latter is higher than vanet (rsu) signal 4 : the vehicle is attached to external network and charging is performed by its charging and billing 5 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e1 darqaoui m., bah s., sebgui m figure 8. vanet-to-3gpp roaming charging signaling flow system cbs 5 : the charging is performed by the online charging of external network 6 : the session is ended or interrupted 7 : the charging and billing system of external network transfers the charging and billing data to vanet charging and billing system (vcbs) for final update in the situation where vanet and external network belong to the same service provider, a common charging and billing system is used,but generally the home vanet(hvanet) network and visited vanet or 3gpp networks belong to different operators, therefore charging and billing functions are preferably performed by the home network.in such situation visited vanet or 3gpp networks will only act as a relay network to transfer the charging data to home network(home vanet) for final charging and billing. 5. conclusion vehicular ad-hoc network is a challenging environment especially for charging and billing. nowadays many vanet research are addressing several aspects (e.g. access, routing and services). however, no works have been found in charging and billing systems. in this paper we showed that existing solutions mainly for manet and peer-to-peer do not meet our proposed requirements and therefore are not suitable for vanet. hence, we described two high level proposals for insuring the high availability of charging and billing in vehicular ad hoc environment especially when a vehicle moves from a vanet charging environment to a nonvanet charging one. in the next steps of our work we will detail our solution in term of, business model, architecture, functional entities, protocols, procedures and interfaces and in order to best enforce our solution a simulation of the work is also planned. references [1] zeadally, s., hunt, r., chen, ys. et al. telecommun syst (2012) 50: 217. doi:10.1007/s11235-010-9400-5 [2] hannes hartenstein, kenneth laberteaux: intelligent transport systems, vanet vehicular applications and inter-networking technologies,(2010) [3] anna maria vegni, mauro biagi and roberto cusani (2013). smart vehicles, technologies and main applications in vehicular ad hoc networks, vehicular technologies deployment and applications, dr. lorenzo galati giordano (ed.), intech, doi: 10.5772/55492. available from: http://www.intechopen.com/books/vehiculartechnologies-deployment-and-applications/smartvehicles-technologies-and-main-applications-invehicular-ad-hoc-networks [4] al-omari, saleh ali k. and putra sumari.’an overview of mobile ad hoc networks for the existing protocols and applications.’ corr abs/1003.3565 (2010) [5] felipe domingos da cunha, azzedine boukerche, leandro villas, aline carneiro viana, antonioa. f. loureiro. data communication in vanets: a survey, challenges and applications. [research report] rr-8498, inria saclay; inria. 2014.<hal-00981126v4> [6] h. hartenstein and l. p. laberteaux, "a tutorial survey on vehicular ad hoc networks," in ieee communications magazine, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 164-171, june 2008. [7] claudia campolo, antonella molinaro, riccardo scopigno:vehicular ad hoc networks standards, solutions, and research,edition 1, 2015 [8] zaydoun yahya rawashdeh and syed masud mahmud (2011). communications in vehicular ad hoc networks, mobile ad-hoc networks: applications, prof. xin wang (ed.), intech, doi: 10.5772/13399. [9] xiaodong lin, rongxing lu:vehicular ad hoc network security and privacy, 1 edition (22 jun. 2015),216 pages [10] mejri, mohamed nidhal, jalel ben-othman and mohamed hamdi. ’survey on vanet security challenges and possible cryptographic solutions.’ vehicular communications 1 (2014): 53-66. [11] yun-wei lin, yuh-shyan chen, and sing-ling lee:routing protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks: a survey and future perspectives,journal of information science and engineering 26(3):913-932. may 2010 [12] kevin c. lee, uichin lee, mario gerla :"survey of routing protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks,", advances in vehicular ad-hoc networks: developments and challenges, igi global, oct, 2009. [13] benamar maria, benamar nabil, singh kamal deep, el ouadghiri driss recent study of routing protocols in vanet: survey and taxonomy. wvnt 2013 : 1st international workshop on vehicular networks and telematics , 02-04 may 2013, marrakech, morocco, 2013 [14] sjoberg, katrin. medium access control for vehicular ad hoc networks. chalmers university of technology, 2013. 6 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e1 high availability of charging and billing in vehicular ad hoc network [15] md whaiduzzaman, mehdi sookhak, abdullah gani, rajkumar buyya, a survey on vehicular cloud computing, journal of network and computer applications, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2013.08.004 [16] e. lee, e. k. lee, m. gerla and s. y. oh, "vehicular cloud networking: architecture and design principles," in ieee communications magazine, vol. 52, no. 2, pp. 148-155, february 2014. [17] nkenyereye, l., park, y. & rhee, k.h. j wireless com network (2016) 2016: 196. doi:10.1186/s13638-0160687-0 [18] 3gpp ts 32.240 v9.0.0:3rd generation partnership project; technical specification group services and system aspects; telecommunication management; charging management; charging architecture and principles (release 9) [19] r. kuhne, g. huitema and g. carle, ’charging and billing in modern communications networks âăť a comprehensive survey of the state of the art and future requirements,’ in ieee communications surveys and tutorials, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 170-192, first quarter 2012. [20] joao girao, bernd lamparter, dirk westhoff, rui l. aguiar, joao paulo barraca, ’implementing charging in mobile ad-hoc networks’, electronica e telecomunicacoes, vol. 4, no. 1, issn 1645-0493, oct 2004 [21] anders nilsson plymoth, bjorn plymoth, amelie plymoth:charging in ad hoc communication networks,sweden,2009 7 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e1 1 introduction 2 background on vanet and charging/billing 2.1 vehicular ad hoc network 2.2 charging and billing 3 requirements and critical overview of existing solutions 3.1 requirements 3.2 related work 3.3 analysis and discussion 4 proposed solutions for high availability charging in vanet 4.1 business model 4.2 online to offline charging and billing roaming 4.3 vanet-online charging to non-vanet online charging roaming 5 conclusion this is a title 1 an interactive adaptive learning system based on agile learner-centered design a. battou1*, o. baz2 and d. mammass1 1irf-sic laboratory, faculty of science, ibn zohr university, agadir morocco 2irf-sic laboratory, high school of technology, ibn zohr university, agadir morocco abstract adaptive and interactive learning concepts has apprehended the interest of educational actors and partners, especially in higher education. however, the implementation of those concepts has faced many challenges, particularly in interactive adaptive learning systems (ials). the present paper aims to give the foundation of a framework for an ials that gives extensive attention at each stage of the design process to the end-user: learners. the system proposed is based on balanced combination of agile learning design and learner-centred design to improve teaching effectiveness, facilitate learning among learners, encourage long life learning and maximize motivation as well as reducing the dropout rate. keywords: adaptive learning, interactive learning, ials, agile learning design, learner-centred design. received on 18 december 2017, accepted on 12 january 2018, published on 12 february 2018 copyright © 2018 a. battou et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.12-2-2018.154106 1. introduction one of the challenges faced by developers of ials has been how to design and create quality and pertinent ials, able to build courses based on a model of the goals, preferences and knowledge of an individual learner and use this throughout the interaction for adaptation to the needs of that learner. this is due to the fact that ials deal with diverse backgrounds, such as software developers, web application experts, content developers, domain experts, instructional designers, user modeling experts, pedagogues, etc. [1]. moreover, the process of defining and developing elearning material for an ials is often expensive to produce especially in a single context settingmaking the return on investment difficult to quantify [2]. the most of ials currently available provide similar sets of features. the most of them are designed and developed from scratch, without taking advantages of the experience *corresponding author. email:ambattou@gmail.comom from previously developed applications, because the latter’s design is not codified or documented [3]. thus, development teams are wasting time and efforts to reinvent the wheel. various works have been presented in the literature in order to support the design of ials [2][3][4][5][6]. thus, there are several learning design methods presented in the literature, such as addie, ouldi, design thinking, xproblem, etc. however, the most of them don’t involve the learner until late in the project which is in our view an obstacle for the adaptation of the content to the features of the learner and leads to the dropout. in this work, we focus on one of the recent works proposed to design ials, which is called agile learning design. this choice is based on a comparative study of the most used approaches in the literature that was subject of other publications [7][8]. a learner-centered approach -that is increasingly being encouraged in higher educationwill be implemented with agile learning design process to involve the learner in each stage of the design process. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ a. battou, o. baz and d. mammass 2 the present work aims to present a framework for designing an ials based on agile learning design approach and integrating the learner-centred approach. the structure of the rest of this paper is as follows. the second section provides an overview of the concepts learning design, agile learning design and learner-centred approach. the third section discusses the interest of integrating learner-centred approach into agile learning design. the fourth section describes a case study based on agile learning design approach and integrating the learner-centred approach to teach the “c programming language”. the fifth section provides some of the preliminary results of this work. finally, a conclusion and future work are presented in the last section. 2. background and related work in this section, we present first an overview of the concept of learning design. we provide afterwards a summary of agile learning design and learner-centered design. 2.1. learning design historically, learning design has emerged from instructional design, but with a focus on learning activity as the central concern of the design process [9]. it was presented as a methodology for both articulating and representing the design process and providing tools and methods to help designers in their design process [10]. koper [11] defines the learning design as the description of the teaching-learning process that takes place in a unit of learning (eg, a course, a lesson or any other designed learning event). other authors [9] use the term designing for learning which is defined as the process by which all actors involved in the support of learning arrive at a plan or structure or design for a learning situation. learning design representations enable teachers to document, model and share teaching practice at various levels: from the creation of a specific learning activity, through the sequencing and linking of activities and resources, to the broad curriculum and program levels. 2.2. agile learning design the agile learning design is an iterative model of learning design that focuses on collaboration and rapid prototyping. agile learning design can be adjusted to fit the needs of the learning and training community. it is more a philosophy or ethos, rather than being a methodology, that is best described by its manifesto [12]. several agile methods have been presented and developed (scrum1, extreme programming2, feature-driven development3, etc.) the flow of agile learning design may contain several cycle (fig.1) 1 www.scrum.org 2 www.extremeprogramming.org/ figure 1: the flow of agile learning design each cycle consists of problem analysis in the first phase, followed by the development of a single feature of the final product. once this single small part of your course is finished you can start testing and evaluating the efficiency and the return on investment of this part. if the results are satisfying a new iteration begins, until the course or the project are fully finished, otherwise the designer has to take one step back, understand what went wrong, and correct. there is a variety of agile design practices, in the literature, based essentially on agile manifesto. each of these practices is important, and each is needed. here some of these practices [13]:  active learners participation : learners are involved in the development process, helping to identify and solve problems and mistakes and providing rapid feedback to the team;  collaborative development: all team members constantly interact and communicate throughout the development process, promoting a collaborative and productive environment;  architecture/design envisioning: initial software architecture and requirements are designed at the beginning of a project to identify and think through critical issues;  iterative modeling/ design: software functionalities are designed at the beginning of an iteration to identify team's strategy for that iteration;  model/ design storming: software functionalities are designed on a just-in-time basis to reflect on specific aspects of team's solution;  early and continuous evaluation: testing and validation activities are conducted at the beginning of the project and extend throughout the development process; 3 www.featuredrivendevelopment.com/ eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e5 an interactive adaptive learning system based on agile learner-centered design 3 2.3. learner-centred design the learner-centered design involves methods of teaching that move the emphasis of teaching from the instructor and contents to the learner. in the literature, the terms learner-centered, learning-centered teaching or student-centered learning, are commonly used to design this approach. the term learner centered will be used through this work even if some authors use the other terms. several authors [14][15][16] when the focus becomes learner higher rates of student retention is attained and have better prepared graduates than those students who were more traditionally trained. moreover, mattheu [17] claimed that adopting learner centered approach; learners are proactive independent, responsible for both what they learn and how they learn. the course provides a flexible framework, supportive environment and collaborative learning culture, with faculty guiding learners through their learning as mentors, with the focus on developing students' critical thinking, problem-solving and research skills. this enables them to become effective lifelong learners. the section above presents the two concepts agile learning design and the learner-centered approach and gives some of their advantages. the section below will give some response to how can we integrate learner-centered approach into agile learning design process to improve the teaching effectiveness, facilitate learning among students, and maximize motivation as well as reducing the dropout rates? 3. agile learner-centred design as the proliferation of content, online courses and leaning activities is increasingly significant, learners must take an effective role and be agents for change by taking part of their learning. they must no longer keep up with the change neither be receptive agents who expect their teachers to transmit the knowledge. they must be more productive by participating in the construction of their knowledge and competencies and creating new opportunities for themselves. according to prensky[18], many authors underlined that the didactical formula based on lectures where the teacher teaches (teacher telling or talking or lecturing) and students learn is not more adequate: the new paradigm fostered by the use of technologies is “students teaching themselves with teacher’s guidance” [18]. in line with above, stewart[19], states that learner have to participate actively to the learning process, that is they have to discuss, to read, to write, but also to solve problem, to analyze, to evaluate and to synthesize. to be active, students have to do things in addition to think about the think they are doing; moreover, to be cooperative students have to participate in tasks as a group. therefore, the new role of instructors is facilitator of learning and training. they have to attract all learners, guide and emphasis on debate along courses. as far as the learners are concerned, they have to be cooperative contributors not only listeners. as we can see, the learner-centered approach is in line with the practice of agile learning design cited above (§ii. b). indeed, the two approaches have a lot of similarities such as focusing on learners and their needs; encourage communication and collaboration between learners and teachers, use adaptive and iterative processes to achieve goals. however, some authors such blomkvist[20] and fox[21] claimed that even if agile learning design and learnercentered design are compatible, there are some dissimilarities. as an illustration, we evoke the concept of learner involvement and the end-learner. thus, in the learnercentered design, learners involved in the design process are the same learners that will interact with the system in last. for the agile learning design, learners involved in the design process are not necessarily the end users of the system. this may affect the efficiency of the learning as the end learners are not those who were involved in the design process. blomkvist[20] presents three approaches to explain how learner-centered design may be integrating with agile learning design.  integrating learners-centered design practices into agile development methodology.  apply agile learning design practices into learnercentered design framework.  balanced combination of agile learning design and learner-centered design. the study of the three approaches, lead us to choose the third one because it is in line with our goals. indeed, it permits us to combine the most useful practices of the agile learning design and the learner-centered design to achieve the development of an ials in which learners are part of the team of the design and at the same time they are the end learners. 4. a case of study: 4.1. the design of the framework the agile learning design method used to implement the framework is organized in main four phases (design, develop, test and evaluate). we notice that we use the same phases to design all the components of the framework. in the initial plan and design, we establish the initial content of the ials. in this stage, we use as a starting point, an architectural design of the proposed system which is composed by three main components (fig.2). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e5 4 figure 1: adaptive content generation process in the following, we present these components, their descriptions, their features and interactions between them a) the domain model: the domain model is characterized by its competence in terms of representation of concepts to learn, the resources available to learners and the structuring of various elements of the field. b) the learner model [19]: the learner model allows changing several aspects of the system, in reply to certain characteristics (given or inferred) of the learner. it includes two type of information grouped in two domains domain independent data (did and domain dependent data (ddd) c) the adaptation model: the adaptation model deals with the generation of adaptive content that will be subsequently presented to the learner. this component has four sub components: the navigation model, the presentation model, the content model and the pedagogical rules. each subcomponent contains a set of rules to achieve the adaptation. after specifying the initial requirement and the main components of our system, every component was subject of a series of iterations, analyzing, designing, developing and testing each feature in turn. in the stage of testing we focused on remarks and feedbacks of learners. we collect all information that could be used to improve the succeeding sprint and to contribute to the constant enhancement process. we notice that all data used in all stage of the design process, were collected through survey or during meeting. the next paragraph presents the learner model design as an example of the implementation of our approach. 4.2. the design of learner model the agile learning design method used to implement the learner model is organized in four phases: establish the initial content of the learner model. in this stage, we use as a starting point, the learner model giving in generic ials that allows changing several aspects of the system, in reply to certain characteristics (given or inferred) of the learner [22]. the learner model in ials includes two type of information grouped in two domains: 1. domain independent data (did): are composed of two elements: the psychological model and the generic model of the learner profile, with an explicit representation [23]. these data are more permanent which allows the system to know beforehand which the characteristics that it must adapt to [24]. the did include several aspects such initial learner knowledge, objective and plans, cognitive capacities, learning styles, preferences, academic profile eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e5 a. battou, o. baz and d. mammass 5 (technological studies, knowledge of literature, artistic capacities, etc.), etc. 2. domain dependent data (ddd): information referring to the specific knowledge that the system judges that the learner possesses on the domain. martins [25] say that the components of the ddd correspond to the domain model with three-level functionality: (a) task level, with the objectives / competences of the domain that the learner will have to master. in this case, the objectives or intermediate objectives can be altered according to the evolution of the learning process; (b) logical level, which describes the learner knowledge of the domain and is updated during the student’s learning process; ( c) physical level, that registers and infers the profile of the learner knowledge. those two elements and theirs contents were discussed with prospective learners, and the member of our team to approve the initial architecture of the learner model, presented below. figure 3 : characteristic used in the learner model plan and create the structure. in this stage, we agree the content of the learner model in adequacy with our learning context. we highlight that we can refine this model (add or delete some content) since we can do iterative design. implement the component. in this stage, we start the implementation, we agree the technologies that we will use to implement our learner model and the design of the learner interface. two different types of techniques are used to implement the learner model: knowledge and behavioral based. the knowledge-based adaptation typically results for data collected through questionnaires and learner studies, with the purpose to produce a set of initial heuristics. the behavioral adaptation results from the monetarization of the learner during his activity [25]. for the did, we developed a form from which we will collect all the information about did evaluate. in this step evaluates and approves the work. some learners create their account in the component of that learner model, fill in the form and evaluate the initial version of the learner model. in this stage, we focus on remarks and feedback of learners. we collect all information that ca be and used to improve the succeeding iteration and to contribute to the constant enhancement process. 5. some results and discuss the first version of the framework presented in previous section, has already been implemented and tested to validate the proposed approach with some selected learners. as we work in faculty, we can’t work in the stage of the design with much learner, especially with our first experience. for the first version of the system we highlight that the agile learning design method allows designs to be modified, repurposed and evolved according to the needs of learners emerging during development. in terms of the applicability of the method, the preliminary results indicate that the method is useful, easy to use. furthermore, it focuses on the final client which is in our case the learners and their interactivity with the system another result is the human contact with the learners, they have not been considered without knowledge but rather partners who participate in the improvement of the system. this motivated them to give their best and develop further learning in the discipline. at the end of the project, we conducted a survey that aimed to have the opinion of the learners on the new way to learn. we can highlight from the results of the survey that the most learners accepted the new learning model and expressed their satisfaction with the new learning experience. this lead us to believe that the implementation of those two approaches in the learning will surly diminish the dropout rate. indeed, learners enjoy learning and give their best when they are involved in the learning experience and considered as partners not only listeners. 6. conclusion in this paper we proposed a general view of how to support de design and the implementation of an ials respecting the agile learning design method and integrating the learnercentered approach. first, we expose the interest of integrating the learner-centered approach and using the agile learning design. furthermore, we present the preliminary results showing the success of this approach in designing and implementation of the components of ials. we intend to complete our system and to enhance our proposal based on the results of the experiment and on the feedback from learners. for further validation, firstly, we plan to embed more learners on the experiment of the all components of ials, enhance our proposal based on the results of the experiment and on the feedback from those learners. secondly, we plan to improve the proposal pedagogical model, including more materials to make learning more effective, amusing and attractive. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e5 an interactive adaptive learning system based on agile learner-centered design a. battou, o. baz and d. mammass 6 references [1] a,battou, o. baz,mammass (2016) toward a framework for designing adaptive educational hypermedia system based on agile learning design approach. volume 520 of the series advances in intelligent systems and computing pp 113-123. [2] m.alshawi, j. steven goulding, i. faraj (2006) knowledge based learning environments for construction, journal for education in the built environment, 1:1, 51-72. [3] r. retalis, a. papasalouros (2005) designing and generating educational adaptive hypermedia applications. educational technology & society, 8 (3), 2635. [4] m. grigoriadou, k. papanikolaou, h. kornilakis, g. magoulas (2001) inspire: an intelligent system for personalized instruction in a remote environment. in p. d. bra, p. brusilovsky, & a. kobsa (eds.), proceedings of third workshop on adaptive hypertext and hypermedia, july 14, 2001. sonthofen, germany, technical university eindhoven. pp. 13-24. [5] m.k. stern, b.p. woolf (2000) adaptive content in an online lecture system, in p. brusilovsky, o. stock, & c. strapparava (ed.), adaptive hypermedia and adaptive webbased systens (pp. 225-238). berlin: springer-verlag. [6] c. süß, r. kammerl, b. freitag (2000) a teachware management framework for multiple teaching strategies, in j. bordeau, & r. heller (eds.), educational multimedia/hypermedia and telecommunications, 1998, proceedings of edmedia'2000 world conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications, june 26 july 1, 2000. montréal, canada, aace. [7] a. battou, o. baz, and d. mammass (2016) learning design approaches for designing virtual learning environments. communications on applied electronics 5(9):31-37, september. [8] a. battou, o. baz and d. mammass (2016) learning design approaches for designing learning environments: a comparative study. 5th international conference on multimedia computing and systems – ieee conference. october. [9] h. beetham, r. sharpe (2013) an introduction to rethinking pedagogy, rethinking pedagogy for a digital age: designing for 21st century learning -2nd edition pp. 2635. [10] g. conole (2010), an overview of design representations, proceedings of the 7th international conference on networked learning, edited by: dirckinck-holmfeld l, hodgson v, jones c, de laat m, mcconnell d & ryberg t. [11] r. koper (2006), current research in learning design, educational technology & society, 9(1), pp.13-22. [12] agile alliance (2001). manifesto for agile software development. retrieved on june 28, 2009 from http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ [13] m.m. arimoto, l. barroca, e.f. barbosa (2015) an agile learning design method for open educational resources. ieee frontiers in education conference proceedings,ieee, pp. 1897–1905. [14] p. blumberg (2008) developing learner-centered teachers: a practical guide for faculty. san francisco: jossey-bass. [15] m.w. matlin (2002) cognitive psychology and collegelevel pedagogy: two siblings that rarely communicate. in d. f. halpern, & m. d. hakel (eds.), applying the science of learning to university teaching and beyond. pp. 87-103. san francisco: jossey-bass. [16] r.j. sternberg, e.l. grigorenko (2002) the theory of successful intelligence as a basis for instruction and assessment in higher education. in d. f. halpern, & m. d. hakel (eds.), applying the science of learning to university teaching and beyond [the theory of successful intelligence as a basis for instruction and assessment in higher education] pp. 45-54. [17] s. mattheu (2013) a proposal for an agile approach to the teaching and learning of creative technologies. a dissertation submitted to auckland university of technology in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of: bachelor of creative technologies. [18] m. prensky (2008) the role of technology in teaching and the classroom. educational technology nov-dec. [19] c.j. stewart, c.s. decusatis,k. kidder, j.r. massi, and k.m. anne (2009) evaluating agile principles in active and cooperative learning. proceedings of student-faculty research day, csis, pace university, may 8th. [20] s. blomkvist (2005) towards a model for bridging agile development and user-centered design. human-centered software engineering—integrating usability in the software development lifecycle. pp. 219-244. springer netherlands. [21] d. fox, j. sillito, & f. maurer (2008) agile methods and user-centered design: how these two methodologies are being successfully integrated in industry. agile'08. conference pp. 63-72. [22] p. brusilovsky (2001) adaptive hypermedia. user modeling and user adapted interaction, 11 (1/2), 87-110. [23] a. kobsa (2001) generic user modeling systems. user modeling and user-adapted interaction, 11 (1-2), 49-63. [24] j. vassileva,a (1998) task-centred approach for user modeling in a hypermedia office documentation system. in brusilovsky, p., kobsa, a. & vassileva j. (eds.), adaptive hypertext and hypermedia, dordrecht: kluwer academic, 209-247. [25] a. c. martins, l. faria, c. vaz de carvalho, & e. carrapatos (2008) user modeling in adaptive hypermedia educational systems. educational technology & society, 11 (1), 194-207. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e5 http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ i. introduction today, we are going to live the internet of things (iot) era, where objects become more and more communicative and need to be connected to disseminate the information they hold. the idate [1] announces 80 billion connected objects for 2020. their aim is to evolve in the years to come and spread in all sectors. these objects could be devices, automata, sensors present in our houses, our workplaces and also in public places. they can transmit information of type, temperature, humidity, the state of a door (open or closed), the parking place (occupied or vacant), and a multitude of other information such a type of connected object will be explained in details in this paper by highliting the possible uses areas..however, the connection of these objects to the internet network that we know requires a compatible and scalable infrastructure capable of absorbing the exponential evolution of the connected objects. it therefore raises a technical problem that will be investigated. the standardization bodies then quickly pushed the search towards infrastructures with wireless access network taking into account the technical specificities of the connected objects. there is now a multitude of radios technology capable of supporting connected objects but are they all capable of responding to the specificities imposed by the iot? we will describe the existing solutions by focusing on the low power wide area network (lpwan) which is the solution of low-energy wireless links. lora and sigfox, lpwan’s key players, will be presented and confronted as well as other players positioned on lpwan solutions such as the 3gpp for lte-m. this paper deals the specificities of deployment and implementation of the end-to-end interconnection of the lpwan system, taking into account the connected object itself, the radio infrastructure (or access network), interconnect gateways, cloud, lpwan backbone. moreover, a study of the physical layer for sigfox and lora and we propose a model to know which technology is more sensitive to the interference. then, we discuss the role of spread spectrum on the sensitivity of the receptors. evaluation of lpwan technology for smart city eai endorsed transactions smart cities research article hussein mroue1, guillaume andrieux1, eduardo motta cruz1, gilles rouyer2 1polytech nantes ietr laboratory la roche sur yon, france 2spie city networks saint herblain, france abstract—in this paper, we explore technologies for low power wide area networks (lpwan) serving the internet of things (iot). these networks are ded-icated to long-range and low-speed communication to ensure a good autonomy up to 10 years and a budget link up to tens of kilometers. the performance of two lpwa technologies is investigated, where the well known lora and sigfox technologies are evaluated according to their sensitivity to the interference and the impact of the spreading spectrum technique on the receptor sensitivity. numerical results are presented and discussed. received on 28 july 2017; accepted on 22 september 2017; published on 20 december 2017 keywords: low power wide area networks, inter-ference, chirp spread spectrum, ultra-narrow band, physical layer. copyright © 2017 hussein mroue et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eai.20-12-2017.153494 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 ii. lpwan : low power wide area network a. principles of lpwan lpwan has been proposed to be the solution to the internet of objects being supported by most media-driven technologies such as lora, sigfox and lte-m. this technology allows the sending and receiving of messages of very small sizes, over very long ranges up to 40km. the major advantage of this technology is that the equipment set up in its network is very inexpensive and does not consume much energy[2]. lpwan technology is perfectly suited to connect equipment that needs to send small amounts of data over a long range while maintaining their autonomy. some iot applications may only transmit small amounts of information, such as a parking parking sensor, which transmits only when there is a change in state (vehicle detected yes or no). the low energy consumption of such a device makes it possible to carry out this task with the least cost and little energy consumed. lpwan is often used when other wireless networks, such as bluetooth-ble and to a lesser extent wi-fi and zigbee, are not suitable for longrange performance. as well as m2m cellular networks are expensive, consume a lot of energies, and are expensive with regard to hardware and services. in order to identify the specifications and benefits of this technology, here is a brief comparison of current technologies: • gsm networks, 3g, 4g, 5g • zigbee (home automation technology) • bluetooth, ble, wifi b. emerging lpwan solutions the lpwan wireless network has emerged in recent years. the precursors of this lpwan technology are today sigfox, lora and lte-m, they will be detailed more in this sector. 1) sigfox network: sigfox is a french company founded in 2009 [3] whose goal is to build wireless chains to connect energy-saving appliances, such as electricity or water meters, alarm systems, which must be continuously lit and emit small amounts of data. sigfox has set up proprietary technology that enables m2m communication using the industrial, scientific and medical ism radio band which uses the 868mhz frequency in europe and 902mhz in the united states. this technology uses a broadband signal that passes freely through solid objects called ”ultra narrowband” and requires very little power. the network is based on a one-hop star topology and requires an access network connection from a mobile operator to carry the generated traffic. the signal can also be used to easily cover large areas and reach underground objects. sigfox has partnered with a number of lpwan industry companies such as texas instruments, silicon labs and stmicroelectronics[4]. although the ism radio band allows for bidirectional communication, sigfox supports only uplink applications limited to 15 bytes of traffic at a time and an average of 10 messages per day. on the technical side, sigfox is a connection hierarchy using signals in the ultra narrow band (unb) for the m2m system [5], this band allows to send signals to long ranges. the emitted signal can be inserted anywhere, even in enclosed areas. sigfox is present in a very wide area of coverage in the world. this company has a cloud system for its web interface as well as the management of its devices (api access point interface) and data configuration. the company offers a secure, responsive and efficient network with low throughput, but can support a wide range of products and sensors. the emission absorption for a sigfox modem can vary from 20 ma to 70 ma and its use is negligible when it is stagnant. the transmission power can be adjusted up to 14 dbm. the antenna radiation power should not exceed 25 mw. in the sigfox network, communication is two-way, meaning that devices send and receive data from a cloud platform. on this network, objects can send up to 140 messages of sizes equal to 12 bytes per day. this functionality is implemented as a polling, for which the object remains the leader, it avoids to remain permanently connected and allows him to ask the information system if there is information to download. this correspondence serves to dispose of a considerable time of autonomy in order to save energy from the batteries. objects exchange and share data and commands. in this case, we are talking about connected objects that are not very sophisticated such as coffee machines and the electricity meter. sigfox technology is easily incorporated into connected objects thanks to its miniature modem which allows the object to exchange information and data on the sigfox network. the data frames are transmitted over the sigfox network via antennas and then received by the proprietary server in the sigfox cloud[6]. this frames are directly retransmitted in a secure way thanks to the https protocol to the client server which can appropriate them on its software applications and then allows the use of the data to ensure that the appropriate services are used, namely that the information sent are difficult to hussein mroue et al. 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 decrypt in themselves. sigfox’s personal data protection system seems impenetrable, but it is different for customers thanks to the ip level security between the gateway and the cloud, as shown in the figure 1: the reliability of the information figure 1. sigfox network architecture sent over the network as well as the security of exchanges between the connected objects are ensured in the sigfox chain despite the use of the licensed frequency bands which are also exploited by other companies. the risk of interference does not exist between different companies operating the same frequency band in view of the new emission techniques developed in recent years. the waterproofing is therefore ensured in this context. the entire network is well protected against jamming. only device vendors are eligible to understand the nature and quality of the information exchanged between the computer sensor and the object itself. in other words, sigfox has good access control over its network. moreover, it is essential and very important to choose the location of the sensor because, like any radio signal, there may be a reception problem facing a thick concrete wall or a metallic surface. 2) lora network: the creation of the lora alliance[7] was announced at the ces in 2015. it is a consortium aiming at stripping a competing offer from sigfox. this open source (os) open system, based on lora technology, is certified by the french-based company cycleo in 2012. today, the alliance comprises 127 members including french players such as bouygues telecom, actility and sagecomm. the lora alliance is an open, nonprofit association of members who are confident that the internet of objects is the future of the communications world. it has been launched by industry leaders whose mission is to standardize the networks (lpwan) that are deployed worldwide to enable internet (iot), machine-tomachine(m2m), smart city and industrial applications. alliance members will cooperate in the global success of the lora protocol (lorawan), sharing knowledge and experience to ensure interoperability among operators in a single open global standard. lorawan is a network specification (lpwan) for wireless connected objects. lorawan targets the main internet requirements of objects such as secure two-way communication, mobility and location services. the lorawan specification provides seamless interoperability between smart objects without the need for complex local installations and gives the user, developer and enterprise the freedom to deploy the iot network. it’s open technology. this means that any company can create its own lora network and then exploit it, having purchased the necessary chips and gateways for network operation. lora is the designation attributed to the technology that relies on spread spectrum modulation of the lorawan protocol. the 3g and 4g cellular mobile networks are based on a communication protocol known by the abbreviation ip (internet protocol) whereas lora itself is based on its own lorawan protocol [8]. this technology is accessible (open source), allowing any company to design its own lora network and market it. to set it up, it is necessary to have an antenna connected to the internet by means of a wifi, ethernet or 3g connection or via a base station broadcasting at the frequency of 868mhz (band used in europe). the coverage capacity for a lora network is approximately 20km in rural areas and up to 2km in urban areas. the flow rate varies from 0.3 to 50 kbps and adapts with the power of transmission mechanically according to the need of the objects in order to optimize the bandwidth and to conserve as much as possible the use of the energy. the technology is not free, each component lora must pay royalties to the company sem tech, originally lora, to benefit from its use. the architecture of the lorawan network is generally presented in a star-shaped star topology in which the gateways are a transparent bridge connecting messages between the sensors and a central network server in the back end[9]. the gateways are connected to the network server via standard ip connections, while the sensors use wireless communication to one or more gateways. all communications from the sensors are generally bidirectional, but they also support operation such as multicast, allowing software upgrade on the air interface or mass message distribution to reduce the communication time on air. the communication between the sensors and the gateways is distributed over different frequency channels and data rates. selecting the data rate is a compromise between the communication range and the length of the message. using spread spectrum technology, communications with different data rates do not evaluation of lpwan technology for smart city 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 figure 2. lora network architecture interfere with each other, and create a set of virtual channels that increase the gateway’s capacity. lorawan data rates range from 0.3 kbps to 50 kbps. to maximize the battery life of the sensors and the overall network capacity, the lorawan network server individually manages the data rate and rf output for each terminal device by means of an adaptive data rate scheme (adr adaptive data rate). 3) lte-m: the historical ecosystem of cellular networks stands in the face of sigfox and lora. to do this, the 3gpp is studying the specifications to evolve the lte technology so that it can respond to lpwan networks sigfox and lora. this action will help mobile operators to evolve their existing networks to the iot-compatible network called ltem[10]. as most of the time, the standardization phase is a slow process that brings together equipment manufacturers and operators to unify their know-how and compete. major telecom leaders such as nokia and ericsson [11] support this combination of 3gpp. lte-m is the abbreviation for lte cat-m1 or long term evolution (4g), of category m1. this technology allows iot devices to connect directly to a 4g network, without going through a gateway. the strengths of this technology are price, battery life and the low cost of service for access to the lte network. this is not expensive because the devices can connect to the 4g network with much less expensive chips to manufacture, these chips operate in half-duplex mode and on a very narrow bandwidth. there are two types of modes that allow the batteries to keep a long life, the first is known as ”deep sleep”, psm power save mode as well as a receive mode (edrx extended discontinious reception), the sensors are periodically awakened while they are connected. the cost of the lte-m network access service is very negligible, because ltem sensors need a bit rate of about 100 kbps, which means that the 4g network will never be congested. the carriers (backhauling network) can offer service plans similar to the old pricing of 2g m2m technology and 4g prices. below is a table showing the specifications of this technology: deployment in the lte band range(max coupling loss) 156 db ; ≥ 13km downlink ofdma, bandwidth 15 khz, turbo code, 16qam, 1rx (half-duplex) uplink sc-fdma, bandwidth 15 khz, turbo code, 16qam bandwidth 1.08 mhz bit rate (ul/dl) 1 mbps for ul and dl duplex fd and hd (type b), fdd and tdd battery life (modes) psm (power save mode) and edrx (extended discontinuous reception) power 23 dbm, 20 dbm table i. specifications of lte-m iot technologies and m2m communications [12] are growing rapidly, lte, the 4th generation cellular technology known as the long-term evolution, is well placed to carry a lot of traffic for machine-to-machine communications and this is problematic because the lte is capable of carrying data at very high bit rates. to solve this problem, an extension of lte, often called lte-m, has been developed for m2m lte communications. new categories launched in the releases 13 of the 3gpp [13] standards known as lte cat 1.4mhz and lte cat 200khz (nb-iot narrow-band-iot). there are several features for m2m lte applications cite3gpp1 as well as requirements that make cellular networks viable: • wide range of equipment: any lte-m system must be able to support a wide variety of different types of equipment. this can be smart meters, vending machines and medical devices as well as safety machines. these different systems have many diverse requirements, so any lte-m system can be flexible. • low cost to purchase equipment: ltem must provide the benefits of a cellular system, but at low cost. • long battery life: many m2m sensors should be left unattended for long periods in areas where there is no power supply. maintaining batteries is expensive. this means that the lte-m system must be capable of draining very little battery and that the battery can last up to 10 years. • coverage: lte-m applications will need to operate in various locations and not just where reception is good. they must operate inside buildings, often in places where there is little access and where reception may be deficient. therefore, lte-m must be able to operate under all conditions. • large volumes low flow rates: the ltem must be structured in such a way that 4 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 hussein mroue et al. the networks can accommodate a large number of connected devices and require only small amounts of data to be transported at very low data rates. some updates are introduced in 3gpp rel 12 to meet ltem requirements. these updates require that the cost of an m2m modem should be about 40-50% cheaper compared to a conventional lte device (smartphone), making them similar to those of egprs (network enhancement gsm in the transport of packets). to meet these requirements, a new category of equipment has been implemented under the category lte category 0. these categories define the overall capabilities of the device so that the base station remains able to communicate properly in the network. in a lte-m network, m2m devices are low cost while having a limited capacity: • antennas: the ability to have a single receiving antenna, unlike other categories of devices • transport block size: there is a restriction on the size of the transport block. these low-cost lte-m devices are allowed to send or receive up to 1000 bits of unicast data per subframe. this reduces the maximum data rate to 1 mbps in the uplink and downlink • duplex: semi-duplex fdds are supported as an optional feature, which reduces costs by eliminating the rf switches and duplexers needed for full performance modems. this also means that it is not necessary to have a second phase-locked loop for the frequency conversion, although with only one pll the switching times between reception and transmission are longer. many features are proposed and prepared in the 3gpp release 13 standards, in terms of capabilities. we cite below the possibilities for improvement : • reduce bandwidth to 1.4 mhz for uplink and downlink • reduce transmission power to 20dbm • reduce support for downstream transmission modes • release requirements that require high levels of processing, such as downlink modulation. there is an additional improvement for lte-m under this release 13 with a reduced bandwidth option of 200khz in the uplink and downlink, often referred to as narrow band or narrow-band lte-m [14]. by reducing the bandwidth and also the data rate, an additional simplification of the modem can be obtained. the category is called cat 200khz. it is possible to compare different categories for lte-m systems. capacity rel8 cat4 rel12 cat0 rel13 cat1.4mhz rel13 cat200khz downlink (mbps) 150 1 1 0.2 uplink (mbps) 50 1 1 0.144 antennas 2 1 1 1 duplex mode full half half half bandwidth (mhz) 20 20 1.4 0.2 power (dbm) 23 23 20 23 table ii. comparaison of lte-m categories iii. sigfox and lora physical layer a. sigfox this technology uses bpsk as a modulation scheme for uplink. it uses the ultra narrow band with a bit rate is of 100 bps. b. lora lora uses a multitude type of modulation scheme (fsk, ook,..). it uses the wideband technology based on spread spectrum. using a scalable bandwidth (b) of 125 khz or 250 khz in europe and in addition of that, the bandwidth of 500 khz is using in us. a variable spreading factor (sf) can be chosen as function of received snr. sf adapts the length of a symbol, but also specifies the number of bits per symbol. so, changing the spreading factor results in a variable bit rate between 366 bps for the highest spreading factor (12) and 48 kbps for the lowest spreading factor (6) as shown in eq.1 rb = b 2sf × sf (1) iv. system model the system model used for measurements and comparison is based on an awgn channel model with only thermal noise with a noise temperature of 25 °c. in addition, we assume a distance dependent path loss with constant attenuation alpha = 2.5 db. for this model, the 2 base stations will be positioned at the same location and we assume the height of the base station at 100m and the nodes are mobile in an interval of [-200 m, 200 m] (fig 3) . here, only the uplink is considered, as the data in sensor networks generally flows in this direction. finally, the transmitter of the mobile device sends the maximum power allowed in most ism bands with a power of 25 mw (14 dbm). so we will 5 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 evaluation of lpwan technology for smart city calculate the signal-tonoise plus interference ratio (sinr) to know which technology is more robust to interference. figure 3. proposal model sinr = pr i + n (2) where pr is the received power, i is the interference and n is the noise. after this we will study the influence of spreading spectrum on the sensitivity of the lora receiver by comparing the sensitivity of receiver uses the fsk modulation and another uses the fsk modulation with direct modulation chirp spread spectrum dm css . the sensitivity is calculated according to the following equation : srx = snr × k × t0 × b × nf (3) where k is the boltzmann constant, t is the temperature at the input of the receiver, b is the bandwidth of receiver and nf is the noise figure. for lora, there is a gain of the processing belonging to the spreading spectrum where the parasitic signals are also reduced by the receiver process gain [15]: gp = 10log10( rc rb ) (db) (4) where rc is the chip-rate (chips/second) and rb is the bit-rate (bits/second) v. results the reason for having a ratio of 1000 is due to the fact that sigfox uses an ultra narrow band with a bandwidth of 100 hz, but lora uses a wideband with a bandwidth equal to 125 khz. in terms of robustness to interference, lora is more robust than sigfox. to date, there are not enough connected objects deployed running via distance (m) -200 -150 -100 -50 0 50 100 150 200 s in r ( d b ) -10-6 -10-7 -10-8 -10-9 -10-10 -10-11 -10-12 sinr lora sinr sigfox figure 4. measurement of sinr lpwan networks, for this reason the probability of interference is very low. moreover, in the future, we must return to this model of simulation of interference with the densification of connected objects. bit rate (bit/sec) ×105 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 se n si tiv ity ( d b m ) -140 -135 -130 -125 -120 -115 -110 -105 -100 fsk with dm css fsk figure 5. comparaison of sensetivity the sensitivity is affected by the increase of the bit rate for the two cases fsk with dm css and traditional fsk. on the other hand, the sensitivity of fsk with dm css exceeds the sensitivity of traditional fsk by 10 db. this difference remains almost the same on the bit rate considered from 0.1 × 105bit/sec up to 6 × 105bit/sec. vi. conclusion in this paper, we explored the existing technologies for lpwan serving the internet of things. these technologies have characteristics like autonomy up to 10 years and carried up to tens of kilometers. in addition, we survey 3 lpwa technologies, ultra-narrow band solutions by sigfox, wide6 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 hussein mroue et al. band solutions by lora technology based on chirp spread spectrum (css) and lte-m technology by 3gpp. sigfox and lora were surveyed in terms of physical layer. we then proceeded to explore which of these two technologies is the more sensitive to interference. the role of spreading spectrum has be illustrated to improves the sensitivity of the receptor. references [1] internet of things a key pillar of digital transformation, idate research, octobre 2015. [2] petäjäjärvi, juha, et al ”evaluation of lora lpwan technology for remote health and wellbeing monitoring.” international symposium on medical information and communication technology ieee, 2016. [3] sigfox. [online]. available: http://www.sigfox.com/en/ [4] https://partners.sigfox.com/companies/chip-maker [5] lora alliance, https://www.lora-alliance.org/ [6] sigfox’s ecosystem delivers the worlds first ultralow cost modules to fuel the internet of things mass market deployment. [online]. available: https://www.sigfox.com/en/press/sigfox-s-ecosystemdelivers-world-s-first-ultra-low-cost-modules-to-fuelinternet-of-things [7] lora alliance defends tech against sigfox slur. [online]. available: http://www.lightreading.com/iot/iotstrategies/lora-alliance-defends-tech-against-sigfoxslur/d/d-id/722982 [8] lora alliance, https://www.lora-alliance.org/ [9] “lora technology.” [online]. available: http://loraalliance.org/what-is-lora/technology [10] d. flore, “3gpp standards for the internet-of-things,” february 2016. [11] ericsson and nokia siemen networks, lte evolution for cellular iot, 2014. [12] 3gpp tr 36.888, study on provision of low-cost machine-type communications (mtc) user equipments (ues) based on lte, v.12.0.0, june 2013. [13] “cellular system support for ultra low complexity and low throughput internet of things (release13),” 3gpp tr 45.820 v1.3.1, jun. 2015. [14] r1-157247, “nb iot – battery lifetime evaluation in inband operation”, nokia networks, ran1 83, anaheim, usa [15] an1200.22 lora™ modulation basics 7 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e3 evaluation of lpwan technology for smart city eai hricova_adamcik_corrections_smart cities ansactions analysis of publicly available business e slovakia 1 department of manufacturing management, faculty of manufacturing technologies with a seat in presov, technical university of kosice, bayerova 1, 080 01 presov, slovakia, romana.hricova@tuke.sk 2 stanislav@adamcik.sk abstract the paper analyzes publicly available e the problem of getting to the information, but getting to it as quickly as possible, the cheapest and, most importantly, getting it as accurately as possible. altho major shift has been made by launching the slovensko.digital platform. the aim of this initiative is to improve informatization in slovakia. the ambition of the article is ways to use it. keywords: e-data, consolidation, dataset, information. d o commons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ riginal work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.26-6-2018.154830 1. introduction nowadays, entrepreneurs, business entities but also private individuals do not have to deal with a lack of information, but instead choose from the overflow of information the right, relevant ones they need and which will be topical as well. especially for entrepreneurs, it is sometimes a problem to find information about business partners and to verify their credibility. truth is that every production unit that wants to be competitive in the present day should be characterized by a suitable combination of needed productivity, flexibility and quality. [1] obviously, if subjects can choose, they prefer official data sources, but those that are scarce, are not always in the form that individuals prefer or need, and most often are time-lag. that is why the resources provided by independent organizations are increasingly being searched for. even if they collect data from official sources, they often process, evaluate or link them, which will subsequently make it much easier for people to search. in 2000 was adopted act no. 211/2000 coll. on free access to information and on amendments to certain acts (freedom of information act). [2] the law stipulated which obligated persons must make the information t _____________ research article 1 analysis of publicly available business e-data in , stanislav ada,* romana hricová1 , stanislav adamčík2 department of manufacturing management, faculty of manufacturing technologies with a seat in presov, technical university of romana.hricova@tuke.sk ailable e-data that entrepreneurs need and use for their business in slovakia. today is not the problem of getting to the information, but getting to it as quickly as possible, the cheapest and, most importantly, getting it as accurately as possible. although data has been published in various forms and public institutions in the past, a major shift has been made by launching the slovensko.digital platform. the aim of this initiative is to improve informatization in slovakia. the ambition of the article is to point out what e-data is being provided today and what are the data, consolidation, dataset, information. accepted on , licensed rms of the creative http://creati e, distribution a reproduction in any medium so long as the nowadays, entrepreneurs, business entities but also private individuals do not have to deal with a lack of information, but instead choose from the overflow of information the right, relevant ones they need and which entrepreneurs, it is sometimes a problem to find information about business partners and to verify their credibility. truth is that every production unit that wants to be competitive in the present day should be characterized by a suitable combination of needed productivity, flexibility and quality. [1] obviously, if subjects can choose, they prefer official data sources, but those that are scarce, are not always in the form that individuals prefer or need, and most often are urces provided by independent organizations are increasingly being searched for. even if they collect data from official sources, they often process, evaluate or link them, which will easier for people to search. ed act no. 211/2000 coll. on free access to information and on amendments to certain the law stipulated which obligated persons must make the information available. these include state authorities, municipalities, higher territorial units as well as those legal entities and natural persons to whom the law confers the power to decide on the rights and obligations of natural or legal persons in the field of public administration, and only to the extent of their decisionfor the law arises because official information is much more valuable than unofficial because the data thus obtained is not only from the sample of respondents but from the basic set, i.e. all respondents who are required to publish this information. entities are also faced with the problem of comparing data for each period and thus monitoring economic developments, for example, supplier, competitor or other relevant business. very important precondition for a successful company application in the business environment is its ability to archive relevant data in the long term on the basis of management quality systems, exactly according to the requirements spec concrete conditions. [3] it is good if data are available for at least the last 3 years. it is true that the harder the history can be found, the better it is for the search person, because it can create a more comprehensive view. all these facts, plus the constant pressure on public administration, the growing demands accuracy of information in the shortest possible time, have research article data in department of manufacturing management, faculty of manufacturing technologies with a seat in presov, technical university of data that entrepreneurs need and use for their business in slovakia. today is not the problem of getting to the information, but getting to it as quickly as possible, the cheapest and, most importantly, ugh data has been published in various forms and public institutions in the past, a major shift has been made by launching the slovensko.digital platform. the aim of this initiative is to improve data is being provided today and what are the . this is an open access article distributed under the ), which permits unlimited available. these include state authorities, municipalities, her territorial units as well as those legal entities and natural persons to whom the law confers the power to decide on the rights and obligations of natural or legal persons in the field of public administration, and only to -making activities. the need for the law arises because official information is much more valuable than unofficial because the data thus obtained is not only from the sample of respondents but all respondents who are required to entities are also faced with the problem of comparing data for each period and thus monitoring economic developments, for example, supplier, competitor or other important precondition for a application in the business environment is its ability to archive relevant data in the long term on the basis of management quality systems, exactly according to the requirements specified in it is good if data are available for least the last 3 years. it is true that the harder the history can be found, the better it is for the search person, because it can create a more comprehensive view. all these facts, plus the constant pressure on public administration, the growing demands for transparency and accuracy of information in the shortest possible time, have eai endorsed transactions on smart cities received on 08 december 2017, accepted on 20 march 2018, published on 26 june 2018 copyright © 2018 romana hricová and stanislav adamčík, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. ∗corresponding author. email: romana.hricova@tuke.sk eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e2 r. hricová, s. adamčík a. n. author, b. n. author and c. n. author 2 yielded results. in its way, 2016 became a breakthrough thanks to the launch of the slovensko.digital platform. 2. data providers publicly available data can be obtained from the following groups of providers: 1) state entities, 2) independent organizations, 3) enterprises. 2.1. state entities the most important sources of published data are: a) statistical office of the slovak republic the oldest source of published data is statistical office of the slovak republic. the history of organized statistical surveys on the territory of today's slovakia extends until 1715, when a whole-country census of the population was carried out in hungary. nowadays its basic missions are to provide statistical information on the state and development of the economy and on social development in the slovak republic to legislative and government bodies, state administration bodies, municipalities, the public and foreign users. the conditions for obtaining the necessary information are regulated by act no. 540/2001 coll. on state statistics, which entered into force on 1 january 2002. pursuant to this act, a legal entity or a natural person who is a reporting entity is obliged to provide free of charge, fully, truthfully and within specified deadlines, the data required by the state statistical surveys, which are listed in the state statistical surveys program. statistical office offers datacube the classification system of individual tables is based on maintaining the structure of domains and fields similarly as in the web portal. data from various statistical fields are presented in the form of multidimensional tables in monthly, quarterly or yearly time series and allow creating your own selections. at the end of the title of each table there is eight-digit code, which is the unique identifier. the outputs can be exported to file formats: pdf and xls. [4] in this context, it is important to note that the statistical office provides only very limited information on individual enterprises. by company registration number (ičo) or name, you can search for an organization. the following organizational information will then be shown: company id (ičo), business name, date of beginning, date of termination, address, district, municipality, legal form, main activity, institutional sector, type of ownership and size of organization. since no other information can be found, the only relevant figure is whether the organization exists or not. directly on this page is the opportunity to choose "open data". the statistical office of the slovak republic publishes the available data in open formats with a text description of the published data content, based on the government resolution of the slovak republic no 59/2015 of 11 february 2015 approving the open government partnership action plan of the slovak republic 2015. [4] figure 1. english page of statistical office of the slovak republic with link to open data [4] b) national agency for network and electronic services national agency for network and electronic services was created within the project: “electronic services of government office of the slovak government edemocracy and open government”, financed from the resources of the european union. [5] open data portal was created as a part of the initiative for open governance, which intention is to improve governance and public matters, through increasing transparency, effectivity and responsibility. the portal is a catalog containing various datasets published by obliged entities in the slovak republic. data can be collected from the web directly from the published links or by searching. open data portal is capable to store a copy of data or accommodate them space in database, along with standard visualization tools, according to the type of data (and the forms of use). [5] specific datasets can be found at https://data.gov.sk/dataset. there are 1243 different datasets from multiple organizations at present (december 2017). fig. 2 shows english homepage of the central public services portal for people. [5] these datasets can be searched for and filtered by organizations, keywords and expressions, file formats, licenses, and the specified sequence on the portal,. datasets are available in different file formats. the largest representation is csv and xml. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e2 analysis of publicly available business e-data in slovakia 3 figure 2. english homepage of the central public services portal for people [5] c) commercial bulletin the commercial bulletin [6] is operated by the ministry of justice of the slovak republic. according to act no.200/2011 coll. on the business journal, the ministry of justice of the slovak republic, as the publisher of the business journal, also makes available the data published in the business journal in the form of structured data that allows search and their further automated processing. to download structured data, it is necessary to register for free and then download the data on working days from 7.00 pm until 7.00 am, on unlimited through non-working days. published texts are only informative and not legally binding. data are updating every working day. provides the following data: • commercial register • collection of documents • notices of initiation of winding-up or co-operation proceedings without liquida-tion • bankruptcy and restructuring • claims of liquidators • other announcements • specification of received share of income tax paid • auctions • sale of property • management reports • mandatory published contracts fig. 3 shows search page of the commercial bulletin. [6] figure 3. search page of the commercial bulletin [6] d) social insurance agency there is only a database of debtors in the page of the social insurance agency. [7] data is in two formats: txt and csv. figure 4. debtor database search page of the social insurance agency [7] e) the ministry of finance of the slovak republic maintains a register of financial statements [8]. the register of the financial statements was established with the aim of improving and simplifying the business environment and reducing the administrative burden of the business. simultaneously the register improves accessibility and quality of the information about the accounting entities. [9] it is possible to find complete accounts in the register by name, company registration number or tax id and if the company was required to disclose both the annual report and the auditor's report, these are also available. however, a more in-depth investigation will show that not every company is likely to upload the requested data or submit it in the required format as some data shows "data not available in a structured form." there is homepage of the register of financial statements on the fig.5. [8] figure 5. homepage of the register of financial statements [8] eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e2 r. hricová, s. adamčík a. n. author, b. n. author and c. n. author 4 f) central register of contracts the central register of contracts [10] is the website on which contracts concluded by the liable entity (pursuant to §5a of act no. 211/2000 coll.) are published. [2] a publicly disclosed contract involving the ministry, the other central state administration body, a public body and a budgetary organization or a contributory organization established by them, which are liable pursuant to article 2, shall be published in the central register of contracts; the liable entity shall immediately send to the office of the government of the slovak republic a contract for publication. the central register of contracts is a public list of mandatory contracts, which are maintained by the office of the government of the slovak republic in electronic form; register is a public administration information system. in this register is today approx. 1,496,696 contracts (december 2017). fig.6 shows english homepage of the central register of contracts. [11] figure 6. english homepage of the central register of contracts [11] 2.2. independent organizations these include organizations interested in giving the general public access to publicly available data in a transparent form or in the form of a suitable dataset for further processing. these organizations receive data from the state administration, trying to consolidate them. the most distinguished providers include: a) fair-play alliance the fair-play alliance is a standard non-profit and non-party civic association founded in 2002 by former journalist zuzana wienk [12]. the civic association manages the datanest.sk project [13], which offers various datasets (the english homepage of the datanest is on the fig.7). regularly updated datasets include the organization's register, which currently contains over 1,400,000 entries. figure 7. the english homepage of the datanest project managed by the fair-play alliance [13] b) platform slovensko.digital (slovakia.digital) slovensko.digital is a civil association aimed at enhancing the quality of digital services in slovakia. the members of the association are mainly it specialists. since the start of their foundation, they have launched more successful projects. in the area of public disclosure, this is the following: • ekosystém.slovensko.digital [14] (ecosystem.slovakia.digital) • verejne.digital [15] (public.digital) ecosystem.slovakia.digital [14] this project is so far the most significant that the slovak.digital platform has put into operation. includes services: datahub [16] the service provides access to consolidated and linked structured data via a simple rest api [17]. using rest api [18] is beneficial for businesses as well as individuals who can use this data in their information systems. the user no longer has to rewrite the published data from the internet; the service will be delivered automatically. however, the information system must be adapted to communicate with the web service. for advanced data analysis, it is also possible to access the sql database. registration is required here. open data & api open data are in this case sql databases that are really made available to the general public and are freely available for download. currently there are the following databases: • register of legal entities database of legal persons, entrepreneurs and public authorities. there are more than 1.4 million legal entities with complete history. source: register and identifier of legal entities, entrepreneurs and public authorities, statistical office of the slovak republic. • central register of contracts database of contracts of the central register of contracts since 2011. source: data.gov.sk, central register of contracts, office of the government of the slovak republic. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e2 5 • bulletin of public procurement public procurement database from 2014. source: data.gov.sk, bulletin of public procurement, office for public procurement. • commercial bulletin – database of notices from commercial bulletin since 2011. source: commercial bulletin, ministry of justice of the slovak republic. • register of financial statements database of accounting units of the register of financial statements. source: register of financial statements, ministry of finance of the slovak republic. • debtors of the social insurance agency a database of social insurance debts from 2014. source: debtor lists, social insurance agency. • debtors of the general health insurance company database of debtors of the general health insurance company from june 2016 each of these databases is guided by practical and streamlined documentation (table and column descriptions). each of them is also available with the rest api, which makes available consolidated and linked structured data in the json format. [19] public digital [15] homepage of public digital is showed on the fig.8. the service is made available in the form of a website. its control is very intuitive and simple. the problem is that the data listed on the site is sometimes old (over 10 years old). by random check, it has been shown that e.g. the self-employed persons are looking for an address that has not only been out for years, but the trade has been abolished and the self-employed person died (a particular search the trade was cancelled 11 years ago and the selfemployed person died 5.5 years ago). within this project there are two more: • links.public.digital (prepojenia.verejne.digital) the purpose of the service is to search for links between businesses and people • procurement.public.digital (obstaravania.verejne.digital) the purpose of the service is to identify and notify tenderers who should be involved in public procurement. figure 8. homepage of the public.digital [15] 2.3. enterprises probably the most well-known private company that provides information on the company's finances is finstat, ltd.. this company was established in 2012 and the first release was launched the following year. the aim of the company is to help people simply and free to assess the financial health of slovak businesses. the effort is to connect the data sources to one location, to process and analyze their data. at the same time, it helps to create a picture of the whole market slovak enterprises as a whole, individual sectors and groups of entrepreneurs. finstat uses data sets from up to 14 data sources. among the most important are the following: commercial bulletin, business register, trade register, accounts list, bankruptcy register, insurers lists, financial reports, and court decisions. [20] company gradually adding additional data sources, but very important information is, that only a few of these resources are free. the free information that the interested person receives is in a simplified form, and even if they are processed graphically, there is no possibility of finding a more detailed structure. if person concerned would like to buy, for example datasets, price is not published on the internet, must contact the company. figure 9 shows english homepage. figure 9. the english homepage of the finstat [21] finstat uses data sets from up to 14 data sources. among the most important are the following: commercial bulletin, business register, trade register, accounts list, bankruptcy register. second private company which provides data about slovak enterprises is foaf ltd.. the name foaf comes from the english acronym friend of a friend and refers to the phenomenon of the small world networks. the project itself draws information on companies from the slovak commercial register, the business journal, the financial statements register, the database of debtors of the general health insurance company, the social insurance and union insurance company, the financial eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e2 analysis of publicly available business e-data in slovakia r. hricová, s. adamčík a. n. author, b. n. author and c. n. author 6 report, the public procurement bulletin and other databases. this information comes from publicly available sources, which are public administration information systems, accessible to the general public. [22] however, the main ambition is to search for and display deeper connections between people and businesses in slovakia using graph algorithms, so thanks to foaf.sk anyone can easily browse the social network of slovak businesses and entrepreneurs and see the relationships between them. as with finstat s.r.o. foaf provides only a fraction of the information for free, others have to buy the buyer, and the price list with the services to be paid is published on the internet. 3. the utility of publicly available business data as can be seen from the previous report, there are now enough public data providers offering information on business entities. on the one hand, there are state organizations, which by law have access to information and on the basis of act no. 211/2000 coll. on free access to information to the general public. the credibility of these data is high, so the entrepreneur gets the opportunity to verify the reliability of a potential partner by accessing the most common financial data, assets, liabilities, sales. the problem is that sometimes it is not possible to get to the freshest information as they are posted with a time delay. private companies that publish their data draw from official sources, so there is a certain time delay. on the other hand, the data is being processed (for example, finstat compares the development of the company's financial indicators also graphically), but for more detailed data, the bidder has to redeem it. as a second problem, it turned out that with private providers, data is not filtered and the consequence is that if someone needs to find the manager, the address or address of the entrepreneur will come across not only old but even outdated information. random search via public.digital showed that the real estate was still featured by the owners who died or the real estate sold and can still be seen, for example, self-employed persons who have been canceled for more than 10 years. therefore, data needs to be verified from multiple sources, and even if the provider states that it is drawing data from official sources, it is also necessary to check their timeliness. more detailed or processed data is payable because it is time consuming to consolidate them. a good solution could be to create software that would allow data to be edited and supplemented by notes. 4. conclusions the paper deals with the most well-known and largest providers of publicly available e-data from state-owned organizations on the one hand and private providers on the other. a closer look at the information provided has highlighted a number of data issues: not always current, they are mostly informative only, some are so old that they no longer correspond to the truth. thanks to the freedom of information act 2000, state entities were forced to disclose information that entrepreneurs need for their business. these data are from a reliable source, but they need to be verified or searched from multiple sources because the data found is not in the desired form. it is still true that the use of data acquired for business can be both time and costly. there remains an open space for finding the right form of processing and consolidating such data so that the user has the data as quickly as possible, most accurately and in particular as simple as possible. acknowledgements. paper originates with the direct support of ministry of education of slovak republic by grants kega 007tuke-4/2018 and vega 1/0614/15". references [1] monkova, k. et al.: newly developed software application for multiple access process planning, in: advances in mechanical engineering. 2014, p. 3907139071. issn 1687-8132 [2] zákon č. 211/2000 z. z. o slobodnom prístupe k informáciám a o zmene a doplnení niektorých zákonov (zákon o slobode informácií). [online] [22.5.2017] available at internet: http://www.zakonypreludi.sk/zz/2000-211 [3] monka, p. et al.: design and experimental study of turning tools with linear cutting edges and comparison to commercial tools, international journal of advanced manufacturing technology, 85 (9-12), 2016, pp. 23252343. [4] statistical office of the slovak republic [online] [24.11.2017] available at internet: https://slovak.statistics.sk/ [5] national agency for network and electronic services [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: https://data.gov.sk/en/ [6] commercial bulletin [online] [21.11.2017] available at internet: https://www.justice.gov.sk/obchodnyvestnik/stranky/stru kturovane-udaje.aspx [7] social insurance agency [online] [21.11.2017] available at internet: http://www.socpoist.sk/zoznam-dlznikov-emw/ [8] register of financial statements [online] [21.11.2017] available at internet: http://www.registeruz.sk/cruzpublic/domain/accountingentity/simplesearch [9] register of financial statements [online] [21.11.2017] available at internet: http://www.registeruz.sk/cruzpublic/home [10] central register of contracts [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: http://www.crz.gov.sk/ eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e2 7 [11] central register of contracts [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: http://www.crz.gov.sk/index.php?id=114372 [12] fair-play alliance [online] [21.11.2017] available at internet: http://www.fair-play.sk/abouts [13] datanest project [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: http://datanest.fair-play.sk/ [14] ecosystem slovakia digital [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: https://ekosystem.slovensko.digital/ [15] public digital [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: https://verejne.digital/ [16] ecosystem slovakia digital [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: https://ekosystem.slovensko.digital/sluzby/datahub [17] wikipedia [online] [22.5.2017] available at internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/representational_state_transf er [18] ecosystem slovakia digital [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: https://ekosystem.slovensko.digital/premiove-api [19] wikipedia [online] [16.10.2017] available at internet: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/javascript_object_notation [20] finstat [online] [16.10.2017] available at internet: www.finstat.sk [21] finstat [online] [16.10.2017] available at internet: https://finstat.sk/information-of-slovak-companies [22] foaf ltd. [online] [02.12.2017] available at internet: http://foaf.sk/info/o-foaf-sk eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e2 analysis of publicly available business e-data in slovakia papersmartroutecalculation-acm.dvi sophisticated route calculation approaches for microscopic traffic simulations karl hübner technische universität berlin daimler center for automotive information technology innovations ernst-reuter-platz 7, 10587 berlin, germany karl.huebner@tu-berlin.de björn schünemann technische universität berlin daimler center for automotive information technology innovations ernst-reuter-platz 7, 10587 berlin, germany bjoern.schuenemann@dcaiti.com ilja radusch fraunhofer fokus automotive services and communication technologies kaiserin-augusta-allee 31, 10589 berlin, germany ilja.radusch@fokus.fraunhofer.de abstract in order to implement meaningful microscopic traffic simulations, a sophisticated calculation of the vehicle routes is essential. in this paper, different route calculation approaches for microscopic traffic simulators are analysed and compared. various simulations are performed to detect traffic distribution and traffic flow resulting from the used route calculation approaches. to have simulations as realistic as possible, real od matrices of the city of fulda (germany) were used for the evaluation of the different approaches. the results show that simple route calculation algorithms are not appropriate for microscopic traffic simulations. however, approaches that are more sophisticated and that integrate additional heuristics produce good results regarding traffic distribution and traffic flow and can improve iterative techniques to find a user equilibrium. categories and subject descriptors i.6.7 [simulation and modeling]: simulation support systems general terms route calculation keywords route calculation approaches, microscopic traffic simulations, route assignment, trip generation, shortest-path search, choice routing, dynamic traffic assignment, user equilibrium 1. introduction the generation of realistic traffic is an essential requirement for the execution of meaningful traffic simulations. since the movements of all vehicles are simulated individually in microscopic traffic simulations, the place and the time of the departure, the destination, and the route through the traffic network have to be defined for each vehicle. the process of this data generation can be split into four steps, which are described by the traditional traffic prediction model: trip generation and trip distribution are responsible for determining origin and destination points and the number of trips between them, mode choice detects which transportation mode is used for each trip, and route assignment computes a route for each trip and defines the point in time when a trip is started [9, 12]. if realistic background traffic for a whole city or a certain area is needed, data based on real measurements or empirical studies are helpful, such as predefined origin-destination (od) matrices which can be obtained from local traffic authorities (e.g. [14]). if such matrices are available, only mode choice and route assignment have to be carried out for traffic generation. while mode choice is a rather simple task (using statistics about modal splits for example) [12], route assignment is more difficult to perform since the aim is to find routes which result in balanced traffic which is close to reality. a trivial approach of route assignment would be to assign the shortest route for each trip (all-or-nothing). however, this approach would often result in traffic bottlenecks and heavy congestion. in order to prevent this, the routes simutools 2015, august 24-26, athens, greece copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.24-8-2015.2261359 might be distributed among the road network, which can be achieved by applying wardrop’s principle of user equilibrium (ue) where each driver chooses a route in a way that he/she cannot reduce his/her own travel time by changing to another route [16, 5]. in order to calculate the user equilibrium in a time-dependent environment, dynamic traffic assignment methods are used. such methods solve the ue problem either mathematically, or for microscopic simulations more suitable by iterative simulations until the equilibrium is reached [4]. an iterative approach, however, requires much computing time due to the excessive amount of simulation runs needed. therefore, it might be helpful to reduce the number of iterations by putting more effort into route calculation, which is presented in the following. 1.1 paper structure this paper is structured as follows: in section 2, different approaches for the route calculation will be presented. an introduction of methods used to create vehicular traffic from existing od matrices will follow in section 3. moreover, our simulation setup and the used evaluation methods and measures will be introduced in section 4. finally, the achieved results will be analysed in section 5, and a conclusion will be given in section 6. 2. improvements in route assignment in order to prevent traffic bottlenecks and heavy congestion caused by the generated vehicle routes, sophisticated methods for the route calculation have to be identified. in the following section, several approaches are discussed for improving the single route search and for calculating alternative routes and distributing the traffic among these routes. 2.1 improving shortest-path search two mechanisms seem to be promising to improve the shortest-path search: avoid the use of roads with low capacity and avoid time-consuming turns. the use of roads with low capacity can be avoided by increasing the costs of the relevant roads for the path search, for example by adapting the costs of each road segment according to its defined road type or capacity. considering turn costs is a more challenging task. turn costs can lead to p-turns, e.g. a detour around a city block containing three right turns instead of one left turn in order to avoid a turn restriction [17]. p-turns, however, would violate bellman’s optimality condition. this condition indicates that if the shortest path between origin and destination passes through two arbitrary nodes a and b, also the chosen path between a and b must be the shortest possible path [11, 2]. this condition implies that a shortest path must not contain the same node twice [6]. since turn restrictions are a special case of turn costs, this problem needs to be addressed as well. in order to avoid the violation of the principle, there are two main methods: firstly, junctions within the graph can be modelled as subgraphs with additional edges representing all turning possibilities. with this approach, any existing shortest path algorithm can be applied without violating bellman’s principle [17] (see fig. 1). another method is using an edge-based path search algorithm. instead of storing weights for each visited node, weights for each visited edge are stored during traversal. this approach allows applying turn restrictions and turn costs since the previous edge is known and can be used to calculate turn costs (see fig. 2). thus, turn costs are considered and p-turns are possible without violating bellman’s principle [6]. figure 1: to avoid the violation of bellman’s principle, junctions within the graph are modelled as subgraphs with additional edges representing all turning possibilities. in this way, any node-based routing algorithm (e.g. dijkstra) finds allowed p-turns. figure 2: an edge-based routing algorithm and turn-cost tables are used to enable turn restrictions and turn costs without editing the underlying graph. 2.2 determining turn costs to calculate turn costs, geisberger et al. [7] propose to consider the deceleration, the acceleration and the maximum turning speed to achieve a realistic presentation of the time needed for a turn. considering the maximal tangential acceleration maxa, the speed limits v and v ′, the edge lengths l and l′, and the angle α in between, the maximum turning speed between both edges can be calculated by equation 1 [7]. vturn := min(v, √ maxa · tan(α/2) · min(l, l′)/2) (1) furthermore, considering aacc as the maximum acceleration and adec as the maximum deceleration of a vehicle, the approximated time a turn costs cturn can be calculated by equation 2 [7]. cturn := (v − vturn) 2 2 · adec · v + (v′ − vturn) 2 2 · aacc · v′ (2) in our experiments, we used these equations to determine the turn costs. we assume the accelerations aacc = 2,6 m/sec2 and adec = 4,5 m/sec 2. these are the values the traffic simulator sumo applies for the default acceleration and the default deceleration.1 2.3 finding alternative paths in general, drivers have different preferences and experiences, and therefore choose different routes to reach the same destination. consequently, several approaches and algorithms exist to find paths with similar costs but different road sections. yen developed an algorithm to find the k-shortest, loopless paths in a network [18]. however, the k-shortest paths are not feasible in road traffic scenarios since they contain many similar and unrealistic paths that users in reality would not use [1]. one method to solve the problem of similarity is to remove similar and unrealistic paths out of the shortest-paths set, e.g. by applying the minimax method by kuby et al. [10]. those improvements, however, increase the calculation time of routes even more. a method to identify potential dissimilar paths is iterative penalty method (ipm) proposed by johnson [8]. as soon as the best path has been found by any arbitrary single path search algorithm, the weights of all edges on the resulting path are penalized. a second search is done to find a different route which costs are quite similar to the best one. this can be performed several times until the desired number of alternative paths is found. furthermore, bader et al. penalized not only the edges of a path but all edges which are leaving from nodes visited by the path. this tube avoids small detours of already found routes [1]. choice routing is a relatively new method [3] which operates in four steps. firstly, two shortest path algorithms are executed simultaneously, one from the source node towards the target and one from the target node towards the source; resulting in two shortest-path trees. in the third step, both shortest-path trees are intersected with each other, which results in a set of edges traversed by both path searches. the connected edges in this set are called plateaus. in the fourth step, plateaus are ranked by a quality criterion and paths are generated by following the weighted trees. figure 3 shows the different stages of choice routing in an example. bader et al. showed that this simple and fast method results in very good alternative routes. it was also shown that choice routing is able to match about 80% of the routes which drivers would choose in reality [1]. 1 http://sumo.dlr.de/wiki/definition_of_vehicles, _vehicle_types,_and_routes 1) create shortest-path tree (a*) from s to t 2) create shortest-path tree (a*) from t to s 3) intersect trees and determine plateaus 4) build routes based on plateaus figure 3: finding alternative routes in four steps by applying the choice routing algorithm. 2.4 route selection to assign different routes with the same origin and destination to the trips resulting from the corresponding od matrix pair, decision models can be used. these decision models detect a probability for using a particular route. one example is the logit model [13]. here, for each route r, a utility function ur is used to calculate the probability p(r) to choose this particular route. considering a set of r different routes and a scaling parameter β, the logit decision model is described by equation 3 [13]. p(r) = exp(β · ur) ∑ r s=1 exp(β · us) , r = (1, . . . , r) (3) 3. generating initial traffic in order to generate the initial routes for a simulation, different methods can be applied. in this chapter, we give a brief overview about approaches and methods used by us to create traffic from existing od matrices. 3.1 preparation of the od matrix in many cases, the origin and destination points given in od matrices are based on traffic analysis zones (taz). those analysis zones need to be transferred into a simulation scenario. in order to distribute departures and arrivals within a zone, we generate several origin and destination points at junctions within each taz randomly. furthermore, od matrices do not provide the number of trips per hour, but for one whole day. since departure times for each trip are required, the trips have to be distributed over time. for this task, we use one-day-variation curves which describe the amount of traffic over a normal working day per hour. for each trip, the time of departure is determined by distributing all trips over time according to such curves. within each hour, departure times are distributed equally. 3.2 calculation of the initial routes in the following sections, several methods for calculating initial routes are described. we used these routes to generate the traffic for our evaluations. f for each od pair, the fastest route is calculated. no additional routes are provided or calibration techniques are applied. f* for each od pair, the fastest route is calculated by considering turn costs and avoiding streets in residential areas. no additional routes are provided or calibration techniques are applied. cr4* for each od pair, four alternative routes are calculated by choice routing. the route calculation considers turn costs and avoids streets in residential areas. no calibration techniques are applied. 3.3 calibrating traffic in addition to the previous methods, the following approaches use an iterative dynamic traffic assignment approach (dta) in order to calculate an initial route for each trip. while the first iteration step is an all-or-nothing assignment, each following iteration uses the traffic flow of the previous simulation in order to assign routes for the vehicles. dta the following steps are executed alternately for a specific number of iterations: 1) route calculation, 2) route selection, 3) traffic simulation. in each iteration, the route calculation calculates fastest routes based on the traffic flow of the previous iteration without considering turn costs (figure 4). cr4*+dta an improved version of the previous approach, where a more sophisticated route calculation approach is used in order to pre-calculate a set of routes. at first, four alternative routes are calculated for each od pair by applying choice routing (including turn costs and the avoidance of residential areas). afterwards, the traffic is calibrated by executing the following steps alternately: 1) route selection, 2) traffic simulation. here, the route selection only chooses between existing routes which were calculated once at the beginning (figure 5). figure 4: iterative dynamic traffic assignment: reaching the user equilibrium in three alternating steps. figure 5: iterative dynamic traffic assignment: instead of recalculating routes every time, a set of sophisticated routes is calculated once at the beginning. 4. preparation of the simulation scenario in this section, we introduce our simulation setup. we use the previously presented methods to generate vehicle routes and to simulate the resulting traffic by the sumo simulator. moreover, we define evaluation methods and measures to allow a comparison of the different route calculation approaches. 4.1 simulation setup in 2008, the results of the future planning of the public transportation services of the city of fulda (germany) were published online [14]. these results include od matrices and a detailed map of all traffic analysis zones. to model traffic demand close to reality, we used the published od matrices to calculate the vehicle routes for our simulations. figure 6: this map of the city of fulda shows the network we used for the evaluation. at important road segments, e.g. at the depicted sample location, we set up induction loops for counting traffic. the road network we used for our simulations is based on openstreetmap data of the region hesse, germany2. we removed unnecessary objects from the osm data and fixed some errors caused by the converting process of the sumo tool netconvert. for example, we fixed illegal turns and faulty traffic light programs. for a later analysis, we added detectors at important road segments within our simulation to analyse and identify congested roads. 4.2 preparation of traffic demand after the simulation scenario preparation, we set up the traffic demand. for this purpose, the following files were chosen from [14]: the od matrix of the public transportation demand as expected in 2015 and the od matrix of the general traffic demand as expected in 2015 (general traffic = public transportation + motorized traffic [14]). the od matrices had to be converted into a suitable format since they were published as pdf files. in order to retrieve an od matrix with traffic demand of motorized vehicles only, the od matrix for public transportation was subtracted from the one for general traffic. the provided data consists of 67 traffic analysis zones (taz), however, half of the traffic concentrates within the first 17 zones. therefore, we simulated traffic within these zones only. the lost traffic was compensated by raising the number of trips accordingly. for each taz, origin and destination points were created (according to section 3.1). as a result, 5 760 od pairs and 160 000 trips were created and used for the route calculation approaches described in sections 3.2 and 3.3. 2 http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/germany/ hessen.html 4.3 measures after the vehicle routes were generated, numerous simulations were run in sumo. at the end of each simulation, the generated trip information were used to compare the different simulation runs. for the comparison of the different route calculation approaches, we used following measures: number of vehicles which reached their target. in the case that several vehicles did not reach their target until the end of the day, probably a huge traffic congestion occurred in the network which prevented vehicles from reaching their target on time. average length of trips helps to detect which amount of detours was made by the vehicles compared to the shortest possible routes. average duration of trips shows how long vehicles drove from the origin to the destination. we assume, that a better distribution of traffic results in less congestion and therefore in lower trip durations. therefore, the average travel time is used as one of the main characteristic for the analysis of the traffic distribution. average standard deviation of duration of trips shows how much trip duration varies in relation to the average duration. for this measure, we calculate the standard deviation of all trips which have the same source and destination. the average of these standard deviation values is used to analyze the traffic distribution in terms of fulfilling the user equilibrium. the lower the deviation for a set of trips with the same source and destination, the lower the benefit a driver would experience when changing to another route. additionally, high values in standard deviation indicate a congested network, since drivers suddenly need more time to reach their destination. average speed of vehicles describes the average velocity of vehicles. comparing different simulation runs, this measure offers a good indicator of free or congested traffic. average waiting time of vehicles shows how many seconds on average vehicles spent waiting during their trip, for example at traffic lights or due to traffic congestion. in addition to these metrics, several induction loops on important roads were set up. these detectors measured the number of vehicles, the average speed and the vehicle flow over a period of 300 seconds. by these measures, timedepending events could be detected. 5. results table 1 shows the essential results of our simulations. each one simulated a whole day. the simulated traffic is based on the od matrix of fulda, containing real traffic demand data. for the route generation, one of the discussed approaches was used. the measured results give a first insight into the differences of the approaches regarding the calculated routes and the resulting traffic flow. we assume that the traffic flow over a full day is balanced reasonably if average travel time and speed are appreciable and traffic congestion only occur locally. in order to keep track of special events which are supposed to occur in real traffic flow (e.g. peaks in morning / evening hours and local traffic congestion) and events which usually do not occur in real traffic flow (a highly congested network, frequent deadlocks on junctions), we measured, additionally, the traffic volume and speed over the time on one sample location within the network (figure 7). f (fastest routes) f* (fastest with heuristics) dta 10 (10 iterations of dta) dta 50 (50 iterations of dta) cr4* (choice routing 4 routes) cr4* + dta10 (choice routing and 10 dta iterations) figure 7: traffic flow at the defined sample location for the different route calculation approaches. approach vehicles arrived avg. distance avg. speed avg. travel time avg. std. deviation of travel time avg. waiting time f 73,7 % 1,58 km 17 km/h 2 070 sec 1 348 sec 1 751 sec f* 98,5 % 1,62 km 28 km/h 246 sec 52 sec 73 sec ca4* 99,9 % 2,03 km 30 km/h 249 sec 60 sec 61 sec dta (10 iterations) 91,2 % 2,46 km 27 km/h 1 070 sec 870 sec 730 sec dta (50 iterations) 99,9 % 2,01 km 31,3 km/h 245 sec 56 sec 42 sec cr4*+ dta (10 iterations) 99,9 % 1,76 km 30,5 km/h 215 sec 34 sec 51 sec cr4*+ dta (50 iterations) 99,9 % 1,69 km 30,9 km/h 203 sec 31 sec 45 sec table 1: simulation results for the different route calculation approaches 5.1 fastest routes (f) our evaluations show that using the simple fastest routes approach results in unbalanced traffic in our simulation scenario. many vehicles share parts of the selected routes which quickly results in bottlenecks. moreover, if no additional heuristics are used, vehicles are often navigated through residential areas which is rather unrealistic and causes heavy traffic congestion. in the worst case, this congestion spreads throughout the overall network which leads to long waiting times and a low average vehicle speed. as shown in table 1, each vehicle waits half an hour in average during its journey. moreover, the average speed is very low and only 74% of all departed vehicles reach their destination within the simulation time. the overall network is congested in both morning and evening hours. furthermore, vehicle flow and speed decrease at the sample location (figure 6 and 7) during the peak in the morning hours and do not recover due to the massive congestion in the network. 5.2 fastest routes with heuristics (f*) in our scenario, this method eliminates the problem of bottlenecks since the initial routes consider turn costs and avoid residential areas. in general, vehicles follow the main roads instead of taking the shortest way through residential areas, which prevents several bottlenecks. on the other hand, many vehicles still share several parts of their routes which is rather unrealistic and causes congestion on the used roads. in the analysed scenario, no persistent congestion is caused. during peak times, however, many roads still get congested due to missing alternative routes. in comparison to f, the average waiting time decreases to 73 seconds while the average speed for each vehicle increases to 28 km/h. vehicle flow and speed at the sample location (figure 7) does not show congestion but only peaks in the morning and evening hours. 5.3 choice routing with heuristics (cr4*) calculating several alternative routes reduces the problem that too many vehicles share the same road segments. consequently, less bottlenecks occur. in the simulated scenario, the average waiting time for each vehicle decreases to 60 seconds and the average speed increases to 30 km/h. these results show that this approach improves the initial route generation even more. in this simulation scenario, only temporary local traffic congestion occur on traffic lights and the overall traffic flow is never blocked due to bottlenecks. compared to f, vehicles have a lower average speed and no long-term congestion occurs at the sample location (figure 7). 5.4 iterative dynamic traffic assignment (dta10 / dta50) in this approach, the route choice and the resulting traffic simulation is repeated until the user equilibrium is approximated. consequently, the fastest route according to the traffic flow of the previous simulation is calculated for each vehicle. the higher the number of iterations of this process, the more vehicles adapt their routes to the traffic flow. therefore, this approach shows the best results for all measures after 50 iterations. average speed, duration and waiting time show better results than in cr4*. however, it can also be seen that the network still collapses within the tenth iteration, as seen in the deviation of travel times per trip. also, massive congestion occurs at the sample location (figure 7) in the evening hours. these results show that iterative dta without any optimization of initial routes requires a lot of iterations to obtain the (approximated) user equilibrium for our simulation scenario. thus, using this approach is a time-consuming process due to the multiple runs of simulations and routing calculations. 5.5 iterative dynamic traffic assignment with initial routes (cr4* + dta10 / cr4* + dta50) the main problem of the previous method is that initially, the simple fastest routes approach is used for the first route calculation which causes bottlenecks and a congested network (as seen in f). in order to obtain better results for the first iterations, this approach uses precomputed routes initially generated by choice routing with the same heuristics as in cr4*. our simulation results show that this approach is more suitable for reaching the user equilibrium with less iterations. the tenth iteration already results in a route distribution which produces balanced traffic, as seen in low travel times and a low standard deviation of those. also, there are neither huge traffic congestion nor other anomalies. applying more than ten iterations does not produce a further improvement. consequently, the (approximated) user equilibrium for our scenario setup seems to be reached in less iterations. 6. conclusion in this paper, different route calculation approaches for traffic simulators were compared regarding their generated traffic distribution and the resulting traffic flow. for our evaluations, we used an od matrix of the city of fulda (germany) based on real traffic demand, and used different route calculation approaches in order to generate initial traffic for comparable simulation scenarios. in this simulation study, the approach ’simple fastest routes without any heuristics’ caused unbalanced traffic and resulted in an overall congested road network. considering turn costs and distributing vehicles among alternative routes by using the ’choice routing’ algorithm resulted in more balanced traffic. by using this approach, bottlenecks were avoided and, thus, no congestion occurred in the simulated scenario. however, this approach was not able to achieve a user equilibrium which represents a traffic distribution close to reality. to approximate the user equilibrium, we applied several iterations of a simple dynamic traffic assignment method. first, the initial routes were calculated by the ’simple fastest routes’ approach. here, many iterations were required until a user equilibrium was reached. in a second experiment, we used initial routes pre-calculated by ’choice routing’ before an iterative traffic assignment approach was applied. now, we were able to approximate the user equilibrium with less iterations. since the results are promising, we plan to integrate the best route calculation approaches into the simulation architecture vsimrti [15]. consequently, these approaches can be used for the route calculation of all traffic simulators coupled to vsimrti. 7. references [1] r. bader, j. dees, r. geisberger, and p. sanders. alternative route graphs in road networks. in proceedings of the first international icst conference on theory and practice of algorithms in (computer) systems, tapas’11, pages 21–32, berlin, heidelberg, 2011. springer-verlag. 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[14] c. of fulda. öpnv-nahverkehrsplan 2. fortschreibung. http://www.fulda.de/bauen/verkehrsplanung/ oepnv-nahverkehrsplan.html, september 2013. [15] b. schünemann. v2x simulation runtime infrastructure vsimrti: an assessment tool to design smart traffic management systems. computer networks, 55:3189–3198, october 2011. [16] j. g. wardrop. correspondence. some theoretical aspects of road traffic research. ice proceedings: engineering divisions, 1:767–768(1), 1952. [17] s. winter. modeling costs of turns in route planning. geoinformatica, 6(4):345–361, 2002. [18] j. y. yen. finding the k shortest loopless paths in a network. management science, 17(11):712–716, 1971. big data in telecom industry: effective predictive techniques on cdrs big data in telecom industry: effective predictive techniques on cdrs sara elelimy and samir moustafa∗ computational and data science and engineering, skolkovo institute of science and technology abstract mobile network operators start to face many challenges in the digital era, especially with high demands from customers. since the mobile network operators have considered a source of big data traditional techniques are not effective with new era big data, internet of things (iot) and 5g, as a result handling effectively different big datasets becomes a vital task for operators with the continuous growth of data and moving from long term evolution(lte) to 5g therefore, there is an urgent need for sufficient big data analytic to predict future demands, traffic, and network performance to fulfill the requirements of the fifth generation of mobile network technology. in this paper, we introduce data science techniques using machine learning and deep learning algorithms: the auto-regressive integrated moving average(arima) bayesian-based curve fitting, and recurrent neural network(rnn) is employed for a data-driven application to mobile network operators. the main framework included in models is an identification parameter of each model, estimation, prediction, and final data-driven application of this prediction from business and network performance applications. these models are applied to telecom italian big data challenge call detail records (cdrs) datasets. the performance of these models is found out using specific well-known evaluation criteria that show that arima (machine learning-based model) is more accurate as a predictive model in such a dataset as the rnn (deep learning model). received on 20 april 2020; accepted on 29 may 2020; published on 04 june 2020 keywords: big data analytics, machine learning, cdrs, 5g. copyright © 2020 sara elelimy et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eai.13-7-2018.164919 1. introduction operators of mobile networks began to move to the fifth generation from the fourth generation, which is an upcoming and promising solution for meeting the requirements of wireless broadband. additionally, they have started looking for some innovative solutions for facing challenges and providing a satiable customer ∗corresponding author. email: samir.mohamed@skoltech.ru experience with the management of the complex network by efficient backhaul resource handing [1]. telecom organizations and researchers have been studying a diversity of techniques for big data management adequately for discovering unknown knowledge and patterns from the collected information obtained from operators and help organizations in providing smart services for achieving reduced expenditure and resources. 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ mailto:<samir.mohamed@skoltech.ru> with the fast uptake in mobile applications and services, requesting demands for infrastructures in wireless network. for 5g requirements and kpis are to support exploding in mobile traffic, provide low latency so this raised need for real-time decision and network resources management and optimization to maximize and increase customer satisfaction and enhance user experience. using traditions methods to achieve these requirements and overcome different problems become a challenge to telecoms. tradition techniques start to be useless in this area so industry and academia start to search and create more effective new techniques to deal with this tremendously increase of data and raise the question of how the telecoms deal with: 1. enormous data sizes (various systems generated a huge amount of log data and reached giga-tera byte). 2. different sources (generated from different sources e.g., routers, switches, applications, operating systems, etc.). 3. heterogeneity (different format, structures, terms of terminology, etc.). these questions and challenges are the main problems statement for this work, and how telecoms benefit from applying ml/dl on different datasets, and what kind of application can be achieved using these techniques that are exiting and traditional ones. in this paper, we are investigating the analysis and application-driven by big data in the telecommunication industry concerning operators of mobile networks for the fifth generation and current networks in their operational and business aspects, implementing different ml/dl techniques driven by big data on data gathered from a telecommunication network and applying different models of prediction for predicting traffic. moreover, in the end, how different results and applications are brought by big data analytic in comparison with traditional methods. also, it will be discussed how they are beneficial for business and operational activities, companies, and how this can be utilized and in which types of applications. 2. analytic tools and data sources for telecoms 2.1. telecom data sources operators of mobile networks form a source and carrier of big data because of the penetration of mobile users have increased significantly [2], and organizations utilized traditional techniques before transactions from the analytic of big data. these techniques pay less attention to operational data, and they do not concentrate significantly on transnational data. the analytic of big data is essential in several ways in comparison with traditional methods. for instance, the compressor transmits data, and useful data are defined by the analytic of big data [3]. in large part of an application, decision-making in real-time is a benefit of using analytic of big data by monitoring the development and infrastructure of network performance. several smart services will be supported and provided by mnos with the analysis of sources and types of data [4]. classifies sources of data for telecoms as operator and subscriber data, external and internal data sources [3], core network levels, cell, subscriber, and kpi deep classification for different networks [5]. when it comes to analytic tools, some of the main tools, as defined by the previous studies, include methods of machine learning modeling, data mining, and statistical modeling [6]. actually, with current development and improvement in data analytic, networks based on big data have formed an attractive area of research for numerous researchers around the globe [7], [8]. additionally, in the industrial sector, researchers recently developed and studied frameworks for big data management in an efficient manner in mobile networks. 2.2. contribution of cdrs or call details records in mobile operators, cdrs were considered essential in for finical aspects. however, in the period of big data, applications driven by it are obtaining attention by researchers in industrial and scientific aspects because datasets of cdrs are full of information associated with communication among numerous users along with how, when, and with whom they are communicating. the analysis of cdrs datasets has become quite a significant and exciting research area [9] because 2 sara elelimy and samir moustafa eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 numerous uses associated with these datasets provided by it for different purposes of research resulting in the improvement of dataset management techniques, development of analytic techniques, and analysis types from several perspectives with the use of bigdata methods. when it comes to telecom operators, orange is recognized as one of the biggest, and the first challenge, "d4d challenge" was launched in 2013. they invited different candidates through this challenge from around the globe.addition to it, and access was provided to massive datasets of cdrs for developing objectives of their customer satisfaction and infrastructures as a source of gaining more revenues. successful outcomes have resulted in scientific work, which encouraged the organization to launch a second challenge during the mobile conference of net in april 2015 [9]. in europe, telecom italian is also a recognized mobile operator that faces the same challenges of big data, and2014, big data challenge’s first edition was launched by its [10]. 3. techniques and methodology in the analysis of these datasets, different techniques and methods are utilized. some of the techniques utilized in this work include data visualization, prediction, and clustering. we followed the framework for obtaining the optimum outcomes from datasets. pre-processing is the first step, and it is considered an essential step while using massive data, and in understanding the hidden patterns existing in the data. the next step is concerned with defining analysis type and necessary tools for it, the application type is driven by it, and which type of information might be needed for it. finally, based on the results, the best applications are determined for this analysis. 3.1. data set millions of records are included in a dataset between december and november 2013. in 2014, these datasets were a component of the big data challenge of telecom italian. it was quite ironic and included different types of telecommunications, including electricity data, weather forecasting, news, and social networking. telecom italian has formed an original dataset with the connotation of some specific labs. the institutes included in them are: • fondazione bruno kessler. • eit ict labs. • trento and trento rise institute. • milan polytechnic university. • mit media labs. before the first dataset is released, the attention of partakers is considered. the demand is nevertheless being increased at the competition’s end for datasets, which has become an initiative or measure towards "open big data." datasets, following [10], were freely published for improving the dataset used in the society. telecom italian generated a dataset that is a consequence of evaluation or calculation upon the call detail records for subscribers of milano city. cdrs record user activities for billing and network management, but our research focuses on the use of dataset for different applications rather than utilizing it for traditional activity. information included in dataset described in [10], it consists of main eight variables: • square id: the square id, which is the portion of milan grid. • time interval: the start of the time interval can be stated as the number of milliseconds passed till 1st january 1970 from the unix epoch at utc. in addition, of 10 minutes (600000 milliseconds) to this value, the time interval can be achieved. • country code: it is the local code of a country for phones. • sms-in activity: the sms activity is receiving the inside square id throughout the time interval • sms-out activity: the sms activity is sending the inside square id throughout the time interval. • call-in activity: the calls activity is receiving the inside square id throughout the time interval. • calls-out activity: the sms activity is issuing the inside square id throughout the time interval. 3 big data in telecom industry: effective predictive techniques on cdrs eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 • internet traffic activity: the internet traffic activity is issuing the inside square id throughout the time interval and by the state of the user all these activities are recognized from the country code. we have a few types of call detail records for generating the datasets which are related to these activities: before the first data-set is released, the attention of partakers is considered. the demand is nevertheless being increased at the competition’s end for data-sets, which has become an initiative or measure towards "open big data." datasets, following [10], were freely published for improving the dataset used in the society. information included in dataset described in [10], it consists of main eight variables: • received sms: every time when a user receives an sms. • sent sms: every time when a user sent an sms. • incoming call: every time when a user receives a call. • outgoing call: every time when a user issued a call. • internet: every time when a user starts or end an internet connection. throughout the similar internet connection one of the below restrictions is reached : • 15 minutes after producing the final cdr • 5 mb after producing the final cdr this data-set was formed by accumulating the above stated records, to deliver internet traffic, smss and calls activities. the level of collaboration between users and mobile network is calculated through this. for instance, more sms sending by a user results in more activity of the smss sent by the user. the smss and calls activities are having the similar scale of sizes “therefor they are analogous to each other”. according to (data telecom, 2014), data-sets are combined in four-sided cells gird, as shown in figure 1. figure 1. “the area of a milan is composed of a grid overlay, which is 1,000 squares having the size of 235*235 meters.” the grid is probable with wgs84 (epsg:4326) standard 3.2. methods and models in these sections, the adopted methods are explained: • data visualization: using the right type of visualization brings insight into the data analysis process. explanatory data analysis(eda) executed in a proper order to study and expound the dataset. the aim of conducted data analysis, to discover the restriction of data, data patterns, and which unavailable or missing variables. • clustering: clustering procedures, in the data mining field, constitute some important methods [11] due to their significant-high abilities for deducing connections among different data objects. scientists have primarily utilized them for investigating datasets for the tracing of mobile. on different networks acquired from mobile networks, k-means is implemented the most, and in other works, including [12] and [13], it provides satisfactory results. the techniques of clustering are accepted, either a separated approach or hierarchical approaches. hierarchical techniques arrange items into a 4 sara elelimy and samir moustafa eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 figure 2. diagrams to show the explanatory data analysis(eda) relations. hierarchical structure, which can visually be represented diagrammatically. hierarchical algorithms can follow an organized method or separated one. however, partitioned clustering algorithms e.g., isodata and kmeans, directly group objects into numbers of categories k.a relevant comment is that hierarchical algorithms can also be used in categorizing objects into a definite number of categories, which can be finished by ending the algorithm at the required point/level. in all instances, there is no stipulated rule to determine the definite number of categories, the decision still remains either ascertained definitely relying on the accordance to certain clustering quality measures or knowledge about the data. innercluster distances. • standardization: standardizing a vector most often means subtracting a measure of location and dividing by a measure of scale. for example, if the vector contains random values with a gaussian distribution, you might subtract the mean and divide by the standard deviation, thereby obtaining a “standard normal” random variable with mean 0 and standard deviation 1, so standardizing the internet traffic before modeling will help in prediction. table 1. show the arima model parameters. white noise arima(0,0,0) random walk arima(0,1,0) with no constant random walk with drift arima(0,1,0) with constant auto-regression arima(p,0,0) moving average arima(0,0,q) • prediction: for mobile operators, it is considered necessary in making decisions associated with network optimization, and as a part of ml. arima model is one of the most renowned algorithms of prediction, as explained in [14]. it is significant for time series data in both static and practical manner. yt = c + p∑ i=1 ϕiyt−i + �i (1) the following are special models from arima: yt−i and �i are respectively the actual value and the random error at the time t, ϕi(i = 1, 2, 3, . . . ,p) are the model parameter and is a constant, the integer is known as the order of the model [15]. rnn model is another adopted model, model with many layers on the basis of short and long-term memory is referred to as lstm. a common lstm unit is composed of a cell, an input gate, an output gate, and a forget gate. the cell remembers values over arbitrary time intervals, and the three gates regulate the flow of information into and out of the cell [16]. it consists 5 big data in telecom industry: effective predictive techniques on cdrs eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 outputs to next layer ymc (τ + 1) youtm(τ + 1) output gating h(x) smc (τ) smc (τ + 1) cec 1.0 memorising yinm(τ + 1) input gating g(x) yv(τ) yi(τ + 1) figure 3. a standard term short memory (lstm) memory block, and the cell output is calculated by multiplying the cell state by the activation of the output gate. of memory blocks, and it can be trained with the use of black propagation. in this model, the issue of the gradient is gradually decreased [17]. ft = σ(xt ∗uf + ht−1 ∗wf ) (2) ct = tanh(xt ∗uc + ht−1 ∗wc) (3) it = σ(xt ∗ui + ht−1 ∗wi) (4) ot = σ(xt ∗uo + ht−1 ∗wo) (5) figure 4. daily activity. ct = ft ∗ct−1 + it ∗ct (6) ht = ot ∗ tanh(ct) (7) xt = input vector , ht−1 = previous cell output ct−1 = previous cell memory, ht= current cell output , ct = current cell memory. w,u = weight vectors for forget gate (ft), candidate (c),i/p gate (i) and o/p(o) [18]. both arima and rnn are performed in a better manner in comparison with others for time series prediction [19]. 3.3. analysis of data and prediction process generally, the base of our analysis is the data-intensive approach, and different techniques of machine learning are applied on datasets of cdrs because it contributes to the value of both business and scientific aspects. three analyses have been performed in our work: first analysis : the highest daily activity is identified in this analysis during a specific day. in addition to it, peak hours within a day are also identified. the first analysis’s results were derived concerning total and time activity, while peak hours are 11, 10, and 9 am, while 3 am is not a peak activity hour. in business aspects and network development, this result is quite beneficial because it will aid in the identification of which areas needs to be developed or requires more resources. it will also help in determined which country code or square grid develops more traffic due to which companies gain more revenues by targeting customers based on their geo-location. additionally, with resource management, it decreases its costs and expenses. 6 sara elelimy and samir moustafa eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 figure 5. analysis of residuals second analysis: this analysis compares and illustrates the weekly usage of the internet in november for three id cells portraying different areas for categories in the city of milan. it also included nightlife area, university area, and downtown area. it was indicated by the results that the downtown area’s peak is earlier than that of nightlife, phone calls are less in universities area on the weekends, and a decrease was experienced in the volume of calls. in optimization and resource allocation, these observations will help by defining which area is fully loaded and at what time, and it can help in defining temporary solutions for different peak hours, such as the deployment of pico cell. certain tests were carried out on the dataset to identify and select the proper and effective models for time series data. it is essential to discover trends, seasonality, and stationary of data. residuals analysis provides an indication if data is statistically stationary if the data is truly random noise, it can be classified as statistically stationary from figure 5. another testing method is the dickey-fuller stationary test, which is a quantitative test for residuals analysis; its null hypotheses represent that residual is not statically stationary. findings and results showed that the test statics is about -7, confirmed that residuals are statistically stationary. third analysis: in this analysis, three methods are implemented for prediction and modeling based on table 2. statistical tests to show dickey-fuller stationary test. result of dickey-fuller test: test statistic -7.405407e+00 p-value 7.367220e-11 # lags used 1.000000e+00 number of observation used 1.660000e+02 critical values(1%) -3.470370e+00 critical values(5%) -2.879114e+00 critical values(10%) -2.576139e+00 figure 6. arima hourly prediction of internet traffic for cell id 4456 internet usage. arima model is the first one, lstm is the second model, and the last model is developed on the model which was utilized in the kaggle competition. this model was validated on different types of data weekly for determining if modeling for a week is efficient enough for having similar results and whether it can be implemented on datasets that are collected at different time intervals. • arima for the datasets of one week, the applied model is arima (2, 1, 0). three id cells will be focused upon first for the central regions, and the obtained results are portrayed in the figures 6 and 7. moving on, 9998 cells were the target, as illustrated in figure 8. • lstm one input is included in this model for four blocks and a visible layer in the hidden layer. meanwhile, in the output layer, there is a single input. internet traffic prediction is shown in figure 9 for 4456 cell id every week. 7 big data in telecom industry: effective predictive techniques on cdrs eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 figure 7. arima hourly prediction of internet traffic for cell id 5060. figure 8. for all cells, internet traffic hourly prediction using arima figure 9. for 4456 cell id, internet traffic hourly prediction using arima • third prediction model in the kaggle competition, this model was utilized where it was implemented on several periods in contrast without information. generally, it is figure 10. downtown area results of internet traffic figure 11. nightlife and downtown areas and internet traffic data figure 12. universities area and internet traffic data based on many datasets which are periodically set every twenty-four hours. meanwhile, sin behavior is exhibited by internet traffic, as portrayed in figure 10. moving on, this model is implemented in three areas, which are categorized from our analysis. prediction results for nightlife and downtown are represented in figure 11 for the area of universities in figure 12. three models were applied for the prediction internet traffic based on hourly and weekly data results explained that the prediction model of arima is precise for the selected cells and with a 3 percent 8 sara elelimy and samir moustafa eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 test set and 70 percent data set. it recognized that 21 percent of test sets and 69 percent training sets were not sufficient enough in cell/data id. the obtained results, for the third model, it was indicated by the obtained results that this model is accurate and suitable for all the selected datasets with the university area being an exception. this area still has some issues, and it might be associated with the mobility of community patterns. the same conclusion as previous works was obtained for different dataset periods. thus, it was determined that this model was suitable for all datasets. results have indicated that the application of predictive models and intelligent data analysis for the prediction of traffic are considered significant, and they play a vital role for mobile operators, which will be quite useful in the routing of traffic. it can indicate yearly prediction as well for supporting network optimization, resource allocations, self-organizing networks, and investment planning. 4. discussion for mnos, this research is dedicated to big data management and applying ml/dl techniques in an efficient manner in the sector of data-driven apps and the telecommunication sector. comprehending the available data, which analytic tools are eligible and must be implemented, and which type of information or data should be collected are significant for any provider of service for harvesting the best results from the data. big data is selected and applied in this work, and t is vital to recognize that techniques of machine earning and deep learning contribute significantly to both the industrial and academic sector and playing a significant role in wireless network application like network traffic prediction using different clustering techniques, it is possible to cluster mobile users based on cdr records and generate location-based recommendation system. cdrs mining using these techniques then existing one expands its role and applications not only for finical usage, but also by extracting huge and important knowledge from this dataset introduces different application for telecoms: 1. analyzing cdrs data can be provided demographic about genders and age where we can use rnn or cnn to predict these features of mobile users. 2. rnns are employed to determine the metro density from massive cdrs data, they propose to identify the trajectory of the customer as a sequence of locations as input to rnnmodel to handle this sequential data. 3. from code number information in cdrs, it is possible to predict tourist‘s locations and make business packages. it has been proven by this practical work how benefits in the business and operational aspect of the telecommunication industry can be obtained with the effective application of techniques of big data instead of traditional techniques. models like lstm and arima was applied for the prediction of traffic, and it was explained that results were quite beneficial in strategic and short plans for the operator. for the performance of our practical part, cdr database selection was based on the significance of the dataset for the mno since it is indicated by our results that cdrs analysis has much significance beyond and currently in different areas like investment plans on the basis of optimization network, fault detection traffic prediction, network optimization, and resource allocation. for future work, we will apply ml/dl techniques on different unlabeled datasets since mos-generated data in wireless network systems have these challenge able features, which required specific techniques. acknowledgement this research is developed on the basis of a master thesis “methods to efficiently handle big data in 5g networks” 20181, double degree erasmus + program between higher school of economics and uas technikum wien. i would like to express my sincere gratitude to my academic supervisors and the professors and lecturers at the big data systems program. improvement is made during study at skoltech. 1https://www.hse.ru/en/edu/vkr/219430036 9 big data in telecom industry: effective predictive techniques on cdrs eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 references [1] zeng, d., gu, l. and guo, s. (2015) cost minimization for big data processing in geo-distributed data centers. in cloud networking for big data (springer), 59–78. [2] bi, s., zhang, r., ding, z. and cui, s. (2015) wireless communications in the era of big data. ieee communications magazine 53(10): 190–199. [3] he, y., yu, f.r., zhao, n., yin, h., yao, h. and qiu, r.c. (2016) big data analytics in mobile cellular networks. ieee access 4: 1985–1996. [4] zheng, k., yang, z., zhang, k., chatzimisios, p., yang, k. and xiang, w. (2016) big data-driven optimization for mobile networks toward 5g. ieee network 30(1): 44–51. [5] imran, a., zoha, a. and abu-dayya, a. (2014) challenges in 5g: how to empower son with big data for enabling 5g. ieee network 28(6): 27–33. [6] boccardi, f., heath, r.w., lozano, a., marzetta, t.l. and popovski, p. (2014) five disruptive technology directions for 5g. ieee communications magazine 52(2): 74–80. [7] ramaprasath, a., srinivasan, a. and lung, c.h. (2015) performance optimization of big data in mobile networks. in 2015 ieee 28th canadian conference on electrical and computer engineering (ccece) (ieee): 1364–1368. [8] samulevicius, s., pedersen, t.b. and sorensen, t.b. (2015) most: mobile broadband network optimization using planned spatio-temporal events. in 2015 ieee 81st vehicular technology conference (vtc spring) (ieee): 1– 5. [9] blondel, v.d., decuyper, a. and krings, g. (2015) a survey of results on mobile phone datasets analysis. epj data science 4(1): 10. [10] italia, t. (2015), telecom italia big data challenge. url https://dandelion.eu/datamine/open-big-data/. [11] xu, r. and wunsch, d. (2005) survey of clustering algorithms. ieee transactions on neural networks 16(3): 645–678. [12] soto, v. and frías-martínez, e. (2011) automated land use identification using cell-phone records. in proceedings of the 3rd acm international workshop on mobiarch: 17–22. [13] liu, j., chang, n., zhang, s. and lei, z. (2015) recognizing and characterizing dynamics of cellular devices in cellular data network through massive data analysis. international journal of communication systems 28(12): 1884–1897. [14] zhang, g.p. (2003) time series forecasting using a hybrid arima and neural network model. neurocomputing 50: 159–175. [15] adhikari, r. and agrawal, r.k. (2013) an introductory study on time series modeling and forecasting. arxiv preprint arxiv:1302.6613 . [16] hochreiter, s. and schmidhuber, j. (1997) long shortterm memory. neural computation 9(8): 1735–1780. [17] sundermeyer, m., schlüter, r. and ney, h. (2012) lstm neural networks for language modeling. in thirteenth annual conference of the international speech communication association. [18] staudemeyer, r.c. and morris, e.r. (2019) understanding lstm–a tutorial into long short-term memory recurrent neural networks. arxiv preprint arxiv:1909.09586 . [19] ho, s.l., xie, m. and goh, t.n. (2002) a comparative study of neural network and box-jenkins arima modeling in time series prediction. computers & industrial engineering 42(2-4): 371–375. 10 sara elelimy and samir moustafa eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 06 2020 07 2020 | volume 4 | issue 11 | e1 https://dandelion.eu/datamine/open-big-data/ 1 introduction 2 analytic tools and data sources for telecoms 2.1 telecom data sources 2.2 contribution of cdrs or call details records 3 techniques and methodology 3.1 data set 3.2 methods and models 3.3 analysis of data and prediction process 4 discussion assesing the feasibility of smart grid technology on electrical distribution grids 1 assesing the feasibility of smart grid technology on electrical distribution grids tatenda kanyowa1, *, rindai p. mahoso1 1harare institute of technology, po box be277 ganges road belvedere, harare, zimbabwe department of industrial and manufacturing engineering abstract this paper gives a critical analysis framework on the impact of smart grids on electrical distribution grids. it highlights the discrepancies between the developed and developing countries on the adoption of this technology. the concept of smart grids is gaining appreciable recognition in the developed world’s electricity networks. the need to assess the impact of this new technology is critical as the laws of infrastructural clearly show that this is the direction to go if speedy and efficient development is going to be achieved in the developing world. a case study of developing countries was cited as a reference base and compared against developed countries. as developing countries still have the majority of their people still without access to power, the paper shows that the capacity for the implementation of smart grid technologies is ripe for implementation, albeit at a rather high fiscal cost. keywords: developing country, developed country, smart grids. handling editor: akshat agrawal (amity university gurgaon, india) received on 09 july 2020, accepted on 24 july 2020, published on 28 august 2020 copyright © 2020 tatenda kanyowa et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.18-8-2020.166008 *corresponding author. email: tkanyowa@hit.ac.zw 1. introduction as the technology advances and the demand for electricity increases, it has become imperative to implement methods that address the generation, distribution and storage of electrical power. the development of electrical grids globally has been very slow over the years especially in africa and with the everincreasing energy demands it has led to economic, environmental and political unrest. due to these concerns, there has been an ongoing global discussion on implementation of smart grids with first world countries showing a great deal of commitment. smart grids offer a great deal of benefits when it comes to revamping and making strides in the electric network structure and most work carried out in this area has been centred on developed countries. to comprehend smart grids one has to know its perceived characteristics which include facilitation in the generation, distribution and storage, optimizing asset utilization and real time monitoring. [1] smart grids synchronize across the value chain from end users to investors all the way to shareholder by significantly reducing the associated costs that come with environmental impacts and at the same time manipulating high system performances, consequently this a critical piece of infrastructure in the big data matrix. [2] recent studies have shown that developing countries have the highest urban growth population which has seen power needs showing a positive correlation as well. this urban migration is also ironically in the population following the more developed urban areas with electricity. statistically is has been shown that the majority of the world experience the scourge of power outages or lack of power therefor, with 17% of the global population without electricity and 40% still using non-renewable sources for cooking and space heating. a global survey has also shown that by 2050, seven out of ten people are expected to live in cities. however the repercussions of this newfound access are frequent blackouts that will leave eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ tatenda kanyowa , rindai p. mahoso 2 many people in the developing countries with at least 20 hours per day with the average urbanite zimbabwean already going through long period per day of power outage. these effects are already evident as the power grid is burdened with cities overpopulated and infrastructure development of the grid only at 30% of potential development. india which has one of the largest population in the world faced the largest blackout in history when the electrical grid crushed. this caused a cease in many operations that supported the economy and as a result the economy experienced the effects of the blackout. this is another example of how the energy grid suffers when it is over-powered by the population and there are no backup structures to curb the effects. as developing countries evolve into modern metropolises, it is clear that the best solution for developing countries hinges on the development of efficient and reliable generation and distribution systems for the advantage of the general populace. [3] in this light, the timing is perfect as the band wagon of data manipulation (big data) has officially turned its stare of intent towards energy generators and distributors to make them more viable and reliable. what this means is that, smart meters in every household that allow energy measurements and control energy consumptions. for developing countries that have an exponential city growth and an unbalanced mix of energy supply and demand and theft, the changes could be transformational. india loses 25% of its electricity during distribution, usa loses 8% and zimbabwe loses 14% which translates to $40 billion, $25 billion and $250million respectively in monetary terms. the smart grid is still very much in its infancy stage but a lot of capital is being invested each year into the industry and is expected to reach higher figures globally by 2030. the south american number one player brazil alone will invest $36 billion in smart grids to substitute 63 million energy readers with smart meters. india is expected to pump $10 billion and one of the biggest economies in the form of china outmatched the united states in 2013 with $4 billion investment. these are however very high figures for the developing countries of africa. this then sets up an intriguing paradox for the developing nations. [4] smart grids need to be monitored meticulously in developing countries and guesstimated delicately especially when it comes to financials to safeguard the narrow equity available in these countries. expense recovery for smart grids investment is challenging in developing countries due to the limit on the figures by which tariffs can be surged and still remain in an affordable range. when synergistically mixed with renewable energy capacity and enforced efficaciously, smart grids result in a plethora of advantages such as reduction of power outages and transmission losses. [5] table 1. associated betterment for investing smart grid technology in developed and developing countries. advantage beneficiary downsized outages end users scaled down electricity losses energy distributor lessened carbon dioxide emissions surrounding community decreased additional service costs energy distributor delayed investments for distribution energy distributor minimized equipment failure energy distributor extensive research and studies have indicated the area of interest has been exhausted even though the technology has been in its infancy in terms of implementation. however the current studies be they similar in nature or dissimilar do not clarify and highlight a visible plan for both developed and developing countries. most studies either focus on one of the two, either developed or developing countries. the question remains are the conditions for implementation still the same for the different areas. what are the areas of focus, what are the cost benefits for each area, what are the challenges to be faced in each area amongst other questions? the novelty of this article hinges on critically giving an insight and answers these questions in a meticulous manner. the article or research is based on recent findings from both developed and developing countries so that a clearer conclusion could be reached on the feasibility of this technology without a one sided view. the article commences by analysing the types of smart grid technologies available and then goes on critically compare the issues faced in developing and developed countries in trying to adopt this technology. a roadmap to expedite and facilitate the adoption of smart grids is then highlighted and the article concludes by explaining the eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 assesing the feasibility of smart grid technology on electrical distribution grids 3 challenges experienced by both developed and developing countries. 2. objectives/ rationale of the study • to analyse the stages of development and research of smart grid systems in developing and developed countries. • t conduct quantitative and qualitative research on smart grids. • to study the roadmap or future of smart grids. 3. smart grid technologies wide area monitoring responsible for assessing performance in real time and subsequently showing the result of system elements crosswise the linkage and throughout the massive geographical areas. these state of the art operations scale down on blackouts and merges with a mix of renewables. progressive technologies generate data which informs decision makers mitigate disturbances and improve transmission capacity. 3.1 renewable and distributed generation integration a synthesis of renewable and various energy sources which are distributed encapsulate all the scale levels from large to medium to small scale. this means we are looking at commercial and residential buildings which pose different challenges when it comes to quickness and manageability. 3.2 advanced metering structures allows the dispatch ability of a mix of technologies to already existing modern smart systems which permits an exchange of data in two directions, giving end users and distributors information on pricing and usage as well the timeline of power used and the quantity. 3.3 customer side systems probably the most improved and sophisticated system which aids in power usage at all levels. the information is generally shown on a dashboard and usually it comes in the form of power peak demand and power or efficiency gains. this kind of system synergizes manual responses from the end user and the automated responses on pricing. [6] 4. smart grids and renewables the ultimate goal of every nation is to run on sustainable energy sources and in particular we will mention renewables. the increase of renewable energy is a fundamental ingredient in accomplishing the global power mix and such an action will require an upgrade from old grid systems to new robust energy systems, case in point smart grid systems. smart grid systems when incorporated with renewables need to possess some of the following characteristics; 4.1 distributed generation smart grids facilitate the precise pricing and valuation of renewables as appropriated energy generation has several effects on distribution systems. smart grids provide comprehensive data on related output and performance and aid the operators in putting accurate figures on the cost of generated renewables. it should also be noted that the information and control is useful in several ways which include but are not limited to reducing output or disconnecting distributed energy. 4.2 variability the principal challenge in electricity systems is always maintain the match for demand with supply be it nonrenewables or renewables. traditional fuel powered plants operate on set points and operators rely on them to produce a steady output with less fluctuations. however with renewables such solar or wind which are intermittent in nature, there is always going to be variations in output resulting in an unmatched demand and supply. when smart grids are incorporated they make it achievable to combine a broad spectrum of renewables. 4.3 capital investment smart grids diffusely highlight on the issue of equity required for renewables by supporting private financing in power systems. in past times the power generators were responsible for enacting power plants. with the ever changing times policies and governments have given support to private investors to finance their power plants along the regulated guidelines. [7] 5. developed versus developing countries smart grid technologies present a premium of chances for both developed and developing countries. a study shows that the pushing elements for the approval of smart grid technologies in developing economies revealed that these often vary in analogy to the drivers in developed countries. as indicated by figure 1, the comparison eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 tatenda kanyowa , rindai p. mahoso 4 indicates that while bettering system efficiency is crucial for both developed and developing countries, increasing system reliability and achieving secure revenue collection has a higher priority. it can be clearly seen from figure 1 that developing countries need to focus more on reliability and system improvements and they focus more revenue collection whilst developed countries have improved their supporting policies to enable renewable energy generation and new products introduction in conjunction with system efficiency improvements. [8] figure 1. an analogy of the main drivers for investments in smart grids (developing and developed countries) due to these different contrast drivers for smart grid investment, developing countries also have different technological priorities when it comes to smart grids. figure 2, indicates the contrast in the technological priorities for smart grid installation for developing and developed countries. figure 2 highlights how developed and developing countries prioritizes technological improvements and this can be attributed to the differences in economical advantages between the two. figure 2. an analogy of the technological preferences for installations of smart grids (developing and developed countries) moreover, table 2 also indicates some of the problems experienced by the electricity network in many developing countries and their corresponding quick fixes which can be used to address these issues. the problems are similar in nature for both developed and developing countries which means an action to implement would also mean these issues have to be tackled. distributed generation from renewables, limited generation capacity, costs and ageing infrastructure are some of the challenges which can be resolved by balancing demand and supply, load management and efficient generation among other solutions. [8] eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 5 table 2. problems that are faced in the electricity network and the complementary solutions existing problems in the energy system solutions for smart grid renewable and distributed generations matching supply and demand with existing business models restrained output capacity managing load and minimizing on peak loads and times ageing infrastructure implementation of automatic systems that avoid power outages value and emissions of energy supply reliable output levels in terms of supply and demand revenue losses accountability of all power generated and distributed via automated systems 6. methodology the authors work is purely a research article which focused on the impact of smart grids on electrical distribution grid for both developed and developing countries. the research approach was a combination of both qualitative and quantitative data gathering to understand the differences and similarities between the developed and developing countries. for quantitative data gathering it was purely based on recent studies of research papers and journals on the subject area. the research stemmed from the need to understand the challenges experienced in implementing smart grids. recent research studies and supporting journals were guidelines for the quantitative data for both developed and developing countries. as for qualitative data, a few interactions with management in energy sectors aided in formulating some of the conclusions. it was a constraint though in this section as the authors were dealing with people who have not yet implemented the technology but with a roadmap. the analysis of the gathered data was however a success as it was near accurate and a mixture of current studies, implementation and near implementation. 7. success of smart grids implementation 7.1 distribution of a mix of generation technology in a bid to minimize the carbon footprint correlated to power supply, a plethora of variable generation technologies have been deployed. the escalation is expected to expedite in the distant future with most countries incorporating these technologies in their electricity systems; zimbabwe included. the zimbabwean government has encouraged the development of independent power generation companies with an emphasis on renewables. as the growth accelerates, it will become challenging to establish a steady and decent management of energy systems supply depending on conventional grid architectures and limited flexibility. smart grids will however will give strength to deployment of a mix of generation technologies by providing operators with real time information that enables management of generation, demand and power quality thus increasing system flexibility and maintaining stability and balance. spain initiated a global pioneering to monitor and control these variable renewable energy resources by allowing the maximum amount of production to be integrated under secure conditions. [9] 7.2 electrification of transport a statistical survey indicates that due to the increase of electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles, the transport sector will consume 10% of electricity consumption. charging of electric needs meticulous monitoring or it may result in a surge of peak loading on the electricity infrastructure which consequently leads to current peak demands. smart grid technology allows prioritized charging in cases of low demand exploiting the use of both low cost generation and extra system capacity. in the long term there is a possibility that vehicles could give stored electricity in the batteries back into the system when needed. the netherlands engaged in a project that established a network of electric car recharging sites using smart communication and communication technology assesing the feasibility of smart grid technology on electrical distribution grids eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 tatenda kanyowa , rindai p. mahoso 6 applications to enable distributors to deal with additional power demands. [10] 7.3 hurdles to overcome in smart grid adoption the electrification of developed countries has spanned over a couple of years and continued financial support is required to maintain a consistent power supply. with growing energy requirements and changes, ageing distribution and transmission infrastructure will need replacement and updating. the downside of this action is that technology investment will be obstructed by current market and regulatory policies which have been enacted for long periods and overlooking the perks of new innovative technologies. smart grids offer a way to maximize existing infrastructure through better monitoring and management. fast emerging economies like china have a different assortment of smart grids infrastructure needs from developed countries and its response to its high growth in demand will result in newer distribution and transmission infrastructure. europe and america have the highest number of ageing infrastructure especially at the transmission level. japan has been successful in deploying the smart grids which operate at high reliability levels and now focusing on distribution levels. [11] 7.4 peak demand the variation in energy demand is high across the day periods and throughout the seasons. the distribution systems are tailored to cater for high demand periods and during non-peak hours the system is under-utilized. enacting systems which meet erratic peak demand requires huge investments that would not be needed if the demand curves were flatter. smart grids can reduce peak demand by providing information and incentives to consumers to allow them to shift consumption away from peak demand periods. the management of peak demand enables improved system planning throughout the entire electricity system, increasing options for new loads. these benefits are essential for new systems where demand growth is very high and for existing and ageing systems that need maintenance. [12] 7.5 capital expenditure all types of smart grid will require major investment and the actors investing will face investment risk accordingly. the more advance types that promise greater benefit require investors with different interests to join forces and to at least coordinate their investments. three factors which determine investment include; dealing with new risks and uncertainties, dealing with new decision making arenas in which investment plans need to be defended and dealing with the new power position of the electricity consumer and prosumer. each factor need to be analysed with respect to the market forces. [13] 7.6 tailoring smart grids to developing countries and emerging economies first world countries have advanced contemporary systems for smart grids whilst the majority of existing grids that do not operate constantly over a lengthy period, and other have no infrastructure at all. developing countries and upcoming economies are classified by steep expansion in energy demand, high commercial and technical losses in a context of rapid economic growth and development. such areas often present important issues and probabilities concerning the subject area. smart grids play a crucial role in the distribution of new electricity infrastructure in developing countries by allowing more competent action and minimized costs. minor peripheral systems not networked to a centralized electricity asset and initially employed as a price effective approach to rural electrification might be later connected easily to a national or regional infrastructure. as a means to access to electricity in sparsely populated areas, smart grids could enable a transition from simple, one off approaches to electrification to community grids that can then connect to national and regional grids. the deployment stages go from battery based and single household electrification to micro, mini or standalone grids to national grid and regional interconnection. these stages require standardisation and interoperability to be scaled up to the next level with higher amounts of supply and demand. each successive step can increase reliability and the amount of power available if managed in a way that allows seamless variation from the community. ultimately the end point of smart grid deployment is expected to be similar across the globe but the routes and time to get there could be different. 8. recommendations • cultivate research to enhance smart grid programs where the general objective is to achieve dependable and effective grids to cope with the ever changing outlook. • foster dissemination and knowledge initiatives with the end objective of allowing grid operators to have a central role and allow them to providing the largest number of security requisites. • improve the regulatory and policy framework in which this legal framework would aid in harmonizing existing policies which would be considered as a reference with which to align policies and regulations on other aspects. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 assesing the feasibility of smart grid technology on electrical distribution grids 7 • a key element is to allow the revamp of the existing infrastructure which is of old age. the result in to enact systems which will have a long life span and provide efficient output and robustness • development of roadmaps for standardisation and interoperability which allows for devices to communicate and operate seamlessly across all levels of the grid. • initiate innovation in business models where the government, regulators and utilities should define roles and operational boundaries. government should collaborate with manufacturers, network owners and operators to create sandbox environments in which new distributed energy business models can be operated in real world conditions to identify least cost integration options. 9. the future current market systems are coupled with hurdles that hinder the proper implementation of smart grids. it is imperative that regulatory and market models that address investments, prices and end user involvement advance as new technologies offer new options. most typical markets offer vertically integrated utilities which own and operate infrastructure assets across the generation, distribution and transmission. therefore roadmap for the developing countries to achieving the feat of smart grids is divided into seven actions and these actions are sequential in their implementation. the first action is the challenge faced with grids and the associated advantages that grids offer. second action explains the trending status of smart grids coupled with combined expenses and profits. third action is a future perception for smart grid distribution. the fourth and fifth action examine smart grid technologies and policies and milestones. the sixth action analyses current trends and the outlook of international collaboration and the seventh presents an action plan and identifies future steps. these steps will encompass the full system from generation, transmission, distribution and management for the system. [15] 10. conclusion this research article has articulated the adoption of smart grids and the constraints to be faced by both developed and developing nations. in advanced countries, strides have been made in adoption and implementation of these systems with developing countries still lagging behind. the major achievements have been efficiency, reliability and productivity through the use of smart grids. power generation is not limited to engineering problems, it is multi-dimensional and affects the infrastructure and exchange of information between systems. the following points can be drawn from the study; • smart grids can be seen as a basal asset that give the capability to replace adequate use of data to form more effective investments in the electricity systems. • smart grids have the potential to change the outlook of how energy generation devising is carried out and how large scale electricity markets are planned. the data gathered will give users the liberty to control their energy use as well as allow utility companies to better comprehend customer needs. • smart grid technologies clearly come at a high investment cost and fiscal cost especially to the developing nations which are inherently poorer. however it can also be argued that going for outdated infrastructure in trying to reduce costs may inherently cost a higher running cost, as well as a cost to upgrade. it can also be seen that the cost upgrading old infrastructure to smart systems is evidently higher as many components become redundant and new components are needed altogether, a position which puts developing countries at an advantage as the grid expansion projects and capital power projects can be planned with the smart grid in mind and thereby working efficiently to make the design of the new grid less capital intensive to a point of affordability. references [1] l. lo schiavo. smart metering and smart grids: the italian regulatory experience. [2] presented at the kasct smart grid workshop 2011. riyadh, saudi arabia 2011 [3] bazilian, m. and welsch, m. et. al (2011), smart and just grids: opportunities for subsaharan africa, imperial college london, london. [4] iea (2010), energy technology perspectives 2010, oecd/iea, paris. [5] boots, m., thielens, d., verheij, f. (2010), international example developments in smart grids possibilities for application in the netherlands (confidential report for the dutch government), kema nederland b.v., arnhem. [6] s. kalogirou, k. metaxiotis, and a. mellit. "artificial intelligence techniques for modern energy applications". intelligent information systems and knowledge management for energy: applications for decision support, usage, and environmental protection. igi global, 2010, pp. 1-39. [7] smart grid projects in europe: lessons learned and current developments, jrc reference report. 2011: european union eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 tatenda kanyowa , rindai p. mahoso 8 [8] the future of the electric grid, an interdisciplinary mit study. 2011; massachusetts institute of technology 978-09828008-6-7 [9] p.s fox-penner. smart power: climate change, the smart grid and the future of electric utilities. 2010; island press: washington, dc [10] j. cardenas, a. garcia, j. l. romeral, and j. urresty, "a multi-objective ga to demand-side management in an automated warehouse," in etfa2009, the ieee 2009 conference on emerging technologies and factory. [11] c. clasters. smart grids: another step towards competition, energy security and climate change objectives. energy policy 39 2011; 5399-5408 [12] h. slootweg. smart grids. the future or fantasy? smart meteringmake it happen, 2009 iet. 2009; 1-19. [13] r. harley, j. liang. "computational intelligence in smart grids."ieee symposium series on computational intelligence (ssci) 2011 ciasg, april 11-15, 2011. [14] s.d.j. mcarthur, e. m. davidson, v.m. catterson, a.l. dimeas, n.d. hatziargyriou, f. ponci, t. funabashi. "multi-agent systems for power engineering applications — part ii: technologies, standards, and tools for building multi-agent systems". ieee transactions on power systems, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 1753-1759, nov. 2007. [15] p. mcdaniel, s mclaughlin. security and privacy challenges in the smart grid. security& privacy, iee. 7 (may-june 3): 200ppp9; 75-77 [16] national institute of standards and technology (nist). nistir 7176: system protection profile industrial control systems. decisive analytics. 2014. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e3 performance evaluation of arima and fb-prophet forecasting methods in the context of endemic diseases: a case study of gedaref state in sudan 1 performance evaluation of arima and fb-prophet forecasting methods in the context of endemic diseases: a case study of gedaref state in sudan hussein ali hussein1, mukhtar m. e. mahmoud2,* and haroun a. eisa3 1department of information technology, university of gedaref, gedaref, sudan 2faculty of computer science and information technology, university of kassala, kassala, sudan 3department of computer science, alsharg ahlia college, kassala, sudan abstract today, artificial intelligence is a key tool for turning a city into a smart city, and advances in information and communication technology (ict) have led to the development of smart cities with many different parts. smart health is one of these components and is used to improve healthcare by providing services such as disease forecasting, early diagnosis, and others. there are various machine learning algorithms available now that can help with s-health services, but which is better for disease forecasting? gedaref state, for example, has some of sudan's heaviest rains, and malaria and pneumonia are widespread throughout the year. predicting future trends for these diseases has been a major focus for researchers in order for gedaref's administration and the state's ministry of health to design effective ways to prevent and control the development of these diseases, as well as to prepare an adequate stock of medicine. as a result, it is necessary to establish a trustworthy and accurate forecasting model to aid gedaref's government in developing economic and medical strategies for dealing with these diseases, as well as taking action on medical resource allocation. this study uses a time series dataset collected from the state's ministry of health to estimate malaria and pneumonia as common diseases in gedaref state, sudan, five months later. to comprehend the overall number of cases of diseases, two forecasting methodologies, namely the arima and prophet models, are applied to the disease's dataset. the performance of the arima and fb-prophet forecasting systems in predicting malaria and pneumonia diseases in gedaref state is compared in this study. the data was collected from the state's ministry of health between january 2017 and december 2021. the results reveal that the arima technique outperforms the fb-prophet forecasting method in both malaria (rmse: 182.8, mae: 141.6, mape: 0.0057, and mase: 0.0537) and pneumonia (rmse: 1400.3, mae: 1001.4, mape: 0.0513, and mase: 0.9136). keywords: smart city, artificial intelligence, pneumonia and malaria diseases, endemic diseases, gedaref state. received on 07 february 2023, accepted on 08 march 2023, published on 30 march 2023 copyright © 2023 hussein a. et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v7i2.3023 *corresponding author. email: 1. introduction in recent years, smart cities have dominated discussions about shifting economic growth, local geographic development, and accessibility. despite enormous amounts of global investment in smart cities, such as $608 billion usd, many people are still unclear about what smart cities are. a smart city is defined as a metropolitan area that uses electronic and technological infrastructure, such as information and communication technology (ict), to collect real-time data and insights, supply key services, and address local issues. smart cities are also used to improve municipal operations such as public transportation, power and water supply, and sanitation. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ hussein ali hussein, mukhtar m. e. mahmoud and haroun a. eisa 2 using this information, the city administration may make educated decisions about establishing effective solutions to the city's present problems [1]. the use of machine learning and other cognitive sciences to help doctors make decisions is an important way ai is used in medicine.ai could help specialists and clinical professionals share more accurate findings and treatment plans by using information about the patient and other data. furthermore, by breaking down massive volumes of data to produce better preventative care suggestions for patients, ai can help make medical services more predictive and proactive. medical services are likely the most essential area in the bigger picture of huge information because of their critical role in a flourishing society. ai implementation knowledge can mean the difference between life and death in the healthcare profession. in their regular work, specialists, medical caregivers, and other medical service employees can profit from computer-based intelligence. simulated intelligence in medical services can increase preventive care and personal happiness, lead to more precise judgments and treatment techniques, and result in improved overall outcomes. by evaluating data from administration, medical services, and other sources, simulated intelligence can also anticipate and track the development of dangerous diseases. as a result, as a tool for preventing illnesses and pandemics, ai has the potential to play a vital role in global well-being [2]. gedaref state is located in eastern sudan, bordering ethiopia; kassala and khartoum states in the north; aljazira state in the west; and sennar state in the south. the international border crossings in gedaref state are the hamdayet border crossing in the north and the gallabat border crossing in the south. gedaref is home to many tribes, including arabs, beja, nubians, and others. the state is known for its large-scale rainfed agriculture activities and vast agricultural acreage. sorghum and sesame are the two main agricultural products. rainfed agriculture and the production of arabic gum are the state's main sources of revenue [3]. malaria and pneumonia are the most common diseases in gedaref state, with the most cases between 2017 and 2021, according to data from the state's ministry of health. the who says that malaria is a dangerous disease that is found in most tropical countries. prevention and therapy are both options. however, simple malaria can progress to a severe type of sickness that is commonly fatal without treatment if a prompt diagnosis and appropriate treatment are not delivered. female anopheles mosquito bites, which are not contagious and cannot spread the disease from person to person. plasmodium falciparum and plasmodium vivax are the two parasite species that cause malaria and do the most harm to people. there are around 400 anopheles mosquito species, and about 40 of these, known as vector species, are capable of conveying disease. several factors, such as the kind of local mosquitoes, influence the likelihood of infection, with certain areas being more vulnerable than others. the risk is greatest in tropical settings during the rainy season, although it may vary seasonally [4]. pneumonia, according to the world health organization, is an acute respiratory disorder that mostly affects the lungs. when a healthy person breathes, tiny air sacs called alveoli fill up and form the lungs. when a person gets pneumonia, the alveoli get blocked with pus and fluid, making breathing difficult and oxygen intake limited. pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of death in children worldwide. pneumonia killed 740 children under the age of five in 2019, accounting for 14% of all deaths in children under the age of five but 22% of all deaths in children aged one to five. pneumonia affects children and families all throughout the world, with the highest fatality rates in southern asia and subsaharan africa. pneumonia in children can be avoided, and it can be managed with low-cost, low-tech treatment and care [5]. using past and present data, time-series forecasting is a way to predict future values over time or at a single point in time. we may make well-informed decisions about the ministry of health's strategy and future trends by looking at data from the past [6]. the autoregressive integrated moving average (arima) method is a one-dimensional technique. the ar component, often known as p, is calculated by correlating current values in a data series with past values in the same series. the ma component, q, is obtained by associating current values of a random error term with prior values. current and historical data mean and variance values are thought to be steady, or unaffected, over time. a component (symbolized by d) is included if necessary to compensate for a lack of stationarity via differencing. in a non-seasonal arima (p, d, q) model, the number or order of ar terms is denoted by p, the number or order of differences by d, and the number or order of ma terms by q. the parameters p, d, and q are all numbers that are bigger than or equal to 0 [7]. fb-prophet is a time series data forecasting method based on an additive model that takes into account yearly, monthly and daily seasonality as well as holiday factors. it works best with time series that have strong seasonal influences and data from multiple seasons. prophet is robust to missing data and trend changes, and it deals effectively with outliers [8]. this study presents estimates of malaria and pneumonia as common diseases in gedaref state, sudan, five months later, using a time series method and a dataset collected from the state's ministry of health. to comprehend the overall number of cases of diseases, two forecasting methodologies, namely the arima and prophet models, are applied to the disease's dataset. the performance of the arima and fb-prophet forecasting systems in predicting malaria and pneumonia diseases in gedaref state is compared in this study. the data was collected from the state's ministry of health between january 2017 and december 2021. although there are several predicting studies in the literature, we could not find much that compares arima and prophet time series eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first performance evaluation of arima and fb-prophet forecasting methods in the context of endemic diseases: a case study of gedaref state in sudan 3 models at the same time to compare and analyze the malaria and pneumonia datasets. to the best of our knowledge, the dataset investigated in all of the studies listed below was limited to certain commodities or places. unlike prior studies that focused on a specific condition, this one looked at a number of them. furthermore, the most popular forecasting approaches have been used for completeness. the rest of the paper is structured as follows: section 2 presents the related work. section 3 describes the dataset and methodology used. section 4 shows the results of the methods employed and investigates the outcomes of various methods. section 5 discusses the findings. section 6 concludes the paper. 2. related work this section provides a summary of the most relevant papers on the application of arima and fb-prophet in epidemiology. ersoz et al. [9] compare the accuracy of arima, prophet, and holtwinters exponential smoothing forecasting algorithms for covid-19 disease epidemiology in europe. the dataset was obtained from the world health organization (who) and comprises covid-19 case data from european countries classified by the who between 2020 and 2022. the results show that the holt-winters exponential smoothing approach (rmse: 0.2080, mae: 0.1747) outperforms the arima and prophet forecasting methods; the study's main weakness is the limited amount of available data. ziyuan ye et al. [10] made a hybrid model to predict how dirty the air will be in shenzhen, china. for blending time and space relationships, it is based on arima (the auto-regressive integrated moving average model) and prophet. after training their models with data from 11 sites that measure air quality, the researchers gave their models weights. experiment results demonstrated that this hybrid technique can improve air pollutant prediction in shenzhen. in certain ways, arima is more accurate than prophet, but it takes 10 times as long as b. the majority of arima's computation time is spent seeking for the best sequence of (p, d, q) and (p, d, q, s). kumar et al. [11] suggested that data from supermarkets be used to make an fb prophet tool that can predict how much food will be sold. in the proposed study, many forecasting models, such as the additive model, the autoregressive integrated moving average (arima) model, and the fb prophet model, were looked at. according to the proposed research effort, fb prophet is a better prediction model in terms of low error, better prediction, and better fitting. the statistical approaches given by sirisha et al. [12] for this successful inquiry, the autoregressive integrated moving average (arima) and seasonal arima models (sarima), as well as the deep learning technique of long short-term memory (lstm) neural network modeling in time series forecasting, were applied. it was converted into a stationary dataset for arima but not sarima or lstm. based on test data, fitted models were constructed and utilized to forecast profit. forecasts for the next five years have been completed with 93.84% (arima), 94.378% (sarima), and 97.01% accuracy (lstm). in terms of developing the optimal model, the results show that lstm beats both statistical models. ning et al. [13] present a machine learning-based time series forecasting system that uses existing data as time series and extracts prominent attributes from historical data to predict future time sequence values. three methods were explored and evaluated to overcome the restrictions of traditional production forecasting: autoregressive integrated moving averages (arima), the long-short-term memory (lstm) network, and prophet. this study begins with reflective oil supply data from a well in an unconventional reservoir in the denverjulesburg (dj) basin, and the application of arima, lstm, and prophet techniques to 65 wells in the dj basin demonstrates that arima and lstm perform better than prophet—most likely because not all oil production data includes seasonal changes and arima is strong in forecasting the oil production of wells across the dj basin. 3. material and method this section talks about the malaria and pneumonia datasets that were used in this paper and how they were evaluated. while figure 1 depicts the workflow of our methodology, the three subsections that follow, namely i) dataset, ii) arima technique, and iii) fb-prophet technique, provide details on each phase. figure 1. flowchart of our methodology the methodology of the work is divided into 5 steps as follows: step 1: disease dataset: this step concerns collecting the disease dataset from the ministry of health. diseases dataset data pre-processing fb-prophet method arima method forecasting forecasting performance evaluation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first hussein ali hussein, mukhtar m. e. mahmoud and haroun a. eisa 4 step 2: data pre-processing: this step contains three stages to guarantee the accuracy and completeness of the data: i) data cleaning; ii) feature selection; and iii) feature extraction and transformation. step 3: time series forecasting methods (arima and fb-prophet): in this step, we prepare the system for predicting diseases five months later. step 4: forecasting: this step concerns conducting the forecasting methods and gives the results for each one. step 5: performance evaluation: in this step, we use the error metrics (rmse, mae, mape, and mase) to evaluate the performance of forecasting methods and choose the best one. 3.1. dataset the diseases dataset in gedaref state was collected by the ministry of health's statistics department and the state's information center. the dataset contains data on the total number of disease cases from january 1, 2017 to december 31, 2021. the dataset contains 25062 records from all diseases in the state during this time period, as well as 20 characteristics. the features of the dataset are ("quarter", "diseases", "diseases code", "male -1", "female -1"," male 1-4 years", "female 1-4 years", "male 5-14 years", "female 5-14 years", "male 15-44 years", "female 15-44 years", "male 45-64 years", "female 4564 years", "male 65+ years", "female 65+ years", "sum of males", "sum of females", "total cases", "localities", "years"). data cleaning was undertaken to ensure the accuracy, completeness, and accuracy of the data, which was obtained in arabic and then transformed to english. feature selection: the purpose of this stage was to pick the suitable features (date and total cases) for use in the forecasting procedure. feature extraction and transformation: in this step, the feature that was chosen before is taken out and changed into a form that helps with prediction. the disease dataset was then made by just adding "date" as a time series. it has 60 rows, and the common "diseases" in the state are malaria and pneumonia. in the disease dataset, each row showed the total number of disease cases for each month from 2017 to 2021. tables 1 and 2 show the features of the dataset, and figure 2 shows the dashboard of full diseases, which shows the most common diseases in the state. figures 3 and 4 show the overall number of malaria and pneumonia cases over the five-year period. the data was divided into two sets: one for training the models and one for testing the approaches' performance. table 1. demonstrate the whole dataset before data pre-processing no features data type 1 quarter categorical 2 diseases categorical 3 diseases code categorical 4 male -1 numeric 5 female -1 numeric 6 male 1-4 years numeric 7 female 1-4 years numeric 8 male 5-14 years numeric 9 female 5-14 years numeric 10 male 15-44 years numeric 11 female 15-44 years numeric 12 male 45 -64 years numeric 13 female 45-64 years numeric 14 male + 65 years numeric 15 female + 65 years numeric 16 sum of males numeric 17 sum of females numeric 18 total cases numeric 19 localities categorical 20 years datetime table 2. demonstrate the dataset after data preprocessing. figure 2. demonstrate the dashboard of whole diseases. features data type min value max value mean std. dev date datetime malaria numeric 6786 32383 16839 6082 pneumon ia numeric 9565 27177 18659 4014 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first performance evaluation of arima and fb-prophet forecasting methods in the context of endemic diseases: a case study of gedaref state in sudan 5 figure 3. illustrates the malaria disease over five years in months. figure 4. illustrates the pneumonia disease over five years in months. 3.2 auto regressive integrated moving average (arima) method the auto regressive integrated moving average (arima) generates forecasts by providing a specific temporal arrangement depending on its limitations and prediction mistakes [14]. the order of the autoregressive expression p, the degree of differencing d, and the order of the moving average expression q define a non-seasonal arima model. the integer p is the number of y occurrences that will be used as indicators. also, q is the number of prediction errors that are not interesting and should be added to the arima model. the modifications required to solve the problem d = 0 if the temporal difference is constant at that instant. the following is the generic difference series equation: ŷt = μ + ϕ1 yt-1 +…+ ϕpyt-p θ1et-1 -…θqet-q (1) where ϕi are the coefficients, yt-p, and et-q are the model's lagging predictors. choosing suitable p and q values necessitates optimization and testing. graphs of the autocorrelation function (acf) and partial autocorrelation function (pacf) must be analyzed to calculate the values. the following prerequisites must be met in order to achieve this goal: a few univariate time series forecasting algorithms that rely purely on subjective eye assessment and follow these guidelines may be beneficial. however, when large sums must be projected, these criteria become ineffective. one option is to use software tools to select arima's parameters automatically. another approach is to search the solution space for different parameters and propose the ones with the lowest error [15]. 3.3 fb-prophet method: facebook developed the fb-prophet time-series analysis and forecasting algorithm [16]. this model incorporates parameters for holidays, trends, and seasonality, which will help shape prediction results and provide higher performance with time-series data that has seasonal affects. the following equation is used to combine these ingredients: y(t)=g(t)+s(t)+h(t)+εt (2) where g(t) represents the trend, which is non-periodic growth changes, s(t) reflects seasonal variations, and h(t) describes the effects of holidays. the following equation defines the trend: 𝑔(𝑡)=𝐶(𝑡) / 1+𝑒𝑥𝑝 (−(𝑘+𝛼(𝑡)𝑇𝛿) (𝑡−(𝑚+𝛼(𝑡)𝑇𝛾))) (3) where c(t) is the carrying capacity, k is the growth rate, and m is an offset parameter. the precision, speed, and resilience to outliers and trend shifts of fb-prophet are well-known. it is totally automated, allowing it to produce an accurate forecast from a jumbled set of data without the need for human intervention. it's an additive regression model with trends like a piecewise linear growth curve or a logistic growth curve. it recognizes changes in patterns in real time by identifying data change points [17]. 4. results this section describes the application of two forecasting models. as performance measures, rmse (root mean squared error), mae (mean absolute error), mean absolute percentage error (mape), and mean absolute scaled error (mase) rates are used to evaluate forecasting algorithms. the following are the definitions of rmse, mae, mape, and mase: (4) (4) (5) eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first hussein ali hussein, mukhtar m. e. mahmoud and haroun a. eisa 6 where n denotes the number of data points, 𝑦(𝑖) is the actual value of 𝑖th data point and �̂�(𝑖) is the predicted value for the 𝑖th data point. (6) where m denotes mean absolute percentage error, n denotes the number of times the summation iteration happens, at denotes the actual value and ft denotes the forecast value. (7) (7) where ej is the prediction error for a specific time, defined as the actual value (yj) minus the predicted value (fj) for that period: ej = yj fj, and the denominator is the mean absolute error of the one-step. 4.1 arima model results: to estimate the parameters q and p, the arima model evaluates the autocorrelation function (acf) and partial autocorrelation function (pacf) graphs. acf measures the degree of correlation between a time series and its lagged values. after the linear effects of the lags in between are removed, pacf indicates the correlation between the time series and the lag. the acf and pacf graphs from the disease dataset are given in figures 5 and 6 for malaria disease and 7 and 8 for pneumonia disease, respectively. figure 5. illustrates acf in malaria disease. figure 6. illustrates pacf in malaria disease. figure 7. illustrates acf in pneumonia disease. figure 8. illustrates pacf in pneumonia disease. from the aforementioned figures, we must select the best (p, d, q) pair with the lowest rmse, mae, mape, and mase. based on the results, the arima approach has the lowest rmse, mae, mape, and mase from the figures above. based on the data, the best (p, d, q) combination for malaria disease is chosen as (0, 1, 0), resulting in an rmse of 182.8, mae of 141.6, mape of 0.0057, and mase of 0.0537 for the arima approach. as demonstrated in figures (9) and (10) for the effective arima forecasting process for 5 months on malaria and pneumonia disease, the optimal p, d, and q pair is chosen eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first performance evaluation of arima and fb-prophet forecasting methods in the context of endemic diseases: a case study of gedaref state in sudan 7 as (0, 0, 2) for pneumonia disease, resulting in an rmse of 1923.9, mae of 1578.3, mape of 0.0834, and mase of 1.4399. figure 9. forecasting malaria disease using the arima model. figure 10. forecasting pneumonia disease using the arima model. 4.2 fb-prophet model results in the application for exploratory data analysis, the parameters of the fb-default prophet are used to make an fb-prophet model. these parameters are changed automatically. according to the findings, the fb-prophet model for malaria disease has an rmse of 2815.9, mae of 2614.6, mape of 0.1237, and mase of 0.9907, while the fb-prophet model for pneumonia disease has an rmse of 1923.9, mae of 1578.3, mape of 0.0834, and mase of 1.4399. figures 11 and 12 show how arima can be used to make accurate predictions about malaria and pneumonia over a period of 5 months, respectively. figure 11. forecasting malaria disease using the fb-prophet model. figure 12. forecasting pneumonia disease using the fb-prophet model. table 3 shows the rmse, mae, mape, and mase values of arima and facebook's prophet for predicting malaria and pneumonia in gedaref state. as shown in table 3, the arima approach outperforms the fbprophet method in forecasting new cases of both malaria and pneumonia in gedaref state. table 3. demonstrate rmse, mae, mape, and mase values for arima and fb-prophet forecasting methods forecasting method diseases performance metrics rmse mae mape mase arima malaria 182.8 141.6 0.0057 0.0537 pneumonia 1400.3 1001.4 0.0513 0.9136 fb-prophet malaria 2815.9 2614.6 0.1237 0.9907 pneumonia 1923.9 1578.3 0.0834 1.4399 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first hussein ali hussein, mukhtar m. e. mahmoud and haroun a. eisa 8 5. discussion as governments stockpile medicines, it has become important for them to try to figure out how malaria and pneumonia will change in the future. because of this, it is very important to build a reliable and accurate forecasting model that will help governments come up with economic and medical plans to deal with these endemic diseases and decide how to allocate medical resources. in this study, there were 60 data points that broke down the malaria and pneumonia disease statistics for gedaref state by month. arima and fb-prophet models were used to figure out how malaria and pneumonia will change in the future. when the constructed models were compared in terms of performance, the results revealed that the arima technique outperformed and had the lowest error than the fb-prophet forecasting method in both malaria (rmse: 182.8, mae: 141.6, mape: 0.0057, and mase: 0.0537) and pneumonia (rmse: 1400.3, mae: 1001.4, mape: 0.0513, and mase: 0.9136). we notice that, in the small dataset, arima is a powerful method. the fb-prophet method requires holiday effects in the dataset to boost its performance. 6. conclusion in this work, the arima and fb-prophet forecasting models were used to predict how many people in gedaref state would get malaria and pneumonia. between january 2017 and december 2021, the data was gathered from the state's ministry of health. in terms of rmse, mae, mape, and mase error metrics, our results suggest that the arima model in both malaria (rmse: 182.8, mae: 141.6, mape: 0.0057, and mase: 0.0537) and pneumonia (rmse: 1400.3, mae: 1001.4, mape: 0.0513, and mase: 0.9136) outperforms the fb-prophet model. forecasting methodologies, as demonstrated here, can aid in the prediction of future patterns for a variety of diseases as well as be implemented to reduce the number of diseases in the state, which is beneficial to public health. we anticipate that the study's findings will be valuable to governments and health authorities in terms of correctly planning medical support and providing necessary resources, such as medical staff and care facilities, for future diseases. these methods will be combined with iot-enabled solution to provide a smart disease management framework in our future work. acknowledgments the authors would like to thank the ministry of health in gedaref state for providing us with this information, particularly dr. hussein, director of the ministry of information and statistics center. references [1] s. myeong and k. shahzad, “integrating data-based 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(2021). time series forecasting model for supermarket sales using fb-prophet. 2021 5th international conference on computing methodologies and communication (iccmc). https://doi.org/10.1109/iccmc51019.2021.9418033. [12] sirisha, u. m., belavagi, m. c., &amp; attigeri, g. (2022). profit prediction using arima, sarima and lstm models in time series forecasting: a comparison. ieee access, 10, 124715–124727. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2022.3224938. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first performance evaluation of arima and fb-prophet forecasting methods in the context of endemic diseases: a case study of gedaref state in sudan 9 [13] ning, y., kazemi, h., &amp; tahmasebi, p. (2022). a comparative machine learning study for time series oil production forecasting: arima, lstm, and prophet. computers &amp; geosciences, 164, 105126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2022.105126. 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[17] mahanty, m., swathi, k. teja, k. s., bhattacharyya, d., “a prophet model to forecast spread of covid-19 pandemic,” journal of xidian university, vol 14, issue 7, pages 949-962, 2020. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first blockchain for smart citiesa review eai endorsed transactions on smart cities review article 1 blockchain technology and smart citiesa review shilpi1,*, mohd abdul ahad2 1department of computer engineering, jamia millia islamia, new delhi-110025, india 2department of computer science and engineering, sest, jamia hamdard, new delhi-110062, india abstract blockchain technology can be termed as a revolutionary innovation that has transformed the manner of data sharing by making it more secure and immutable. the existence of a mutual trust model which includes every participating entity makes it a widespread adopted technology in recent years. due to its impeccable application domains the blockchain technology is slowly becoming an essential enabling technology of modern day. smart cities ecosystem is one such domain wherein blockchain is finding numerous application and implementation avenues. due to the diverse nature of devices and heterogeneity of data involved in smart cities ecosystem blockchain is considered an apt technology. in this paper, the current status of “blockchain based smart cities” is discussed. the paper further systematically reviews the various existing proposals, frameworks and architectures which were developed by researchers in order to mitigate the issues and challenges in the implementation of smart cities by utilizing the blockchain innovation. keywords: blockchain, smart city, security, iot received on 29 january 2020, accepted on 26 march 2020, published on 27 march 2020 copyright © 2020 shilpi et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.13-7-2018.163846 *corresponding author. email: july23shilpi@gmail.com 1. introduction in recent years, the economic growth and social changes have initiated the largest surge of urbanization around the globe and thus more and more individuals are moving towards urban communities. as of late the “united nations” has anticipated that “86% of developed nations and 64% of the developing nations will be urbanized by 2050” [1]. it has been indicated that more inhabitants stay in urban areas (54%) than provincial zones (46%) and this figure will increase to 66% by 2050 [2]. in order to adapt to these emergencies, urban communities focus on current advancements with a focus to minimize costs, use assets optimally, and make increasingly reasonable and feasible urban conditions.  the widespread adoption of iots and remote interchanges has enabled easier interconnection of gadget networks and uniform transfer of information even from remote areas and difficult terrains. such systems, however, are largely instrumented with open information and thus must be protected against security vulnerabilities [3-4]. in order to overcome these vulnerabilities, data dependent solutions must be created to give protection, trustworthiness, and confidentiality of information. gartner's report gauge that 30% of keen urban community’s social insurance applications will have mechanical technology and innovative machines and 10% of shrewd urban communities will utilize street lamps as the spine for a system of savvy urban communities by 2020 [5]. as of late, blockchain innovation has gained popularity in numerous fields and businesses for example horticulture, digital currency, inventory network and shrewd urban areas and so on. it is also reported that $3.1 trillion will be added to the world economy by 2030 [6].  as per “nelson rosario” [7], the blockchain technology is characterized as a "distributed ledger network using public-key cryptography to cryptographically sign exchanges that are put away on a distributed ledger, with the record comprising of cryptographically connected blocks of exchanges. this cryptographically connected blocks of exchanges structure is known as a blockchain." in simple words, it is a shared dispersed record innovation that “records exchanges”, “understandings”, “agreements”, and “deals” eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2020 06 2020 | volume 4 | issue 10 | e2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ mailto:july23shilpi@gmail.com shilpi and mohd abdul ahad 2 [8]. primarily created to aid digital currency, blockchain technology can further be used for a variety of information exchanges using peer to peer networks. the requirement for any central authority between different parties executing budgetary and other information exchanges have been wiped out by blockchain by utilizing a transparent, immutable and a decentralized open record. this open record is a conveyed database that is shared with all the participating entities of the system. it is a sealed, cryptographically verified, and immutable record of the exchanges that at any point occurred among the members. considering the remarkable properties of blockchain which combine changelessness, acceptance, decentralization, and straightforwardness the blockchain promises to provide protection and safety to the information. therefore, the blockchain will aid varied developing applications including keen urban areas like sanitation, agriculture, supply-chain, industries, banking, transportation and the internet of vehicles [9-11]. a typical smart city is an urban framework where several smart prerequisites exist with every service, governance, policies and other information exchanges like a practical administration model of automated traffic management and open vehicle. it is a setting wherein residents can work remotely in almost all chores of events with the utilization of smart arrangements of energy, use of suitable innovation for saving energy and to minimize the ecological effect. the "smart city" idea includes a few parameters that interface with one another, which makes the quest for a precise definition a complex task. as per one definition it is defined as "the savvy use of innovation so as to gather, analyse, procedure, and execute a lot of valuable information legitimately from the previously working urban areas" [9]. the smart city ecosystem can be thought as an umbrella term where several modern day enabling technologies like ict, blockchain, ai, deep learning, machine learning , iot, cloud/edge computing etc are integrated and works in synchronization to provide solutions to the users. these solutions include automation of essential services, governance, smart transportation, smart agriculture and smart habitat. it involves novel energy efficient frameworks and models, smart grids etc [5], [12]. 1.1. manuscript organization the manuscript is divided into 6 sections. section 2 provides the systematic literature review of the recent researcher works. section 3 provides security threats and issues associated with the implementation of blockchain technologies. section 4 highlights the inherent challenges of blockchain based smart city ecosystem. section 5 reviews the existing security proposals for blockchain based smart city adoptions. section 6 summarizes the manuscript and provides the conclusion. it further highlights the future research directions of blockchain based smart city adoptions. 1.2. why blockchain? there are several unprecedented properties of the blockchain technology that makes it an appropriate solution for several critical applications domains like healthcare, transportations, agriculture, education and forecasting etc. some of these properties are given here in figure 1 [13-14]. • transparency: all blockchain trades are crystal clear, which implies an aggregate, obvious and constant record of any activity that exists. • immutable and non repudiation: this means that with blockchain there is no danger of illegitimate extraction and a blockchain agreement can’t be dropped by the sender when it sent and deleted. • speed: affirmations and transactions of blockchain based trades can happen much faster as compared to legacy methods. • secure: inherent security mechanism of blockchain makes it an appropriate solution of performing sensitive transactions in a distributed manner. • scalability and extensibility: the typical architecture of blockchain makes it flexible to extend and scale the existing infrastructure without much difficulty and overhead. • distributed and decentralized: at the core, the blockchain technology is a “distributed ledger” and follows a peer-to -peer architecture and thus eliminating the limitations of typical centralized systems. figure 1. properties of blockchain eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2020 06 2020 | volume 4 | issue 10 | e2 blockchain for smart citiesa review 3 2. related works this section provides some of the recent development in the field of blockchain based smart cities proposals. the authors in [15] proposed a blockchain based mechanism for securely storing data from iot based sensors placed at multiple surroundings of the point of interest. they proposed to use ethereum blockchain and scrum technology for the implementation of their proposal. the authors in [16] provided a review of the existing literature on importance digital identity of the users and methods available for their protections. they primarily highlighted the blockchain based methods and discussed the issues and challenges associated with such systems. the authors in [17] proposed a blockchain based approach for securing and providing a transparent lottery management system. the specifically used “smart contracts and cryptograph blockchain model” in their proposal. in [18] the authors put forth a new “future living framework” based on blockchain technology to provide services and unique codes to the users. the applications domains and challenges associated in integration blockchain with smart living ecosystem is addressed. the authors in [19] proposed to apply blockchain and smart contracts in the real state sector. their proposal provides a secure and privacy preserved means for the financial transactions between landlords and tenants. in [20] the authors proposed to decouple the transaction data from the blockchain headers in order to enhance the transaction speed. the supported the proposal with empirical evaluation using network emulator. the results show the effectiveness of their proposal as compared to existing solutions. the authors in [21] provided the extensive review of researches on blockchain technology applied in smart cities. a comprehensive roadmap of the research was provided including motivation, background and need of the research conducted. finally some future aspects and scope were discussed. in [22], the authors provided privacy persevered svm based data training scheme using blockchain technology. their proposal eliminated the use of third party dependency and thus securing the data in transit. the authors in [23] proposed a lighter and novel security protocol using ethereum blockchain. the primary aim is to minimize the overhead of the network and provide better security. the source of the data origin can be authenticated using ethereum building blocks. the authors in [24] provided a mechanism for smart and sustainable economic services using fog computing and blockchain based storage. their proposed framework was supported with implementation details and results showing the effectiveness of the proposal. the authors in [25] provided a blockchain based mechanism called as “bis” for insurance industries in the smart cities. it uses poc based contract and data sharing mechanism. the primary aim of the proposal was to minimize the delay in processing of request and services of the insurance industries. in [26] the authors proposed a mechanism for sharing the data in a “secured and privacy preserved manner”. the main idea of the proposal is to distribute the blockchain network into multiple channels with each channel having a specific capacity and constrained to process only specific type of data and thus the overall network congestion is distributed to gain performance enhancement. 3. security threats & issues of blockchain technology one most appealing highlights of blockchain innovation is its security component, which depends on distributed consensus and a public ledger. this doesn't imply that it can oppose any sorts of extortion and hacking. in recent years, the blockchain technology has been put to test and several security vulnerabilities were found as shown in figure 2 [27-31]. figure 2. security threats and attacks on blockchain • 51% attack: they are the most regular assault on the blockchain based systems. they basically targets smaller networks and occurs when the hackers controls 51% of the nodes in the whole network. • double spend attack: the “double spend attack” comprises of spending a similar coin twice. • dos and ddos attack: the assaults like “denial of service (dos) or distributed dos” aim at flooding the network with fake requests such that the legitimate requests cannot be serviced by the network. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2020 06 2020 | volume 4 | issue 10 | e2 shilpi and mohd abdul ahad 4 • man-in-the-middle attack: the aim of this attack is to hack the communication between two users and illegitimately relay spurious communication by altering the original contents. • eclipse attack: these attacks occur when the hackers tricks the nodes to chose the peer from the malicious nodes instead of legitimate nodes. • dao attack: categorized as one of the most devastating attacks in history of blockchain. here a bug was identified in the code and was used to illegitimately withdraw the money from users account. • sybil attack: here the attackers flood the network with malicious nodes in order to trick the legitimate nodes to choose peers. this attack is generally used to target a group of user or the complete network as a whole. as discussed in [2], other significant dangers to smart urban communities are: • threats to availability: this includes issues like unapproved and illegitimate asset retention. • threats to integrity: this incorporate unapproved and illegitimate information alteration • threats to confidentiality: it incorporates disclosure of sensitive data or impersonation. • threats to authenticity: it includes unapproved access to assets and sensitive data. • accountability threats: this incorporate forswearing of transmission or gathering of a message by the related substance . moreover, innovation advances with time and consequently new vulnerabilities and security threats are discovered. these newly discovered bugs and threats can further compromise open blockchains initiatives in near future.    the non-appearance of a focal position, the nonexistent stamping element, and subsequently the complete lack of control is an alluring and simultaneously hazardous quirk. numerous “private” and “permissioned” blockchain applications have been developed as of late to counter this. 4. challenges of blockchain based smart city compatibility barriers are the primary potential safety concern that still needs to be addressed. there are several other safety concerns that should still be handled [32], [45-49]. some of them are given below: • the absence of innovations that will have the option to process huge volumes of information. the 5v model of big data constitutes a core element of a smart city model. • use of iot would entail a huge concentration of administrations, software, and associated hubs. each one of these components may uncover the heterogeneity of their usefulness that will inevitably uncover vulnerabilities in security. • one of the biggest problems is the lack of predefined standard benchmarks. the way things are, there is no general security consensus that will be utilized as a rule on the most proficient method to capture, handle, process, and appropriate information. as expressed in [33-36], another set of difficulties include: • relying on a centralized cloud computing frameworks unavoidably acquires dubious latencies and dependencies on third party services. • although the fog/edge processing-based framework can meet the prerequisites raised by delay-sensitive, crucial applications but there is an acute shortage of skilled workforce [34-36]. new difficulties are additionally presented by the disseminated, cross-space highlights, for example, versatility, heterogeneity, and interoperability. a portion of the difficulties in a blockchain based smart city ecosystem addressed in [37] are: • structural versatility: structural adaptability should be addressed when planning the engineering for an integrated smart city. this property allows the construction of a structure when appropriate without requiring critical system design changes. • network data transmission imperatives: concentrated engineering-based arrangements are not fitting because of system transfer speed restrictions. • protection and security: the smart city system gives rise to numerous security and protection concerns and difficulties due to the exponential rise in the number of gadgets connected within the smart city ecosystem. • single point of failures: smart city ecosystem can have a large number of single-point-offailures as a result of heterogeneous nature of participating devices and data models. 5. different proposed security frameworks smart city ecosystem is centred around suitability, computerized administrations, instalments, and conditions, however, it ought to be improved.  various attempts in this area are the development of “open web application security project (owasp)”, “computer emergency response teams (cert)” , “g-cloud” for “cloud computer service provider (ccsp)” etc. [38-40].  security perspectives are talked about by biswas et. al [2], simona ibba et. al [15], theodorou et. al [32] and p.k. sharma [37] in their work. these works have been thought about as it examines the need for a particular security structure.  one such system is made out of four layers [2], [15]: eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2020 06 2020 | volume 4 | issue 10 | e2 blockchain for smart citiesa review 5 • physical layer: smart city devices (e.g. “nest thermostat” and “acer fitbit”) are fitted with sensors and actuators that capture and forwards the information to the upper layers; these devices are helpless against security attacks and vulnerabilities due to lack of encryption and access control instruments [41]. • communication layer: the blockchain mechanism should be coordinated with this layer to provide security and protection to the transmitted information. mechanisms like bittorrent can be utilized for distributed correspondence through ethereum for providing smart agreement functionalities. • database layer: a “distributed ledger” in the blockchain is a kind of “decentralized database” which stores recording in steady progression. there are two distinct kinds of dispersed records practically speaking: i) permission-less and ii) permissioned. it is prescribed to utilize private records to guarantee versatility, execution, and security for constant applications. • interface layer: each layer contains a variety of apps that work together to settle on mutually agreed positive choices. in [32], a specialized methodology on how the innovation fills in rather than the conventional method for transferring and handling information has been introduced. despite the fact that the highlights that make a smart city secure are various, they centred uniquely around those regions that are regarded as critical, for example, information management and circulation, correspondence, protection, verifying outsiders, savvy agreements and conventions (method for dealing with information). in [37], a novel hybrid design by utilizing the quality of developing “software defined networking” and “blockchain advancements” has been discussed to address the difficulties of dynamic network management and security concerns. to guarantee security and protection in the model examined, argon2 based proofof-work plot is presented. the model was re-enacted over a private ethereum blockchain network. the consequence of the assessment shows the adequacy of the proposed model. to take care of the issue of the sensors information storage and the management was discussed in [32]. simona ibba et. al [15] proposed to build up a product dependent on blockchain and to apply the scrum philosophy as a result of its capacities of being adaptable, versatile and iterative system. like in [37], they have utilized the ethereum stage to record estimations landing from the iot system of sensors. lately, the “smart grid decentralization” has become a subject of research expecting to give an option in contrast to focal substances. in [42], the authors proposed a blockchain-based engineering for disseminating the management, control, and approval of interest reaction (dr) programs in low/medium voltage smart grids with a perspective on guaranteeing high unwavering quality and decentralized activity by actualizing identifiable and sealed vitality adaptability exchanges. the network has been demonstrated as a chart of peer nodes that can facilitate through a “blockchain-based framework” to aid “decentralized-energy” demand. a blockchain appropriated record is built and oversaw at the core framework level. the proposed approach was approved using a model actualized in an ethereum stage [15], [37] using appropriate utilization mechanism and creating hints of a few structures from writing informational collections. the outcomes have demonstrated that blockchain-based conveyed request side administration can be utilized for coordinating critical request and creation at shrewd lattice level. the adoption of the “blockchain” will convert the “smart grid” into a “popularity-based network” that never again depends on a central position rather it can take any choice through smart contract rules dynamically. dheeraj nagothu et. al [33] presented a new secure smart reconnaissance framework dependent on “micro-services design” and “blockchain innovation” which is inherently dependent on various levelled edge-haze distributed computing worldview. the ability of consistent improvement and ceaseless conveyance permit a progressively adaptable and versatile reconnaissance framework. to verify the information traded among micro-services, the blockchain enables the administrator to track the information and keep away from information altering. “smart contracts” have computerized the working of blockchain information and it gives the most significant level of information encryption for proficient and secure correspondence. the rising ad hoc system for vehicles using the smart city was inspected in [43] and presented a blockchaindependent circulated concept for the vehicle system to address difficulties. a “block-vn model”, dependent on blockchain arrangements for enabling smart transportation allows an increasingly productive and powerful improvement of the disseminated system of huge-scale vehicles. the block-vn model enables the participating entities (vehicles) to recognize and share their assets in order to create an iov system. 6. conclusion blockchain is a vital component for providing a transparent, secured and privacy preserved information storage and circulation. when it is combined with other enabling technologies it can provide an unprecedented mechanism of information exchange across the network. in addition, different lightweight cryptographic natives ought to be added to increase the degrees of execution of several interconnected nodes. the expense of implementing the execution of a protected smart city ecosystem could be divided into several sub tasks. sklavos and souras [44] provided a model of the classifications of expenses that ought to be considered. although there are several state-of-the-art solutions for realizing the smart city concept, yet a lot of scope is there eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2020 06 2020 | volume 4 | issue 10 | e2 shilpi and mohd abdul ahad 6 for improvement in every aspect of the smart city model. the security of the system and the participating entities being the primary concern that needs to be addressed more holistically. the complex nature of the underlying infrastructural requirements is causing hindrances in the realization of a smart city in true sense. the cost involved and the scarcity of the skilled manpower are the other limiting factors to be considered. finally, it can be concluded that blockchain is an appropriate technology that can be used for providing a secured and privacy preserved mechanism of information exchange across the smart city ecosystem. references [1] merry h. population increase and the smart city. 2018 [available online] https://www. ibm. com/blogs/internetof-things/increased-populationsmart-city. accessed date 12 december 2019. [2] biswas k, muthukkumarasamy v. securing smart cities using blockchain technology. in 2016 ieee 18th international conference on high performance computing and communications; ieee 14th international conference on smart city; ieee 2nd international conference on data science and systems (hpcc/smartcity/dss) 2016 dec 12 (pp. 1392-1393). ieee. [3] madaan n, ahad ma, sastry sm. data integration in iot ecosystem: information linkage as a privacy threat. computer law & security review. 2018 feb 1;34(1):12533. [4] ahad ma, tripathi g, zafar s, doja f. iot data management—security aspects of information linkage in iot systems. in principles of internet of things (iot) ecosystem: insight paradigm 2020 (pp. 439-464). springer, cham. [5] panetta k. smart cities look to the future. 2018. [available online] https://www. gartner. com/smarterwithgartner/smart-cities-look-to-the-future. accessed date. 06 november 2019. [6] j. d. lovelock, et al. “forecast: blockchain business value”, worldwide, 2017-2030, 2018 [7] n. m. rosario, the emerging blockchain patent landscape, 2017 [8] christidis k, devetsikiotis m. blockchains and smart contracts for the internet of things. ieee access. 2016 may 10;4:2292-303. [9] mohanty sp, choppali u, kougianos e. everything you wanted to know about smart cities: the internet of things is the backbone. ieee consumer electronics magazine. 2016 aug 10;5(3):60-70. [10] puthal d, mir zh, filali f, menouar h. cross-layer architecture for congestion control in vehicular ad-hoc networks. in 2013 international conference on connected vehicles and expo (iccve) 2013 dec 2 (pp. 887-892). ieee. [11] pramanik mi, lau ry, demirkan h, azad ma. smart health: big data enabled health paradigm within smart cities. expert systems with applications. 2017 nov 30;87:370-83. 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[17] liao dy, wang x. design of a blockchain-based lottery system for smart cities applications. in2017 ieee 3rd international conference on collaboration and internet computing (cic) 2017 oct 15 (pp. 275-282). ieee. [18] marsal-llacuna ml. future living framework: is blockchain the next enabling network?. technological forecasting and social change. 2018 mar 1;128:226-34. [19] karamitsos i, papadaki m, al barghuthi nb. design of the blockchain smart contract: a use case for real estate. journal of information security. 2018 jun 28;9(3):177-90. [20] michelin ra, dorri a, steger m, lunardi rc, kanhere ss, jurdak r, zorzo af. speedychain: a framework for decoupling data from blockchain for smart cities. inproceedings of the 15th eai international conference on mobile and ubiquitous systems: computing, networking and services 2018 nov 5 (pp. 145-154). [21] xie j, tang h, huang t, yu fr, xie r, liu j, liu y. a survey of blockchain technology applied to smart cities: research issues and challenges. ieee communications surveys & tutorials. 2019 feb 15;21(3):2794-830. [22] shen m, tang x, zhu l, du x, guizani m. privacypreserving support vector machine training over blockchain-based encrypted iot data in smart cities. ieee internet of things journal. 2019 feb 26;6(5):7702-12. [23] reilly e, maloney m, siegel m, falco g. a smart city iot integrity-first communication protocol via an ethereum blockchain light client. inproceedings of the international workshop on software engineering research and practices for the internet of things (serp4iot 2019), marrakech, morocco 2019 apr (pp. 15-19). [24] rahman ma, rashid mm, hossain ms, hassanain e, alhamid mf, guizani m. blockchain and iot-based cognitive edge framework for sharing economy services in a smart city. ieee access. 2019 jan 30;7:18611-21. [25] sharifinejad m, dorri a, rezazadeh j. bis-a blockchainbased solution for the insurance industry in smart cities. arxiv preprint arxiv:2001.05273. 2020 jan 15. [26] makhdoom i, zhou i, abolhasan m, lipman j, ni w. privysharing: a blockchain-based framework for privacypreserving and secure data sharing in smart cities. computers & security. 2020 jan 1;88:101653. [27] eyal i, sirer eg. majority is not enough: bitcoin mining is vulnerable. in international conference on financial cryptography and data security 2014 mar 3 (pp. 436-454). springer, berlin, heidelberg. [28] abilash soundararajan, 10 blockchain and new age security attacks you should know, 2019. url: https://blogs.arubanetworks.com/solutions/10-blockchainand-new-age-security-attacks-you-should-know/. accessed on 12 december 2019. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2020 06 2020 | volume 4 | issue 10 | e2 https://blogs.arubanetworks.com/solutions/10-blockchain-and-new-age-security-attacks-you-should-know/ https://blogs.arubanetworks.com/solutions/10-blockchain-and-new-age-security-attacks-you-should-know/ blockchain for smart citiesa review 7 [29] efanov d, roschin p. the all-pervasiveness of the blockchain technology. procedia computer science. 2018 jan 1;123:116-21. [30] khan ma, salah k. iot security: review, blockchain solutions, and open challenges. future generation computer systems. 2018 may 1;82:395-411. [31] karame g, androulaki e, capkun s. two bitcoins at the price of one? double-spending attacks on fast payments in bitcoin. iacr cryptology eprint archive. 2012 oct 16;2012(248). [32] theodorou s, sklavos n. blockchain-based security and privacy in smart cities. in smart cities cybersecurity and privacy 2019 jan 1 (pp. 21-37). elsevier. [33] nagothu d, xu r, nikouei sy, chen y. a microserviceenabled architecture for smart surveillance using blockchain technology. in 2018 ieee international smart cities conference (isc2) 2018 sep 16 (pp. 1-4). ieee. [34] nikouei sy, chen y, song s, xu r, choi by, faughnan tr. real-time human detection as an edge service enabled by a lightweight cnn. in2018 ieee international conference on edge computing (edge) 2018 jul 2 (pp. 125-129). ieee. [35] chen n, chen y, blasch e, ling h, you y, ye x. enabling smart urban surveillance at the edge. in2017 ieee international conference on smart cloud (smartcloud) 2017 nov 3 (pp. 109-119). ieee. [36] xu r, nikouei sy, chen y, polunchenko a, song s, deng c, faughnan tr. real-time human objects tracking for smart surveillance at the edge. in2018 ieee international conference on communications (icc) 2018 may 20 (pp. 1-6). ieee. [37] sharma pk, park jh. blockchain based hybrid network architecture for the smart city. future generation computer systems. 2018 sep 1;86:650-5. [38] owasp t. application security risks 2017. available (accessed november 16, 2019): https://www. owasp. org/index. php/top_10-2017_top_10. 10. [39] claycomb wr, nicoll a. insider threats to cloud computing: directions for new research challenges. in2012 ieee 36th annual computer software and applications conference 2012 jul 16 (pp. 387-394). ieee. [40] hm government, government cloud strategy, 1–24, 2011 [41] m. seliger,” test: fitness wristbands reveal data”, test avtest gmbh, klewitzstr, germany, 1–7, jun. 2015 [42] pop c, cioara t, antal m, anghel i, salomie i, bertoncini m. blockchain based decentralized management of demand response programs in smart energy grids. sensors. 2018 jan;18(1):162. [43] sharma pk, moon sy, park jh. block-vn: a distributed blockchain based vehicular network architecture in smart city. journal of information processing systems. 2017 feb 1;13(1). [44] sklavos n, souras p. economic models & approaches in information security for computer networks. ij network security. 2006 jan 1;2(1):14-20. [45] nakamoto s. bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. manubot; 2019 nov 20. [46] lazaroiu c, roscia m. smart district through iot and blockchain. in2017 ieee 6th international conference on renewable energy research and applications (icrera) 2017 nov 5 (pp. 454-461). ieee. [47] reyna a, martín c, chen j, soler e, díaz m. on blockchain and its integration with iot. challenges and opportunities. future generation computer systems. 2018 nov 1;88:173-90. [48] puthal d, malik n, mohanty sp, kougianos e, yang c. the blockchain as a decentralized security framework [future directions]. ieee consumer electronics magazine. 2018 feb 8;7(2):18-21. [49] sun j, yan j, zhang kz. blockchain-based sharing services: what blockchain technology can contribute to smart cities. financial innovation. 2016 dec;2(1):1-9. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2020 06 2020 | volume 4 | issue 10 | e2 this is a title 1 residential buildings renewal towards to the smart concept julius golej1,* 1 slovak university of technology in bratislava, vazovova 5, 812 43 bratislava, slovakia abstract the current global trends lead to fulfilment of specified environmental and economic objectives in all sectors of national economies. buildings form a basic pillar of smart cities concept where all life processes and nerve centres of social life are read, in order to radically improve quality of life, opportunity, prosperity, social and economic development, thanks to the use of the new technology. the building sector has been identified by various studies as a sector that offers considerable potential for the cost-effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, making it an important field for climate protection action. a significant role towards realizing these objectives has in particular the implementation of the latest technologies and technical procedures in all processes at all levels. smart buildings are no longer considered individually, but as a part of complex ecosystem. they must be adapted to the expectations of future users if they are to be properly used. this paper deals with the problematics of current technological, environmental and economic trends in renewal of residential buildings. keywords: residential buildings, renewal, energy efficiency, economic assessment. received on 1 march 2017, accepted on 13 october 2017, published on 19 december 2017 copyright © 2017 julius golej, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.19-12-2017.153477 *corresponding author. email: julius.golej@stuba.sk 1. introduction the real estate and construction sectors can play a critical role in shaping energy use. buildings now account for 40% of total primary energy consumption [1] and they are the biggest single contributor (approximately 36%) to european co2 emissions that amount to approximately 5 gigatonnes for all sectors. building renewal is crucial if the eu is to meet its ambitious 2020 energy and climate goals: improving energy efficiency by 20% and achieving a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels. [1] reaching the declared long-term target of reducing greenhouse gas emission levels by 80-95% by 2050 will therefore need a major effort to improve building energy efficiency. approximately 40% of europe’s building stock predates the 1960s and is in dire need of renovation. [1] given that the renovation cycle for buildings is approximately 30 years (probably less for commercial buildings) during which the performance of a building in principle does not change, it is necessary to ensure that new buildings and renovation measures on existing buildings optimize the energy saving potential. [2] nowadays attitudes towards climate change mitigation remain mixed across the globe. moreover, most of the sector’s energy efficiency investments are in new buildings rather than renewal, even though existing structures make up the biggest share of the world’s buildings. this makes the huge challenge of cutting the energy footprint of the global building stock; an extraordinary opportunity exists to scale up efficiency measures in the real estate sector. [3] anyway, these climate change targets will be nearly impossible to reach without industry’s full participation. according to some realized surveys (the economist, the buildings performance institute europe) the great majority of construction and real estate companies in the eai endorsed transactions smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ julius golej 2 world are mainly focuses on the construction of new energy-efficient buildings instead of renovation of the existing stock. however, precisely old buildings create a huge proportion of energy consumption and production of emissions. this situation is quite understandable in emerging markets such as china or india. what is quite surprising is that even highly developed markets such as europe or the us, where the share of new buildings is relatively low compared to developing countries (share constitutes only 1%), focuses on the construction of new energy-efficient buildings before renovation of existing ones. this is problematic because less efficient buildings will continue to waste energy for a long time to come. the fact that companies are focused on new construction is somewhat understandable as the investment can be more easily amortized over the lifecycle of the building. fitting a structure with the latest energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, high-performance windows and insulation is far easier when starting on a new project than when dealing with an existing structure. moreover, in existing buildings, it may be necessary to work while parts of the building remain occupied. in 2012 the economist intelligence unit realized a global survey focused on energy efficiency, energy savings and the regulatory environment, of 423 senior executives from four sectors: residential real estate, building construction, commercial real estate and the industrial real estate sector. geographically, respondents were evenly split among the us, europe, india and china. organizations of all sizes were represented, and roughly half were from firms with revenue over us$500m. forty percent of us survey respondents from the building sector accept no business responsibility for carbon emissions. in europe, china and india, 84% of respondents cite emissions reductions as an important business responsibility. the attitude of us respondents is mirrored in the country’s political process and the relative weakness of energy efficiency legislation. [3]. 2. technological trends in residential buildings renewal more knowledge of energy use prompts companies to go further in their measures to reduce consumption, including rigorous measurement of a business’s energy footprint. according to building energy experts, heating and cooling account for between 20% and 60% of total energy use in a building, depending on a building’s efficiency. [3] new technologies and systems from the ability to adjust lighting levels for individual users to a range of automated and wireless controls mean companies can do more than reduce their emissions. they can also improve quality of life for building occupants. but if they do not look at how different systems interact and how to persuade users to change their behaviour, the building sector may miss both business and climate change mitigation opportunities. it-enabled energy systems can create buildings that are not only more efficient but are also healthier and more pleasant places in which to live or work. [3] 2.1. savings technologies requirements the maximum savings potential within the building sector has not yet been fully recognized. [4] both the quality of measures and the speed of implementation (especially in building renovation) demonstrate the scope for improvement. [5] so far, european member states have adopted different approaches and different ambitions in their building regulations, influenced by national political processes, building traditions and individual market conditions. [2] technologies to improve the energy performance of buildings, which should be taken into account, are: building envelope measures deal primarily with the reduction of heat transmission and improved air tightness of the building envelope with the intention of reducing transmission losses and losses from (too high) air-exchange. this includes: thermal insulation products (e.g. for insulating walls or roof); building materials (e.g. for walls) with low thermal transmission; measures to ensure air-tightness (e.g. sealants); measures to reduce the effects of thermal bridges (specific construction solutions for connections within facade and roof); high efficient glazing (e.g. triple glazing) and low energy window frames and doors (use of insulating materials, specific sealants, etc.). green facades in smaller amounts became a part of technological solutions in building’s regeneration processes. among their undoubted advantages can be included savings for heating. this is due to the ability of holding the air and prevent its circulation between the wall and greenery, especially in winter time. by contrast, in the summer it creates a pleasant climate in the building and as the leaves releases moisture in the air in the vicinity of facades there is a pleasant environment. another undeniable positives include: sound insulation, production of oxygen and carbon dioxide retention, absorbing pollutants from the air, filtering particles of dust and prevent its dispersion. another advantage is that climbing plants with its roots pumped out moisture from the foundation of the house (see figure 1). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 residential buildings renewal towards to the smart concept 3 figure 1. example of green facade [16] roofs green roofs are not new or extraordinary in new construction of buildings, but this type of roofs are increasingly appearing also in the renovation of existing residential buildings. their undoubted advantages are: oxygen production and retention of carbon dioxide, absorbing pollutants from the air, filtering particles of dust and prevention of its dispersion, preventing overheating of roofs, reducing temperature fluctuations between day and night, the function of heat and sound insulation, fire resistance, mitigation of humidity fluctuations, unlimited service life (with proper design), aiding the sewage system because it slow down the runoff of rainwater, creating a habitat for insects, aesthetic and recreational functions, the possibility of creating gardens for growing flowers and vegetables (see figure 2). thereby green roofs slowing the drainage of rainwater, there is less burden on sewage system functions. while rainwater from these types of roofs can be drained into containers from which could be drawn (or by using a gravity system) and reused for irrigation of immediate vicinity of the building. figure 2. example of green roof [17] during the renewal processes on the roof could be placed alternative energy sources (e.g. solar panels or wind turbines). space heating an active system is usually necessary to meet the demand for heating. this demand can be met by efficient and/or renewable energy systems (e.g. condensing boilers, heat pumps or wood-pellet boilers) in conjunction with suitable storage and distribution systems. hot water domestic hot water is often produced with the same system used for space heating, but it can also be supplied by combined systems (e.g. when integrating solar energy systems) or separate systems. high efficient storage and distribution systems are crucial for reducing heat loss. ventilation systems mechanical ventilation systems help to achieve the necessary air-exchange rates and can also limit losses from air-exchange by heat recovery systems. cooling systems passive cooling systems such as shading devices can help reduce or avoid cooling loads. active systems can meet demand for heating. these are mainly electric systems but renewable systems are also available (e.g. solar cooling). lighting this includes applications to increase the use of daylight (e.g. tubes or mirrors) and active systems for artificial lighting (e.g. low energy light bulbs). a lighting control system can be used to switch lights based on a time cycle, or arranged to automatically go out when a room is unoccupied. some electronically controlled lamps can be controlled for brightness or colour to provide different light levels for different tasks. lighting can be controlled remotely by a wireless control or over the internet. natural lighting (daylighting) can be used to automatically control window shades and draperies to make best use of natural light. building and home automation and control other related measures include the implementation of management systems that introduce supervising/steering functions for the building. this may include centralized control of lighting, hvac (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security. the concept of the "internet of things" has tied in closely with the popularization of building and home automation. home automation refers to the use of computer and information technology to control home appliances and features (such as windows or lighting). systems can range from simple remote control of lighting through to complex computer/micro-controller based networks with varying degrees of intelligence and automation. home eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 julius golej 4 automation is adopted for reasons of ease, security and energy efficiency. [6] home automation systems include: sensors to measure or detect things like temperature, humidity, daylight or motion; controllers such as a pc or a dedicated home automation controller; actuators such as motorized valves, light switches and motors; buses for communication that can be wired or wireless; interfaces for human-machine and/or machine-to-machine interaction. [7] other building-related measures with impact on thermal performance this can include, for example, external shading devices (see figure 3).and other active and passive systems not covered by the other groups. [2] automatic control of blinds and curtains can be used for: presence simulation; privacy, temperature control, brightness control, glare control, security (in case of shutters). [7] figure 3. external shading system [18] 3. legislative framework full execution of existing regulation is needed to promote both energy-efficient new builds and retrofits, the latter being where most gains can be achieved. indeed, most buildings present today in the eu will still be standing in 2050. yet, renovation rates across the eu are low, standing at approximately 1% of the building stock. to reach the eu targets, renewal will need to double to 2-3% of existing stock. only a minority of upgrades is substantial or what experts refer to as complex renewal. [1] government has a significant role to play in this process. since older buildings are generally less efficient than new structures, increasing the rate of retrofitting offers a substantial opportunity for policymakers to profitably advance low-carbon objectives. because retrofits get less attention than new, green buildings, however, this is not an easy goal to achieve. policymakers can help by implementing measures that remove obstacles to retrofitting projects. these might include facilitating the contracting out of renewal efficiency to energy service companies, streamlining project approval procedures or providing technical assistance. coming up with the right incentives will require careful thought, and measures may need to be adapted to individual markets and climates. [3] attracting large institutional investors in renewal finance will require energy efficiency project aggregators. aggregators can be public or private and can appear either as a result of regulation or client demand. to be effective, however, they require clear energy performance objectives, standardized contract structures that allocate responsibility for performance, and data collection and transparency about results. [1] monetary incentives are the most popular form of regulation. but while many companies favour tax rebates and grants, expedited permitting for energy-efficient buildings can be a significant nonfinancial incentive, particularly in the commercial segment. despite the general acceptance of regulation not all of it is considered effective. legislation can be a clumsy tool. for example, those mandatory building efficiency ratings are only effective if sub-metering is also introduced. when the efficiency in buildings is going to improve, it is necessary to understand at a primary level how buildings are operating. it’s mean that it is necessary to understand activities of individual tenants and landlord influenced areas of a building, for creating the complex report. absence of regulation can be as much of a barrier as poorly designed measures. the industry lacks a universal definition of what constitutes a green building as well as consistent data sources and metrics on green buildings. this makes implementation of green projects difficult and therefore the sector does not contribute as much as it should to controlling co2 emissions. governments need to understand how they can influence the market. there is clear evidence that legislation can in fact shape market behaviour. this is demonstrated most powerfully in europe, where strict standards have led a large proportion of companies to audit their energy use. the european experience suggests not only that policymakers can use regulatory tools to promote energy efficiency investment, but also that by combining mandates with incentives, they can facilitate competition for higher efficiency buildings. policymakers can play an important role in shaping energy use in the real estate and construction sectors. measures could include wider use of mandates, auditing, incentives for sub-metering and the introduction of building performance ratings systems. government can do more to raise consumers’ awareness of the social and economic advantages of lowenergy buildings, thus stimulating market demand. increasingly sophisticated technologies and systems can help to remove many of these barriers and increase the return on investments inefficiency. [3] 4. current approach eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 5 designing tomorrow’s buildings today inevitably means questioning the economic logic that will enable them to be funded. it is difficult to move from idea to realization, when the integration of renewable energies and new technologies increases construction costs by 2530%. on this front, all the players are unanimous: it will only be possible to finance projects if they take into account the entire life cycle of buildings. the overall cost approach is developing: social landlords are becoming more and more aware of their tenants’ costs and of the reduction in carbon footprint. [8] whatever the energy-saving strategy, energy management is as important as technology. as energy efficiency becomes more widely accepted, companies are seeing their investments in a more holistic way, taking a longer-term view of investments. when companies move beyond equipment upgrades and integrate energy management into their business models, the potential energy savings increase dramatically. companies have come a long way in their approach to energy efficiency. most are tackling their energy footprint with measures to improve heating, hvac and lighting. and many are going further incorporating energy consumption into their overall strategy, including it in risk management and taking a longer-term view of their investments. [3] to start, the buildings sector needs to better understand its energy consumption and potential reductions. this requires knowledge of the cost of energy investments, adoption of auditing and potentially the use of voluntary standards audited by third parties. companies also need to do more to enhance the efficiency of existing structures. the market needs clear long-term signals, rational expectations and opportunities for a reasonable return on investment. but with buildings responsible for such a large proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is a task that should be embraced with urgency by both governments and the private sector. [3] 5. economic and environmental assessment of residential buildings 5.1. energy assessment of buildings the assessment needs to incorporate the following aspects:  calculation of the buildings net energy use;  calculation of the energy delivered (energy supplied to the building, e.g. natural gas from the grid; energy produced by the building itself and delivered back to the market is subtracted) to the building for heating and cooling, ventilation, domestic hot water and lighting including auxiliary energy;  energy generated by the building itself (e.g. via photovoltaic systems or combined heat and power);  calculation of the overall primary energy use. primary energy is the energy from renewable and non-renewable sources which has not undergone any conversion or transformation process. [2] the energy audit should include: 1. identification data on the owner of the building and about the energy audit processor. 2. the subject of energy audit. it shall indicate the basic information on the subject of energy audit: the purpose of processing energy audit; identification of the subject of energy audit (building name, street, descriptive / registration number, municipality, district); information on use of the base material (e.g. bills for energy supply, the available design documentation, on-site inspection, custom control measurements, thermal diagnostics, photographic documentation, the national technical regulations (standards) and others). 3. description of the status quo, which indicates the characteristics of the building (building category, a description of the building and building structures, geometrical parameters, total floor space, form factor, operating mode, etc.); description of the technical installations in buildings (technical systems, heating, hot water, ventilation, cooling, lighting), identification of deficiencies. 4. basic data on energy inputs and outputs of energy consumption in the building for at least the last three calendar years (including a description of the method of assessment); on energy costs. 5. thermal assessment of packaging structures of the building; energy assessment. assessment of building envelope and roof cladding from which will be identifiable at least the following data: area of construction, heat transfer coefficient; evaluation whether construction is suitable or not; the detailed structure of each building structures; overall rating of packaging constructions; assessment of buildings in terms of satisfying the minimum necessary requirements of heat for heating. 6. proposed measures to reduce energy by renovation of buildings through construction works and their economic and environmental assessment. it should take into account: the type and minimum thickness of thermal insulation, taking into account the quality of the original design envelope and influence of thermal bridges; heat transfer coefficient for windows and doors by the technical regulations. minimal output of environmental assessment for each proposed measure is the reduction in carbon dioxide (co2) and particulate matter and other selected pollutants (co, nox, so2). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 residential buildings renewal towards to the smart concept julius golej 6 7. proposed measures to reduce energy use of technical equipment in the building. these include: heating system; domestic hot water systems, including energy services; the lighting system; the ventilation and air conditioning system. 8. energy evaluation of buildings, taking into account the expected state after the implementation of the proposed building modifications and replacement of technical equipment in the building. it proves the premise of satisfying the minimum energy performance requirements for buildings. energy audit has recommending character for decision making by the owner / operator of the building. it does not constitute a restrictive framework for the detailed design of measures to improve the energy performance of buildings, respectively to improve the energy performance of buildings. [9] figure 4. energy efficiency classification of buildings [19] 5.2. economic assessment of energetic systems in buildings economic evaluation is widely used: to assess the economic potential of energy efficiency measures in buildings; to compare various solutions to energy efficiency measures in buildings (e.g. types of equipment,; fuels); to evaluate the economic performance of the overall design of the building (e.g. a compromise between energy needs and energy efficiency of heating systems); to determine the effect of possible energy conservation measures on an existing heating system on energy consumption with energy-saving measures and without them. [10] when the economic assessment is based on a set of standard conditions, and current energy prices in determining the energy savings potential and the cost of its acquisition (the proposed measures). further from the preliminary estimate of investment costs according to current prices of construction products and construction works on the market without taking into account ancillary coerced costs taking into account the service life of the proposed measure, the calculation period of 30 years and the discount rate. the outcome of the economic assessment are the economic indicators, namely: 1. the simple payback period, 2. discounted payback period. 3. the net present value, 4. the internal rate of return. net present value although we know a few methods for the calculation of the economic evaluation of energetic systems in buildings, specified below in greater detail is a net present value (npv) because this method is most commonly used in practice. according the energy performance of buildings directive recast [5] as a method for an economic assessment suggests the net present value. the net present value is a standard dynamic method for the financial assessment of long-term projects. it measures the excess or shortfall of cash flows, calculated at their value at the start of the project. [2] the npv represents the difference between expenses and income of the investment project which relate to a certain period, usually at the inception of the project by discounting. [11] the npv is considered a basic criterion for deciding on acceptance or rejection of the investment project. [12] an appropriate calculation of npv can be performed by using the global cost calculation method, and can be described by the following formula (1): 𝐶𝑔 (𝜏) = 𝐶𝐼 + ∑ [∑ (𝐶𝑎,𝑖 (𝑗) × 𝑅𝑑 (𝑖)) − 𝑉𝑓,𝜏 (𝑗) 𝑟 𝑖=1 ] 𝑗 (1) cg (τ) global costs referring to starting year τ 0; ci initial investment costs; ca,i (j) annual costs year “i” for energy-related component j (energy costs, operational costs, periodic or replacement costs, maintenance costs); rd (i) discount rate for year i (depending on interest rate); vf, τ (j) final value of component j at the end of the calculation period (referred to the starting year τ 0). here also disposal cost (if applicable) can be taken into account. [13] the global costs are defined by: the initial investment costs at the start of the measure, plus the present value of the sum of the running costs (e.g. fuel costs) during the calculation period, minus the net present value of the final value of components at the end of the calculation period. [2] investment costs eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 7 the methodology takes into account the investment costs of measures that are related to the energy performance of a building. these include: investments related to the efficiency of the building envelope: measures to reduce the thermal transmittance of building elements, low-energy windows and doors, measures related to air tightness; investment in energy supply systems for space heating and domestic hot water: fossil or renewable supply systems, including storage and distribution; ventilation/air conditioning: ventilation systems with or without heat recovery, active cooling systems; investments in lighting systems; other energy-related investments such as external shading devices, building automation/smart buildings; installation costs of systems and components. [2] annual costs annual costs include costs for energy carriers that cover the demand for space heating and cooling, ventilation, domestic hot water and lighting, including auxiliary energy. they also include operational costs, maintenance costs and costs for periodic replacement. income from produced energy (e.g. via photovoltaic systems or combined heat and power) can be subtracted from the costs for energy carriers. the lifetime (service lifetime) of measures should be set according to the information set out in european standards (e.g. en15459). energy prices have an influence on the final results of the methodology. the epbd recast specifies that the commission must provide information and guidance with respect to longterm energy price developments. possible sources of information might be price scenarios developed by the international energy agency (iea). [2] interest rates the choice of real interest rates (interest rate adjusted to inflation rate) is an important input for this calculation. [14] the assumed rates will differ depending on the perspective (private or societal). the final methodology should therefore include guidance on applicable interest rates. [2] the disadvantage of npv is that it is the absolute variable that does not reflect the exact rate of return. however, this problem is solved by profitability index, which is closely linked to the npv. another problem with this method can determine its determinants, such as expected cash flows and discount rates. despite these disadvantages, the method of net present value is considered accurate and reliable method to determine the economic efficiency of the project. [11] in assessing / designing the energy efficiency measures, respectively design of the building as a whole, it is necessary to consider the costs over the entire life of the building; the growth of various costs over time, including growth in energy prices; labour costs and price changes of materials. when comparing the different proposals of building it is necessary take into account synergies between considered systems. a comprehensive economic evaluation provides to investors objective information on investment opportunities (for the assumptions). comparison of different designs of buildings on the basis of an economic evaluation may motivate the owner to invest in buildings with low energy demand, which will be returned in the form of reduced energy costs. [10] 6. conclusion the complex renewal process could be very complicated and challenging. therefore, it should be noted that it is very important that all other stakeholders (industry, project developers, homeowner associations, ngos, scientific organizations, etc.) are actively involved to the process of buildings renewal. this ensures that the various perspectives are taken into account to make the methodology on cost-optimal requirements a useful tool for promoting smart and efficient buildings in europe. the eu has more than one hundred public financing mechanisms to promote energy efficiency in the building sector. most of them rightly focus on existing stock. the financing, however, largely comes through grants and subsidies which, in a context of cash-strapped governments still dealing with a public debt crisis, are not the most effective use of limited public funds. the implementation of energy efficiency-related directives varies by country, which limits the ability of property owners to achieve economies of scale across the region. therefore it is the concern for eu member states to implement to their own legislation laws and regulations for promoting energy-efficiently renewal, which should be sufficiently effective and flexible. through the enough effective mechanism could be then ensure the use of a resources public money should be used to leverage more private finance. [15] references [1] chachoua, e.; hulse, j. 2013. investing in energy efficiency in europe’s buildings: a view from the construction and real estate sectors. economist intelligence unit report, 2013. the economist, london. available on: https://www.tias.edu/docs/defaultsource/documentlibrary_fsinsight/the-eiu-report.pdf [2] cost optimality: discussing methodology and challenges within the recast energy performance of building directive. 2010. the buildings performance institute europe (bpie). available on: www.bpie.eu [3] murray, s.; gardner, b. 2012. energy efficiency and energy savings: a view from the building sector. economist intelligence unit report, 2012. the economist, london. available on: http://www.bpie.eu/uploads/lib/document/attachment/16/e iu_casestudy_report_2012.pdf [4] ecofys. 2007. u-values for better energy performance of buildings. report for eurima european insulation manufacturers association. available on: eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 residential buildings renewal towards to the smart concept julius golej 8 ecofys.com/files/files/ecofys_2007_uvaluesenergyperform ancebuildings.pdf [5] impact assessment for the energy performance of buildings directive recast. european commission 2008. [6] harper et al. (2003), pg. 17 and gerhart (1999), pg. 1. [7] home automation. 2015. available on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/home_automation#cite_refharper17_4-0 [8] smart buildings: intelligence working for people. 2015. available on: http://blog.bouyguesconstruction.com/en/nos-innovations/smart-buildingslintelligence-au-service-de-lhumain/ [9] odporúčania na spracovanie energetického auditu verejnej budovy. siea. operčný program kvalita životného prostredia. [10] korytárová, k. 2012. postupy ekonomického hodnotenia energetických systémov v budovách. in: energetická efektívnosť a obnoviteľné zdroje energie podľa technických noriem. jasná. slovakia. [11] pelikán, r. 2011 hodnotenie efektívnosti investičných projektov. bankovní institut vysoká škola praha. česká republika. [12] máče, m. 2006. finanční analýza investičních projektů. 1. vyd. praha: grada publishing. 80 s. isbn 80-247-1557-0. [13] en 15459: 2007. energy performance of buildings – economic evaluation procedure for energy systems in buildings. reproduced by permission of din deutsches institut für normung e.v. the definitive version of the implementation of this standard is the edition bearing the most recent date of issue, obtainable from beuth verlag gmbh, 10772 berlin, germany. [14] ivanicka, k.; spirkova, d. 2013. challenges of real estate sector development in central european countries in the post crisis period. in: financial aspects of recent trends in the global economy, vol i. 300p. isbn:978-606-93129-9-5 [15] ivanicka, k., zubkova, m., sindlerova, e., spirkova, d. 1996. housing finance in the slovak republic and other cefta countries. emergo journal of transforming economies and societies. volume 3, issue 3, 1996, pages 102-123. [16] available on: https://pixabay.com/sk/budovaarchitekt%c3%bara-dom-okno-166619/ [17] available on: https://pixabay.com/sk/gulli-biela-domploch%c3%a1-strecha-349496/ [18] available on: https://pixabay.com/sk/okno-blackoutumenie-%c5%beal%c3%bazie-417926/ [19] available on: https://pixabay.com/sk/energetick%c3%a1%c3%ba%c4%8dinnos%c5%a5-energie-154006/ eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e2 this is a title 1 influence of urban renewal on the assessment of housing market in the context of smart city development i. rącka 1 * and s. palicki 2 1 the president stanisław wojciechowski university school of applied sciences in kalisz, ul. nowy świat 4, 62-800 kalisz, poland 2 poznań university of economics and business, al. niepodległości 10, 61-875 poznań, poland abstract the variability of the urban environment, where the symptoms are observed in terms of spatial, aesthetic, architectural, urban and socio-economic development, seems to be relevant to the functioning of the local real estate market. housing issue is the vital component of sustainable socioeconomic city development. the perception of the property attractiveness is determined by price-setting attributes such as: building standard, area, utilities, zoning and also location and neighbourhood. the attractiveness of the residential property is manifested in its market value. as part of the follow-urban transformation, it seems to be important to reconstruct the impact of the neighbourhood changes on the housing market. the authors attempt to explain the ensuing problem on the example of one of the streets in a polish city – kalisz, which over the years has gained a new streetscape and market image. they endeavour to simulate changes in the market value of selected properties located on the street, in order to map the influence of changes on the value. keywords: housing market, property value, revitalization, neighbourhood. received on 16 october 2015, accepted on 17 may 2016, published on 20 july 2016 copyright © 2016 i. rącka and s. palicki, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.18-7-2016.151626 * corresponding author. email:i.racka@pwsz.kalisz.pl 1. introduction symptoms of changes in the urban environment can be seen in a number of aspects: spatial, aesthetic, architectural, urban and socio-economic. they seem to be relevant to the functioning of local property markets. perception of property attractiveness by potential buyers depends on evaluation of its vital qualities, the result of which is an objective economic measure – property market value. this value is affected by all relevant market attributes, which in turn affect a particular property. under this study, observations focused on revitalization processes in dobrzecka street in a polish city, kalisz, in 2006-2014. the analysis was accompanied by identification of trends and dynamics of changes in the local property market in kalisz. the choice of the research object was deliberate – within a few years dobrzecka street gained a new aesthetic streetscape and market image. the main purpose of the study was assumed to be an evaluation and interpretation of the impact of urban transformations upon the economic and social assessment of residential properties. thus, a possibility was recognized of conscious programming of a sustainable city development taking into account the influence of revitalization processes upon attractiveness of the local property market. the research procedure employed the principles of a quantity and quality analysis of the property market (including a statistical analysis of phenomenon structure and dynamics), a case study, a comparative analysis, a methodology of property assessment in a comparative approach, a simulation method and a questionnaire. above research article eaeai endorsed transactions on smart cities eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ i. rącka and s. palicki 2 all, a market survey was conducted to evaluate the level of value changes and related factors used by various social and trade groups during their assessment. the article sheds new light on contemporary changes in a smart city space. it simultaneously presents two diverse systems for measuring revitalization outcomes: objective analysis of transfer prices and trends on the residential real estate market as well as the perception of changes from the social perspective. this unusual juxtaposition of quantity modeling with the analysis using sociological methods was intentional. the aim was to directly compare factual and socially perceived response of the real estate market to revitalization. such approach allowed for representation of the perception and response of two groups: those actively involved in the transactions made in the real estate market (investors) as well as the passive users of the domain (observers). the picture obtained as a result, merges two ways of perceiving real estate and its surrounding area – as an economic as well as a social space. the presentation of different reactions of diverse groups of stakeholders helps to better understand and in future better design the changes in space during the process of smart city revitalization. 2. impact of changes in the urban environment upon the property value properties are characterized by interdependence, which means that by possessing a certain image, they affect the surrounding, including properties in the close and more distant neighbourhood [1]. the interdependency in the property market also means spatial and functional interrelations. this kind of interaction is explained by concentration of functions in space, influence exerted by development methods, neighbourhood effects, local site development plans and the power of brand [2], [3]. a diagnosis of the sources and essence of the interdependence first led researchers to consider environmental causes of changes in property values. they analyzed impact of air quality and its pollution upon market listings of flat and house prices [4]. already then, the term of externalities began to be used, which determine change in attractiveness of individual premises in the property market [5]. the externalities also include relations caused by neighbourhood of specific assets or limitations. microlocation may mean a potential asset or a negative circumstance affecting the value, depending on the nature and perception of the neighbourhood. also complexes of properties desired due to popularity, usually improve assessment of their surrounding [6]. the most vivid effects can be observed in commercial property markets where interdependence causes more intense investment activity in the neighbourhood (for instance, ikea, “old brewery: in poznan, “manufacture” in lodz) [1], [2]. it is not only connected with investments in the commercial property market, but also in residential and public properties [7], [8]. studies of the neighbourhood nature and quality consider presence of organized urban greenery and recreational areas (municipal parks or areas accompanying residential estate space) [9], [10]. the widely understood public space and its influence on fluctuations of property value or more generally – on neighbourhood assessment – was analyzed referring to several cities in poland [11], [12]. the said studies prove that among various types of urban public space, centres and representative squares to a large extent determine market aspects of the surrounding development. in the context of transformations in the property market, a lot of attention is dedicated to space transformations, including revitalization processes. the notion of city revitalization combines both revitalization and gentrification. variety of forms and conceptions of developing european urban space as part of revitalization projects or gentrification phenomena [13] points to conscious attempts of determining interdependence effects in the property market. what is interesting from the point of view of evaluating phenomena accompanying city revitalization, is in particular reconstruction of the way it affects the residential and commercial property market [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19]. the property market plays an important role in attracting both investors and residents. a huge capital consumed by revitalization processes is a barrier to its development. a rapid growth of prices in the property market, especially in the residential one, attracts entities with strong capital which follow a disinvestment strategy (meaning a relatively quick sale at a high price) [20]. the market value is the estimated amount for which an asset or liability should exchange on the valuation date between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arm’s length transaction, after proper marketing and where the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently and without compulsion [21]. the market value is a resultant of attractiveness of perception of important property qualities. these qualities comprise attributes related to a particular property (such as a standard and technical condition, usable area, plot area, premises location within a building) and other non-related attributes (such as general location, detailed location, neighbourhood nature and quality, available technical infrastructure, designation in the local site development plan). these attributes, called price determining attributes, are defined each time for a market segment where the assessed property falls in. weights of individual attributes may be assigned by examining customer preferences in a particular property market or by analyzing transactional prices [22], [23]. relations between city revitalization or functional and quality surrounding transformations and the property market value in poland are not exhaustively described; they are still open to preliminary analysis. the development level of domestic residential segment suggests a necessity to carefully examine the phenomenon of transmitting revitalization effects in the property market. the market value is determined in relation to properties which can be traded. this value is the most probable price that could be obtained on the real estate market, having taken into account the price levels of realized deals, as well as making the following assumptions: the parties are independent from each other, do not act under pressure and eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 influence of urban renewal on the assessment of housing market in the context of smart city development 3 are willing to conclude a deal; the parties have sufficient time to negotiate, according to the market conditions. the market value is determined without taking into consideration the property related sale-and-purchase costs, as well as any additional taxes and fees. one of the approaches to valuating the property is the comparison approach, which is based on immediate comparison against verified market information on transactions, having comparable characteristics, similar to those of the object of valuation [11]. following a selection of comparable properties, in a similar area and of similar characteristics, similar method of construction and other comparable attributes, the significant similarities and/or differences are established, making adjustments to determine a market price, based on which the estimate value of the real estate under valuation is determined. the comparison approach in poland has three forms: the method of pairwise comparison; method of average price adjustment; method of statistical market analysis. in this paper we applied average price adjustment method. the method of the average price adjustment makes use of a group of properties, similar in characteristics to the appraised real estate, that have been a subject of market transactions. under this method an average price adjustment is applied in relation to comparable properties, using weighted coefficients depending on the individual characteristics of the real estate. 3. changes in the market value of living premises in kalisz – a case study analysis of the residential property market in kalisz in 2006-2014 the analysis of the residential property market included sale transactions of flats in kalisz from the beginning of january 2006 to the end of december 2014. the authors analyzed 2,941 market transactions of flats. between 2006 and 2010, the number of transactions declined, however, in the period considered as crisis in the property market in poland, it grew. every second flat sold had an area between 30 sq m and 50 sq m (an average size of a property sold in 20062014 in kalisz was 49 sq m). by examining unit transactional prices, a trend formula was created for flats sold in kalisz between 2006-2014. the linear trend function takes the following form: (1) the average price of one square metre increased month by month by pln 0.27 and its theoretical value in the period immediately preceding the analysis, i.e. in december 2005, amounted to pln 2,108.81. the average increase of residential properties in kalisz property market in 20062014 was found to be 0.39% monthly. throughout the entire analysis the average unit price reached 2,526 pln/sq m (fig. 1). figure 1. average price and linear and exponential price trends [pln per sq m] of flats in kalisz from 2006 to 2014. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 4 the goodness of fit of the linear trend function is poor. correlation coefficient r2 equals 11.99%. similarly, the exponential function explains only 13.25% of individual price variability during the analyzed period. because of that, a non-linear model was constructed, explaining the individual price variation over time. the best fit proves to be the degree 6 polynomial function, accounting for 30.72% of individual price variability over time. using this trend function for adjusting the prices for appreciation/depreciation, allows to eliminate at least some of the price differences stemming from the passage of time. other research [24] confirms the low values (30-35%) of the correlation coefficient, even when using polynomial trend functions. this is due to the heterogeneity of real estate – there are no two identical pieces of real estate. the examined sample of apartments was very diverse. the flats traded ranged from studios to 4-bedroom units, with the surface area starting from 13.7 to 138 m2, located centrally, in-between and in the outskirts, differing in standard, fit-out, condition and other variables influencing the price. such a high number of real estate attributes with price influence suggests that the passage of time might not be the dominant factor in this case. by examining unit transactional prices a polynomial trend formula was created for flats sold in kalisz between 20062014. the trend function takes the following form (coefficients have been rounded): (2) the theoretical value in the period immediately preceding the analysis, i.e. in the end of december 2005, amounted to pln 1,322.66. the average increase of residential properties in kalisz property market in 2006-2014 was found to be 0.32% monthly. however, this interpretation does not apply to the price variability within the whole analyzed period – as illustrated by the line of the trend function, the years 20062014 recorded both price increases and decreases (fig. 2). figure 2. polynomial price trend [pln per sq m] of flats in kalisz from 2006 to 2014. characteristics of the analyzed area dobrzecka street in kalisz is about 2.6 km long; it starts near the city centre and reaches the administrative areas of the village of dobrzec. the name “dobrzec” goes back to the oldest tradition of this land and bears a large emotional and historical significance. the first mentions of the dobrzec settlement date to 1280. the street has a non-homogenous nature. its beginning consists of multi-family residential buildings which are about one hundred years old, built close to each other. in the post-war years they were confiscated from private owners by the state and at that time they were mostly tenement blocks. they alternate with other buildings: community services (a blood donor station, social aid centre) and manufacturing (former clothes plant). in its middle section the street is built up with warehouses, engineering and service buildings. the end of dobrzecka street crosses the area of the former dobrzec village, partly transformed into detached house estates, and partly still settlement and farming areas. a particular attention was paid to transformations in the initial sections of the street. this area has changed its character in years. tenement houses administrated then and partly now by a municipal company have been regained by previous owners; other ownership transformations have taken place. the first effective action was the change of ownership of a shabby residential building located at 6 dobrzecka street. the building was later demolished and in 2006 replaced with a new one. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 i. rącka and s. palicki 5 a similar step aimed at changing the street character, was the replacement of the old residential structure at the junction of dobrzecka and poznańska streets, where one of kalisz housing associations built the first block of flats in 2005 and the second one in 2008. the obsolete petrol station located at the beginning of the street was dismantled in 2007. in the same year the ownership transformation of the property located at 10 dobrzecka street was finalised enabling its general repair. at the same time, some manufacturing areas, which formerly belonged to kalpo textile plant, were – upon announcing the company’s bankruptcy – bought out by a local investor (a quasi-developer) and transformed into residential areas. construction of a block of flats (flats and apartments) began in january 2008 and finished in december 2009. the result was a 37 m tall building of 9 overground and 1 underground storeys and 100 flats. to make room for this building, the manufacturing facility was mostly demolished. the only thing left was a raw structure which was subsequently developed and a few storeys were added. in 2009 the perpetual administrator (pck) of the property located at 2 dobrzecka street renovated the building, made the façade, replaced the woodwork and roof. recently, renovation of the building at 5 dobrzecka street was completed. in 2014 the legal status of the property located at 8 dobrzecka street was regulated. currently, the third building joining the two residential houses owned by a housing association is being built. the legal status of a few of the properties is still unregulated, there have been no inheritance proceedings carried out, they are not entered into the title deeds register (land and mortgage register). the current law does not provide for the option to demolish an unsafe and unsightly old tenement house which is adjacent to an apartment building. market value of the flats in the analyzed area in order to show changes in values of the flats as a result of positive changes in the surrounding, a flat situated in an old tenement house in dobrzecka street in kalisz was valued. the said flat covering 50.0 sq m is situated on the first floor of a short building, consists of two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with a toilet and a hall. its market value was determined. transactions connected with non new-build properties were analyzed, which were located close to the flat and were of a similar technical condition and standard. based on our own analysis and surveys of preferences among potential buyers in property agencies, basic attributes were identified which determine the property’s value as well as their percentage weights. the average annual time trend was found to be 4,6% in 2006-2014. due to non-linearity of the applied trend for price variability, the average value of price variability over time is not an indicator of the future price behavior. therefore, the transactional prices were corrected due to elapsing time based on the degree 6 polynomial function – see formula (2). next, transactions were selected which best correspond to the said flat. for the representative sample, parameters shown in table 1 were identified. table 1. the parameters of a representative sample – flats in kalisz in 2006 and 2014 [pln per sq m]. paramet er 2006 2014 transacti on prices adjusted (polynomi al) prices transacti on prices adjusted (polynomi al) prices minimum price 489 797 679 725 average price 1502 2805 2719 2868 median price 1429 2710 2788 2967 maximu m price 4197 6393 6130 6662 standard deviation 504 923 704 732 coefficie nt of variation 34% 33% 26% 26% the most important asset in the calculation was comparison of the market value of the same flat in two situations – the former unimproved surrounding (picture of dobrzecka street in 2006) and upon the image transformation of the surrounding (picture of dobrzecka street in 2014). the property prices which were the reference point in both situations referred to the same moment – 31.12.2014. as a result, it was possible to maintain comparability of all other market conditions. the results of the property assessment were as follows (fig.3):  pln 113,000 before the surrounding changes (2006),  pln 128,000 after the surrounding changes (2014). interestingly, adjusting of the transaction prices after considering the linear trend function for price variability over time, as per formula (1), may lead to false perception regarding changes in the surroundings of the property being valued. assuming that the price variability in 2006-2014 was linear, the value of the property with the surroundings as per 2006 and price adjusted for 2014, would amount to pln 83,000. if the property was valued with the surroundings as per 2014 and price adjusted for 2014, the value would reach pln 123,000. refining the methodology of the research through the introduction of the polynomial trend function improved the quality of the model used and allowed for more precise representation of the local real estate market. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 influence of urban renewal on the assessment of housing market in the context of smart city development 6 figure 3. the value of the flat according to its surrounding in 2006 and 2014 (prices as on 31.12.2014). econometric modelling of apartments value according to their surroundings as the issue of surroundings influencing apartments value has not been fully examined, additional study has been carried out, based on the analysis of 2,945 transactions of apartments sold in kalisz during the years 2006-2014 and the changes in their surroundings which took place at that time. the analysis was carried out on the base of econometric modelling with the use of multiple regression equations. in the chosen procedure, the dependent variables were:  the transaction price [pln/sq m] of a flat,  the adjusted price [pln/sq m] of a flat. 11 independent variables were initially chosen:  x1 – building a block of flats (2 poznańska street),  x2 – destroying and building a new building (6 dobrzecka street),  x3 – renovating a building (10 dobrzecka street),  x4 – destroying a gas station (dobrzecka-poznańska corner/beginning of the street),  x5 – building a block of flats (2b poznańska street),  x6 – building a block of flats (16 dobrzecka street),  x7 – renovating a building (2 dobrzecka street),  x8 – building a pavement,  x9 – renovating a building (5 dobrzecka street),  x10 – building a block of flats (2a poznańska street),  x11 – change in the legal state of a property enabling its renovation (6 dobrzecka street). after carrying out the consecutive steps of regressive elimination, it occurred that the parameters of the regression function did not show statistical significance. estimating the equation of relations between the variables could not be written. perception of space transformation in the analyzed area by kalisz residents one of the purposes of the study was to collect information about perception of changes in the urban surrounding by kalisz residents. the questionnaire asked about feelings and knowledge about changes in the city’s image within the last ten years and about the trend, visibility and image transformation of dobrzecka street (from poznańska to al. wojska polskiego streets). a question was also asked about most likely and desired trends in this area. the survey was designed to recognize and compare knowledge of kalisz inhabitants about changes in values of the properties located there. the respondents were kalisz residents belonging to various groups:  property market specialists (property agents and property surveyors),  clerks employed in kalisz city office,  students from the president stanisław wojciechowski university school of applied sciences in kalisz,  inhabitants of dobrzecka street,  passers-by. table 2. number of surveyed residents. no trade group no of respondents share in total 1 specialists 25 6.6% 2 clerks 70 18.4% 3 students 43 11.3% 4 dobrzecka st residents 43 11.3% 5 passers-by 199 52.4% total 380 100.0% survey results the respondents were asked to define the image trend within the last decade for the analyzed section of dobrzecka street. the changes were perceived as common, repeatable and lacking outstanding diversity. furthermore, dobrzecka eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 i. rącka and s. palicki 7 street was evaluated subjectively – despite the changes – as ugly. when asked about the degree of changes in the image of dobrzecka street over the last 10 years, the respondents most often gave neutral answers as they thought the street’s image had changed to some extent (45%). few (17%) considered the changes as visible. the survey also examined the knowledge of trends in flat prices in kalisz. kalisz citizens were asked about changes in flat prices in kalisz within the last ten years including dobrzecka street. the biggest number of the respondents thought that the prices of flats in kalisz and in dobrzecka street had been stable, however, almost as large a group said the prices went up. only 4% marked a high increase of the prices in kalisz – 3% for dobrzecka street. as many as 22% of the respondents thought that flat prices had gone down in kalisz. of the 22% who said that flat prices in kalisz went down, 28% said that flat prices had been stable in dobrzecka street, while other 19% thought that in dobrzecka street they had gone up. also every fifth who thought the prices were generally stable in the city, pointed to their rise in dobrzecka street. what is interesting, (compare: fig. 1) wrong answers about the drop of flat prices in kalisz within the last 10 years were most frequently given by property agents and clerks. the surveyors, students and passers-by marked the price increase whereas the inhabitants of dobrzecka street were convinced of their stabilization. the respondents were asked to identify which presently existing element is the strongest sign of space changes in the analyzed section of dobrzecka street. the block of flats dominated the spontaneous answers. supported answers were similar. even though 100 new flats were built in the analyzed vicinity, as many as 16% thought the social structure of the street inhabitants had not changed while 35% thought it had been poor (fig. 4). figure 4. accents of changes within dobrzecka street. next, they were asked about respondent anticipated and desired trends in that area. spontaneous answers about the desired trends boiled down to two main options:  renovation of tenement houses,  development of transportation infrastructure. next, the respondents were offered a few variants of answers regarding the change of dobrzecka image. the respondents considered the majority of the suggested trends as quite or rather unlikely. the highest score was given to further growth of blocks of flats – renovation of tenement houses (p=0.49). on the other hand, construction of tall buildings is regarded as slight less likely (p=0.38). the respondents also pointed to transfer of the current trend to the farther section of the street or adjacent areas as quite probable (p=0.46). the likelihood of growth of commercial and other functions was estimated by the respondents as p=0.38 and p=0.36 respectively. the last question asked to kalisz citizens was about their satisfaction with transformations within dobrzecka street within the last ten years. most people did not clearly state their attitude to the changes (selected the neutral answer), however, the emotionally burdened answers were mostly positive (fig. 5). the lowest satisfaction with the changes was shown by property agents and passer-bys; the students are slightly more satisfied. among the street inhabitants negative scores prevail, which proves their dissatisfaction with the changes. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 influence of urban renewal on the assessment of housing market in the context of smart city development 8 figure 5. the level of satisfaction with the changes within dobrzecka street in the last ten years. 4. conclusions the article discusses a new approach to studying contemporary transformation in a smart city space. measuring the quantitative effects of city revitalization (analysis of transaction prices and trends in the residential real estate market) as well as the qualitative effects (perception of changes in social perspective) allows for comparison of factual and socially perceived response of the real estate market. the study shows the trends and dynamics of the changes in the market value of the flat located in kalisz, dobrzecka street. this area was subject to urban transformations which in 2006-2014 improved the surrounding quality and image and consequently increased attractiveness of the local flat market. the flat’s market value was defined according to its surrounding in 2006 and 2014. due to the simulations taking into account various states of attractiveness of the analyzed flat, it was assessed that should the surrounding’s condition remain relatively low and typical of 2006, its market value would now amount to pln 113,000. however, the actual improvement of the neighbourhood’s image and quality made the value go up to pln 128,000. therefore, in the observed period the real appreciation of the said flat increased approximately by 13%. this change, arisen as a consequence of the local revitalization, proves a connection between transformations in the space and flat valuation. it illustrates possibilities of stimulating price increase in a property market in areas subject to revitalization. consciousness among the respondents of the scale of changes in flat prices is low. they diagnosed the difference slightly higher on the scale for dobrzecka street than for the whole city. when asked about desired trends of changes in that area, the respondents indicated a necessity to modify the social structure. significance of changes in urban space and their market consequences reaches more strongly and quickly to profiteers who seek to multiply their assets through successful investments. general social consciousness is limited and blurred. typical space users behave inconsistently – they notice accents, evident signs of transformations, however, at the same time they say the transformations cannot be easily noticed. they also cannot see a link between changes in the surrounding with prices of flats. in this way, a surprising mechanism was caught of separation between social and market consciousness. this indicates a gap in consciousness or economic competence in the society which is unable to translate significance of physical changes in the space to their market consequences. this phenomenon identifies diverse potential of social consumption of benefits offered by smart city transformation. it is an important factor for consideration to ensure a balanced development of urban areas. references [1] kucharska-stasiak, e. (2006) nieruchomość w gospodarce rynkowej (warszawa: pwn). [2] olbińska, k. (2014) the influence of real estate on its surroundings based on the example of the manufaktura complex in lodz. real estate management and valuation 22(4): 5-16. [3] polko, a. (2005) miejski rynek mieszkaniowy i efekty sąsiedztwa (katowice: ae w katowicach). [4] ridker, r.g. and henning, i.a. (1967) the determinants of residential property values with special reference to air pollution. review of economics and statistics, 49(2): 246-257. [5] mason, g. (2007) revealing ‘space’ in spatial externalities: edge-effect externalities and spatial incentives. journal of environmental economics and management 54(1):84-99. [6] simons, r., quercia, r. and meric, i. (1998) the value impact on new residential construction and neighborhood disinvestment on residential sales price. journal of real estate research 15 (1/2):147-161. [7] emery, j. (2006) bullring: a case-study of retail-led urban renewal and its contribution city centre regeneration. journal of retail and leisure property 5(2): 121-133. [8] trojanek r. and trojanek m. (2012) profitability of investing in residential units: the case of the real estate market in poland in the years 1997-2011. actual problems of economics 7: 73-83. [9] gies, e. (2006) the health benefits of parks (san fransisco: the trust for public land). [10] matusiak, m. (2010) przestrzeń publiczna jako czynnik konkurencyjności miast. in gaczek, w. m. [ed.]: prace eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 i. rącka and s. palicki 9 z gospodarki przestrzennej, zeszyt 161, (poznań: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu ekonomicznego w poznaniu). [11] palicki, s. (2013) a valuation of public spaces: selected research results. real estate management and valuation 21(1):. 19-24. [12] tanaś j. (2013) differentiation of local housing markets in poznań suburban area. real estate management and valuation, 21(3):88-98. [13] couch, c. (2003) economic and physical influences on urban regeneration in europe. in couch c., fraser, c., percy, s., urban regeneration in europe, (oxford: blackwell publishing). [14] bryx m. [ed.] (2013) rynek nieruchomości. finansowanie rozwoju miast (warszawa: cedewu). [15] kaźmierczak, b., nowak, m., palicki, s. and pazder, d. (2011) oceny rewitalizacji. studium zmian na poznańskiej śródce (poznań: wydawnictwo wydziału nauk społecznych uam). [16] palicki, s. (2012) interakcje przestrzeni publicznej z rynkiem nieruchomości komercyjnych. przykład śródmiejskiego obszaru poznania. in gaczek, w. m. [ed.], prace z gospodarki przestrzennej. zjawiska i procesy współczesnego rozwoju społeczno-gospodarczego(poznań: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu ekonomicznego w poznaniu). [17] palicki, s. and rącka, i. (2015) wartość lokali mieszkalnych wobec zmian wizerunkowych przestrzeni miejskiej. in palicki, s. [ed.], nieruchomość w przestrzeni (kalisz: wydawnictwo uczelniane państwowej wyższej szkoły zawodowej w kaliszu), ch. 4. [18] belniak, s. (2009) rewitalizacja nieruchomości w procesie odnowy miast (kraków: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu ekonomicznego w krakowie). [19] smith, m. m. and henever, c. c. (2011) the impact of housing rehabilitation on local neighborhoods: the case of small community development organizations. american journal of economics and sociology 70(1): 5185. [20] trojanek r. (2013) fluctuations of dwellings' prices in the biggest cities in poland during 1996–2011. actual problems of economics 2(1-2): 224-231. [21] international valuation standards 2013 framework and requirements (2013) international valuation standards council. [22] rącka, i. (2013) sales of residential properties illustrated with the city of kalisz. the journal of international studies 6(2): 132-144. [23] rącka, i. (2015) czynniki atrakcyjności nieruchomości mieszkaniowych na obszarach podmiejskich kalisza. problemy rynku nieruchomości. biuletyn stowarzyszenia rzeczoznawców majątkowych województwa wielkopolskiego 2: 29-37. [24] frukacz, m., popieluch, m. and preweda, e. (2011) korekta cen nieruchomości ze względu na upływ czasu w przypadku dużych baz danych (real estate price adjustment due to time in the case of large databases). infrastruktura i ekologia terenów wiejskich (infrastructure and ecology of rural areas) 4: 213–226. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e2 influence of urban renewal on the assessment of housing market in the context of smart city development an analysis of trends, developments and transparent issues in the making of indian smart cities 1 an analysis of trends, developments and transparent issues in the making of indian smart cities aatif jamshed1,* 1abes engineering college, ghaziabad, uttar pradesh, india abstract during the past few years, interest has grown in the creation and application of methods, structures for smart city evaluation. this reflects the increasing awareness of the value of systems for better planning and architecture of efficient and stable communities. a city is a vast and permanent human community that offers many resources and opportunities for its people. the rapid urbanization and growth have put a lot of pressure on local services and service delivery. the research discusses many potential resources that can make a city smart across growing city dimensions and also discusses the initiatives of the indian government towards a smart city. this paper is a survey of a variety of papers, covering the actual case study from a more comprehensive framework, such as e-mobility, which covers the smart city subject from. keywords: smart city, iot, ecosystem model, capability layers handling editor: akshat agrawal (amity university gurgaon, india) received on 07 august 2020, accepted on 24 august 2020, published on 31 august 2020 copyright © 2020 aatif jamshed et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.18-8-2020.166042 *corresponding author. email: aatif.jamshed@abes.ac.in 1. introduction what a smart city is all about. the response is that the idea of an intelligent city is not generally accepted. various people say different things. the conceptualization of smart city therefore depends on how much development, readiness to change and changes, the resources and expectations of people differ from town to city and city to country. defining a smart city [1]: a smart-city has developed infrastructure to capture, process, and analyse real-time data in order to better the lives of its citizens. the study indicates that every smart city initiative needs strong guidelines on new technologies and data, a functioning administrative structure, and some form of community engagement. brooks rainwater, co-author, and founder of nlc city solutions and research centre [4] said, technological innovation is closely related to urban growth. although "trends in intelligent city development" shows no one-size-fits approach to the implementation of intelligent city systems, it makes three recommendations which must form the core of each plan: the most successful smart or intelligent city initiatives are those with clear goals that solve public issues that are unique to every city. cities will turn at collaborations with colleges, non-profit groups, and the business sector [4]. figure 1. smart city vision eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:aatif.jamshed@abes.ac.in aatif jamshed 2 figure 1 reveals the smart city vision. smart-city is an integrated system of intelligent treatment, smart technology, smart environment, smart workplace and smart citizens of course [3]. partnerships provide cities with many advantages, including access to finance and external expertise. cities will strive to follow best practices and smart city growth systems. city officials will take into account and develop technical principles and structures for smart-city growth [7]. within a smart city the main network components would include: • suitable water supply, health and education • providing guaranteed power and sanitation and the disposal of solid waste, • efficient public transport and urban mobility; • low-cost housing, particularly for the elderly, • robust it and digitalization integration, 1.1. govt. initiatives an scm underlined in figure 2 below has been initiated by the govt.of india through the mohua-ministry of housing and urban affairs. the scm of the government of india supports cities that provide the citizens with a healthy and secure environment for their core amenities and good quality of life, and the introduction of smart' technology. these smart policies cover e-governance ict programs, online government facilities, and relatively reduced prices to improve key service efficiency [11]. the aim of the smart cities project is to encourage communities with modern services and inhabitants with a better standard of life, a healthy and prosperous climate, and the implementation of smart technologies. the purpose and target is to look at limited areas, construct a model that can be used as a lighthouse in other developing cities [12], and to develop a replicable model of sustainable development. the smart city program of the state is a bold, innovative initiative. it is intended to build templates that can be replicated in and out of smart city, catalyzing the creation of parallel smart cities across the world's various cities and regions. source: india.gov.in figure 2. smart cities mission the goal of the smart cities mission [10] is, therefore, to accelerate economic growth and enhance people's quality of life by promoting urban development and technology creation, in particular technology that contributes to smart outcomes. area-based planning would turn existing areas including slums, into betterdeveloped neighbourhoods, although enhancing the profitability of the city as a whole [14]. modern areas beyond cities will be built to meet the increasing development of metropolitan areas. in order to improve technology and facilities, the smart technologies architecture will enable cities to leverage software, knowledge and data. this will improve the quality of life, generate employment and develop prosperity for everyone, particularly the poor, and vulnerable, contributing to sustainable cities [8]. 1.2. case study analysis bhubaneswar e-mobility plan: bhubaneswar, by major public transit network investments and last mile connectivity modes, the goal is to trigger a 20% change to public transport by 2021. according to the bus modernisation programme, 38.7kmspriority transit corridors would need 148 new electric passenger buses to carry 192,000 passengers daily. first-last-mile within its abd connectivity, the city proposes the deployment of 500 e-rickshaws, the associated infrastructure and charging stations from 2021.ventures will serve as a catalyst to help bhubaneswar achieve its target goal of 30% of vehicles powered by electric vehicles in town by 2030 [9]. via participatory policy-making, good governance, and free access to it, bhubaneswar is a: • city based on public transportation that facilitates involved, integrated, and affordable mobility choices eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 an analysis of trends, developments and transparent issues in the making of indian smart cities 3 • vivid community with numerous housing, educational and leisure facilities while improving its history, culture and cultural cultures • children's friendly town with open, secure, inclusive and vibrant public areas • eco-city that resides in harmony with nature to sustain a stable, clean, green and balanced climate • the regional economic centre, through the presence and empowerment of their governments, local businesses and informal workers, is attracting knowledge-based businesses and sustainable tourism development. the e-vehicle policy [13] outlines key measures through governments of states / cities as follows: • determination of the correct area / routes for electrical rickshaw service within the city • define the regulatory requirements for electric rickshaws in odisha to ensure maximum coverage • finalization of draft electric rickshaws legislation • determination of electric vehicle tariff to be paid • odisha electricity regulatory commission approval of tariff • to identify sustainable operating models for infrastructure charging • define the requisite amendments to the building laws • establishment of an air ambient fund structure • describing auto-rickshaw buyback system structure 2. role of iot in connected cities the internet of things (iot) supports cities connecting disparate public services, infrastructure and networks. such intelligent cities produce quantitative data in real time to more efficiently monitor initiatives and resources and to assess their effects instantly [13]. platooning trucks transport freight easily from port to destination. smart distribution systems warn operators as freight is transferred between locations. when the time comes to retain or replace public transport and community service cars connect with their home entity. self-driving vehicles carry users to and from the area, offer transport and delivery to others. apps work with intelligent parking meters to warn drivers about the availability of parking. the sensors measurement the volume of waste in public receptacles so that sanitation workers can optimize productivity on their way. solar panels will be tracked to see how much electricity they produce and if maintenance is required. led lamps are sensitive to the environment and periodically notify the public works department when the bulbs need to be adjusted. sensors track fireprone situations in urban parks and forested areas. sensors are now able to identify flames in buildings and trigger an alarm call to the fire service. power plants can be tracked in order to track health and local police can be aware of the pollution rates. cities depend on and promote ecommerce to be competitive in the economy of 21st century [16]. drones can be used for law enforcement and firefighting as remote outposts for maintenance inspections and for environmental protection. areas not open to public access cannot be monitored to keep illegal workers out. commercial applications include precision production, aerial imaging and parcel distribution in the near-coming future. cities should create smartphones and wearable devices and allow residents an integral member of the internet network that interacts with the community [17]. table 1 says what internet stuff means for towns? table 1. iot-internet of things mean for cities. transport utilities services smart logistics waste mgmt. fire detection vehicle fleet solar panels radiation levels self-driving cars lighting e-commerce parking water and wastewater surveillance cameras/drones the latest trend is to smart cities. citizens around the world are working to make communities more prepared with electricity, security, education and transportation technologies. cities are creative centres, social beehives, hotbeds of invention and perhaps the most interesting cities to explore in the country. cities are growing; the united nations predicts that by 2035[17], [18], 67 percent of world's people will live in the urban regions, according to national geographic. smart cities utilize ict to be smarter and more effective in resource use, resulting in expense and electricity reductions, increased infrastructure efficiency and quality of life, and decreased environmental impact – both promoting creativity and the low-carbon economy. table 2 lists some of the world's inventive stakeholders [15]. table 2. global smart cities and their inventions name of city equipped technology vienna smart energy vision toronto low-carbon economy solutions new york optimize business process solutions london congestion tax tokyo smart grid barcelona low-carbon solutions. table 3. smart cities in india and their latest inventions eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 aatif jamshed 4 name of city equipped technology indore kahn riverfront development surat smart city centre visakhapatnam all abilities children park coimbatore smart street bench delhi ndmc open space development bhubaneswar e-mobility plan for reader's convenience knowing, this article included many acronyms. table 4 shows all the acronyms included [14]. table 4. list of acronyms abbreviation description scm smart cities mission iot internet of things sca smart city agent cap consistency availability partition resist scc smart city challenge 3. background study h kumar et.al [1] propose a multi-dimensional hierarchy of services and critical infrastructural growth. furthermore, it will enable politicians, local planners, government officials and infrastructure providers to identify and gain more insight from potential creative solutions for sustainable community development in the smart city transition process. in the concrete framework to describe urban development, five main fields (planning and public design, ict services and smart solutions) are discussed. the current sctf is supported by research and experience in many intelligent cities around the world to highlight its usefulness. furthermore, an elegant and systemic simulation for the city transformation process demonstrates the interrelationship between the ideas collected. j laufs et.al [2] have assembled a list of security initiatives for intelligent communities and have recommended different improvements to the strategic status quo on the ground. finally, we suggest three specific groups to categorize security measures in smart cities: those initiatives utilizing modern sensors with existing actuators, those trying to turn old devices smart, and those implementing completely different features. those topics are then addressed in depth and the significance for the general field of public protection and governance of a set of initiatives is assessed. a sharifi et.al [3] discussed general knowledge on aspects such as geographic scope, research size, demographic target and production process. this also describes structure, thematic focus zones, and repeated indicators in systems, and includes detailed detail on the various techniques and methods used to assess city smartness. results show that different approaches were taken, but some commonalities also exist. index is the system-wide model of the most common themes: environment, people, politics, climate, accessibility, living, and records. this typology research can be used for many purposes; it can act as a reference frame for those who use appropriate schemes to analyse the efficiency of smart cities, can be used as a framework for more strategic review of evaluation schemes, and can also direct the development of better educated schemes. pa johnson et.al [4] conceptualized how the modern smart city incorporates people not only as a community, but as a series of micro-transactions integrated in the city's real-time climate. a smart city system monitors this transactional resident and translates it across other networks into intelligent community decision-making. we have developed four different interaction modes to address this shift from traditional methods of communicating with people and the metropolitan environment to micro-transactions: sort (intentional contribution), tweet (intermediate third parties), tap (interaction accepted or requested) and switch (ambient motion driven transaction). such four approaches are used to address core concerns on how the citizens in the emerging era of the smart cities interact with the government and how these interactions form people's political relationships and build different power outlets in the private sector. m lom et.al [5] created a new concept, smart city agent. the sca is the main building block for smart city modelling. however, this paper's approach emphasizes the interconnection of various systems within a town. its strength is better data exchange and heterogeneous agents. this knowledge management strategy is the missing link in the increasing demand for partial smart city technologies, allowing applications to be replicated in dynamic environments like a city. the appropriateness of the value of the proposed alternative as seen on an electric car charging usage case. results show the approach to dynamic behaviour modelling. s edge et.al [6] aimed throughout the face of spatial and social change, brought out common viewpoints and insights throughout downtown kitchener, ontario, canada, an intensely clever city on the development track. they adopt an innovative analytic procedure (cap) method and offer a collection of complex vignettes focusing on the experiences of these stakeholder groups centred on data collected from a neighbourhood dialogue involving representatives of city government, technology and start-up sectors, community service organizations and public leaders. the vignettes highlight various assumptions about the role of technology in enhancing quality of life and demonstrate incapacity to turn shared and equal goals into practice on the ground. we contend that cap is an important tool for addressing and eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 an analysis of trends, developments and transparent issues in the making of indian smart cities 5 enhancing the inclusiveness and openness of conversations and debates in smart cities. 4. impact on real state new house-building figures are main economic indicators. which means they'll give you heads-up on the housing market 's prospects. the figure 3 below shows the number of new private-owned housing units launched in 2009-2020[15]. figure 3. new privately owned housing units impacts predicted are: • improved data collection of data should allow stakeholders to better understand a property or location, its environment and inhabitants. • in the coming years, stronger demand is expected for smart buildings [16], which use digital processes to manage a range of operations such as monitoring and controlling resources, climate, protection and other main features. • advances in technology are disrupting the conventional structures of businesses choosing where to conduct business; purchasing or leasing an office; building it to their specifications; and designing equipment for their employees to perform their work. • in smart cities, data centres are required to play a leading position as the hubs for massive data acquisition, storage, retrieval and archiving. there are following categories of property types [20]: • residential land covers new and resale properties. the most popular is single-family housing. • features shopping centres and strip malls, hospital and residential facilities, hotels and offices. • commercial real estate covers factories and land and warehouses. • land includes vacant land, farmland and ranches. 5. challenges for smart city solutions recognizing that cities are the drivers of development and attracting a million people per minute from rural areas, the government launched the scc-smart city challenge [17], handing over targeted urbanization to the states. the aim of the scm-smart cities mission strategy is to encourage communities that have key services and have people with quality of life, a safe and healthy climate, and 'smart' solutions. key challenges and their description is enlisted in table 5 [15]. table 5. key challenges of smart cities challenge description infrastructure utilization of sensor technology security and hackers cyber-terror threats privacy concerns invasion of privacy educating community awareness in citizens being socially inclusive smart transit programs smart cities are utilizing sensor networks to obtain and analyse knowledge to increase the quality of life for people. sensors gather data from rush-hour statistics to crime rates and air quality in general. installing and operating these devices calls for complex and costly systems. how are they going to get that power? does hard-wearing, solar or battery operation require this? and, for power loss, maybe a combination of all three? large urban areas are now threatened by upgrading decades-old networks such as electric wires, steam pipes, and rail tubes, as well as high-speed broadband. broadband wireless coverage is growing, but connectivity is limited in major cities. recent debate about cyber-terror risks to fragile, aging power grids has a little more anxiety and cynicism about technology and defence. smart cities spend more time and money in infrastructure, while technology firms build apps with creative built-in systems to defend against ransomware and cybercrime. with block-chain being the focus of the computing industry, many developers are finding ways to integrate these cryptographic technologies into current security-enhancing applications. any big city wants a compromise between quality of life and privacy breach. while everybody has to achieve a more comfortable, happier and safe atmosphere, nobody likes to know like any family member is actively watching them [18]. cameras mounted on any street corner can help to discourage violence, but they may also generate distrust and fear among law-abiding people. another important factor is the sum of data collected daily by all occupants with smart sensors. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 aatif jamshed 6 to effectively maintain and grow an informed society, it takes intellectual persons who are interested in the usage of new technology to utilizing them actively. for a current city-wide technological program, the development phase must include informing residents in the public regarding its advantages [19]. real-time updates are an innovative concept for a busy society with smart transportation services providing riders. so what if one half of the city 's populace does not afford mass transport or uber? what about the elderly residents, without having mobile devices or apps? this is crucial because smart city development needs empathy for all groups of society, not just the wealthy and technically developed ones. innovation should often contribute for getting communities together instead of dividing them on the basis of income or jobs. 6. nation-building initiatives in india the nation-building initiative aimed at turning india into a regional centre for design and manufacture. following are the list of some initiatives shown in figure 4: • make in india • india.gov.in national portal of india • incredible india • smart net (urbanization solution) figure 4. list of nation building inititives 6.1. project’s schemes by govt. government has initiated various beneficiary programs shown in figure 5 for the benefit of people and, of course, country under the umbrella of national initiatives. figure 5. list of beneficiary programs/schemes on behalf of west bengal housing and construction infrastructure corporation ltd (wbhidco ltd), bengal urban new town's city development plan (cdp), designed and submitted by infrastructure development limited (buidl) –kolkata, to be listed under the satellite town planning scheme for urban infrastructure about seven mega towns. new town, part of the rajarhatgopalpur area, is a rapidly developing satellite town in metropolitan kolkata place (kma), which has the capacity for construction of infrastructure. therefore, the town is expected to be able to absorb additional population growth and help lighten burden on city of kolkata [21]. 7. ecosystem framework – a model a smart city is a city with six characteristics, based on the "simple" blend of self-decisive, autonomous and informed people [20]. figure two demonstrates our smart city architecture structure. an environment composed of individuals, organisations, enterprises, regulations, laws and processes interconnected to achieve the desired effects in figure one is a lively and prosperous community. this community is flexible, sensitive and still important for everyone living, working and visiting the area. an intelligent city incorporates technologies to speed up, activate and turn this ecosystem [21]. in the intelligent city environment there are four types of value producers. we create and absorb value for one of the results mentioned in figure7 project’s schemes nerudp amrut jnnurm satellite towns urban transport lumpsum provision hriday nulm swachh bharat mission eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 an analysis of trends, developments and transparent issues in the making of indian smart cities 7 figure 6. the smart city ecosystem framework. if you think of a wise city, you immediately think of civic and quasi-governmental infrastructure such as smart car parking, smart water supply, intelligent lighting etc. in reality, three others – corporations and associations, neighbourhoods and people – co-exist in the intelligent community. figure 7. the smart city ecosystem framework. businesses and organisations should create programs that leverage knowledge to produce outcomes for their stakeholders. some examples of "smart" companies include uber and lyft for personal mobility and nextdoor for knowledge sharing [22]. communities are wise, albeit rather clustered cities. many examples include schools, office parks, terminals, freight facilities, multinational units (mdus) or residential projects, housing developments / districts, commercial districts, and even individual "smart" houses, which may be smart neighbourhoods. we need intelligent resources that can be precisely customized to their stakeholders. intelligent infrastructure suppliers in smart cities are either tenants or regular individuals. a citizen living near a dangerous crossroads can point a camera to the intersection and broadcast information to traffic planners and the police live. to order to track ozone and pollen rates at certain times of year, homeowners put air quality monitoring sensors on their property and provide this information to certain community members. residents can opt to temporarily or permanently render such intelligent services free of charge or dependent on fees. a smart city is an ecosystem consisting of several capability layers listed in table 6. whilst technology is an important facilitator, it is just one of the fundamental technologies that any intelligent community requires. no one is more important than the other. in the clever city, every skill plays a different role. these capabilities must be integrated and coordinated to fulfil their mission. table 6. list of capability layers name of layer description value layer visible layer for city residents & others innovation layer. variety of innovation programs governance & operations layer upgrade their existing infrastructure policy & financing layer partners are required to build, operate information and data layer open data initiatives security layer. seamless layer of trusted connections. infrastructure layer. support a new class of value creators the following steps are important: understand the architecture and adapt it to the sense of a special field of the smart city ecosystem. include this idea in the development and execution of the intelligent urban visions, policies and strategies. defining current capabilities and vulnerabilities on many dimensions in the sense of intelligent municipalities. understand what the four ways of sense consumers require. evaluate smart city projects and strategies on existing and evolving environments. this approach helps to decide what the projects need and what is required to complete the projects. prioritize and develop expertise at different habitat levels. a smart city needs new talents and knowledge. improvements in capabilities by strategic partnerships and agreements with service suppliers, where possible. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 8 8. conclusion technology has made many potential lifestyles dreams a reality the smart city is just one of the technological solutions. the concept of smart cities is extended in other parts of the world including the u.s., mexico, finland, south korea, sweden, and others. such cities should make a quality of life leap. smart cities are designed to fit the contemporary city's needs and potential. the "smart" city, intelligent world, knowledge community, smart communication, and wireless media are among the nomenclatures used. although the real estate sector is making significant strides in smart buildings' growth and innovation, it is important that they obtain a comprehensive understanding of how these innovations match and integrate with the wider smart city environment. in particular, stakeholders in the real estate sector will need to consider new data sources and how to build on them to support land asset creation, construction, and management. 9. future work smart city projects are projected to expand in the future, revolutionizing areas such as health care, healthcare, and policing, while also promoting the encrypting development [24] and progress of engaged people who will adopt and use technological technologies and services like smart people. future study can have utilized different deep learning frameworks for progressive databases [25]. this study will continue using factors such as: power efficiency, service quality, data transmission speed, range, sensor size, data storage, data transmission reliability, delivery cost, network type and processor to review these published papers on sensor and routing protocols. references [1] journal article: kumar, h., singh, m. k., gupta, m. p., & madaan, j. (2020). moving towards smart cities: solutions that lead to the smart city transformation framework. technological forecasting and social change, 153, 119281. [2] journal article: laufs, j., borrion, h., & bradford, b. (2020). security and the smart city: a systematic review. sustainable cities and society, 55, 102023. [3] journal article: sharifi, a. (2020). a typology of smart city assessment tools and indicator sets. sustainable cities and society, 53, 101936. [4] journal article: johnson, p. a., robinson, p. j., & philpot, s. (2020). type, tweet, tap, and pass: how smart city technology is creating a transactional citizen. government information quarterly, 37(1), 101414. [5] journal article: lom, m., & pribyl, o. (2020). smart city model based on systems theory. international journal of information management, 102092. [6] journal article: edge, s., boluk, k., groulx, m., & quick, m. (2020). exploring diverse lived experiences in the smart city through creative analytic practice. cities, 96, 102478. [7] journal article: yigitcanlar, t. (2015). smart cities: an effective urban development and management model? australian planner, 52(1), 27-34. [8] journal article: anttiroiko, a. v., valkama, p., & bailey, s. j. (2014). smart cities in the new service economy: building platforms for smart services. ai & society, 29(3), 323-334. [9] conference: castro, m., jara, a. j., & skarmeta, a. f. (2013, march). smart lighting solutions for smart cities. in 2013 27th international conference on advanced information networking and applications workshops (pp. 1374-1379). ieee. [10] journal article: m. vanis and k. urbaniec, “employing bayesian networks and conditional probability functions for determining dependences in road traffic accidents data,” 2017 smart city symposium prague (scsp), may 2017. [11] journal article: pagani, f. bruschi, and v. rana, “knowledge discovery from car sharing data for traffic flows estimation,” 2017 smart city symposium prague (scsp), may 2017. [12] journal article: p. pecherkova and i. nagy, “analysis of discrete data from traffic accidents,” 2017 smart city symposium prague (scsp), may 2017. [13] journal article: anandakumar, h a, & umamaheswari, k. a (2017). supervised machine learning techniques in cognitive radio networks during cooperative spectrum handovers. cluster computing, 20(2), 1505–1515. doi:10.1007/s10586-017-0798-3 [14] conference: v. kostakos, t. ojala, and t. juntunen, “traffic in the smart city: exploring city-wide sensing for traffic control center augmentation,” ieee internet computing, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 22–29, nov. 2013. [15] conference: u. nakarmi and m. rahnamay naeini, “towards integrated infrastructures for smart city services: a story of traffic and energy aware pricing policy for charging infrastructures,” proceedings of the 6th international conference on smart cities and green ict systems, 2017. [16] conference: wenzhao liao and zhiren fu, “a cloud platform for flow-based analysis of large-scale network traffic,” iet international conference on smart and sustainable city 2013 (icssc 2013), 2013. [17] journal article: anandakumar, h. b, & umamaheswari, k. b (2017). an efficient optimized handover in cognitive radio networks using cooperative spectrum [18] sensing. intelligent automation & soft computing, 1–8. doi:10.1080/10798587.2017.1364931 [19] journal article: k. b. malagund, s. n. mahalank, and r. m. banakar, “app controlled: cloud service oriented smart city traffic management,” 2016 symposium on colossal data analysis and networking (cdan), mar. 2016. [20] conference: m. r. alifi and s. h. supangkat, “information extraction for traffic congestion in social network: case study: bekasi city,” 2016 international conference on ict for smart society (iciss), jul. 2016. [21] conference: y. tian and l. pan, “predicting short-term traffic flow by long short-term memory recurrent neural network,” 2015 ieee international conference on smart city/socialcom/sustaincom (smartcity), dec. 2015. [22] journal article: arulmurugan, r., sabarmathi, k. r., & anandakumar, h. (2017). classification of sentence level sentiment analysis using cloud machine learning techniques. cluster computing. doi:10.1007/s10586-0171200-1 aatif jamshed eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 an analysis of trends, developments and transparent issues in the making of indian smart cities 9 [23] conference: imawan, f. putri, and j. kwon, “tiq: a timeline query processing system over road traffic data,” 2015 ieee international conference on smart city/socialcom/sustaincom (smartcity), dec. 2015. [24] journal article: kumar, a., mehra, p. s., gupta, g., & jamshed, a. (2012). modified block playfair cipher using random shift key generation for smart. international journal of computer applications, 58(5). [25] journal article: jamshed, a., mallick, b. & kumar, p. deep learning-based sequential pattern mining for progressive database mainly for bins. soft comput (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-020-05015-2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e4 emulating vehicular ad hoc networks for evaluation and testing of automotive embedded systems manuel schiller, alois knoll robotics and embedded systems department of informatics technische universität münchen {manuel.schiller,knoll}@in.tum.de abstract the evaluation and testing of cooperative applications based on vehicular ad hoc networks (vanets) in real testbeds is difficult due to the need for repeatable scenarios and largescale experiments. therefore a novel virtualization-based framework is presented to evaluate automotive software in the context of emulated vanets. the approach enables the precise and large-scale evaluation of real-world implementations through the synchronized execution of network and vehicle simulators as well as the applications encapsulated in virtual electronic control units. this paper provides a detailed description of the framework’s structure and its components as well as an validation of the proposed synchronization algorithm. the performance comparison with pure network simulation indicates that despite additional overhead large-scale experiments can be conducted without loss of accuracy. keywords vanet, embedded system simulation, testing, evaluation, network emulation categories and subject descriptors i.6.5 [simulation and modeling]: model development; i.6.7 [simulation and modeling]: simulation support systems; c.2.1 [computer-communication networks]: network architecture and design—wireless communication 1. introduction vehicular ad hoc networks (vanets) have attracted a lot of research attention over recent years due to the potential improvements in traffic safety and efficiency as well as driver comfort. a high variety of applications, commonly referred to as advanced driver assistance systems (adas), such as cooperative driving and subsequently automated driving, are enabled through wireless ad hoc communication between the vehicles on the road. simulation is currently the key methodology to gain an understanding of the various effects that influence the performance and behavior of the entire system composing a vanet. the majority of publications focuses on exploring the lower-level effects such as wireless signal propagation at the physical layer, medium access control and ad hoc routing protocols. the actual applications which are intended to run on top of these layers are usually either left out completely or are only modeled on a very abstract level. however, these applications, which often exhibit safety-critical features, need to be evaluated and tested extensively before deployment in series production. while it is theoretically possible to develop simulation models of the actual implementations and execute them in the established simulators, this approach quickly gets infeasible for complex real world applications. at the other end of the spectrum of available methods real world test drives using physical testbeds of prototype vehicles offer the highest degree of realism. due to the large amount of resources needed for real world test drives, this method is not feasible to perform large-scale and extensive testing of vehicular networks. additionally, achieving repeatable test conditions is next to impossible. in the automotive industry the use of simulation is well established in the development process of traditional driver assistance and active safety systems. however, the current emphasis is primarily on the simulation of individual vehicles at a very high level of detail [6]. when investigating and evaluating the performance of adas based on vehicular communication, this isolated view of a single vehicle in the simulation is not sufficient anymore. potentially every vehicle equipped with wireless communication technology is coupled in a feedback loop with the other road users participating in the vehicular network. therefore the number of relevant intelligent entities which need to be taken into account is drastically increased. to help bridging this gap we present in this paper a new virtualization-based approach for emulating vehicular ad hoc networks as the enabling methodology for evaluating and testing network-centric automotive embedded systems based on this wireless communication technology. our approach ensures that the actual implementations rather than models are employed in the test procedure taking into account the overall system context. by eliminating the need to create such simplified abstractions, testing can be performed earlier and without potential mismatches between the application and its model. simutools 2015, august 24-26, athens, greece copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.24-8-2015.2261004 complex drivers ecu hardware microcontroller abstraction layer services layer application layer autosar operating system (os) runtime environment (rte) ecu abstraction layer application software component application software component application software component application software component figure 1: overview of the autosar layered architecture the remainder of this paper is organized as follows: the testing and evaluation of real-world implementations of adas imposes a certain set of additional requirements, which are discussed in section 2 before giving an overview of the related work. the general concept and architecture of our emulation approach are described in section 3. in section 4 we evaluate the performance and scalability of our approach by means of an exemplary scenario and discuss its benefits and limitations. section 5 concludes the paper and gives an outlook of future work. 2. background and related work before we proceed to the discussion of related work, it is essential to illustrate our scope and area of application as well as the resulting requirements. in order to evaluate and validate real implementations of adas in a simulated, virtual environment, a holistic view of the vehicular ad hoc network comprising the three domains vehicle, network and application is necessary. in contrast to existing approaches we aim to not only cover the network characteristics but also the behavior of the vehicles and the network-aware applications in high fidelity. a high fidelity representation of an application means that the actual code as well as the context in which it is executing must be integrated into the overall simulation. unlike traditional pc-based software, driving assistance systems are typically executed on embedded hardware platforms and must comply with hard real time requirements. a specific software architecture called autosar was developed by the automotive industry for this specific purpose, which defines a generalized architecture for electronic control units (ecus). as shown in figure 1 this model features a separation into multiple layers. autosar also contains the definition of an embedded real time operating system as well as the possibility to define custom interfaces and runtime behavior in a formal description. the different components of an ecu, e.g. application software components (swc), can be developed separately from each other and are combined to the desired overall functionality later on. a key benefit of autosar is the standardization of hardware abstraction layers, which enables hardware-independent development and portability of the majority of an ecu’s software. we will exploit this hardware abstraction in our emulation framework to provide a realistic execution environment for the evaluation of network-based applications. in order to state the fundamentals of this investigation we give a brief overview of existing approaches for vanet simulation and network emulation in the following sections. 2.1 vanet simulation the usual strategy to simulate vanets found in literature is to bidirectionally couple a network simulator and a microscopic traffic simulation. following this approach the interactions between road traffic and network protocols are represented and the mutual impact can be explored [15, 12]. a number of vanet research simulation frameworks which employ this coupling strategy have been developed. they allow researchers to focus on their specific area of interest, i.e. low-level networking such as medium access or high-level concepts of applications such as lowering co2emissions or reducing traffic jams. in veins [15] the application behavior is directly incorporated into the network simulator as a high-level and simplistic model. while vsimrti [13] and itetris [11] provide specific interfaces for integrating vanet applications into the simulation context, adapting real-world implementations of automotive embedded software to these interfaces requires code modifications. since large-scale simulations are usually conducted to perform a statistical analysis of the simulation results, efficient but rather simplistic microscopic traffic simulators are used to generate realistic mobility models. when testing and evaluating real adas implementations a more detailed representation of a vehicle’s state including its sensors and actuators in the simulation is absolutely vital. 2.2 network emulation network simulation and real world testbeds are the usual methodologies for evaluating network protocols and applications. due to the simplifications performed in simulators regarding application models as well as the costs and insufficient repeatability in testbeds, it is desirable to combine the strengths of both methodologies in a network emulator. the original definition of network emulation by fall [5] covers the real time coupling of a discrete event network simulator and hardware executing real implementations of software prototypes. in a wider sense, network emulation can be defined as a hybrid experiment technique that combines both real and simulated network components with real referring to either hardware or software components [1, p. 14]. when the network simulation can not be executed fast enough due to complex models and high node counts, simulation overload causes the network simulator to lag behind the real time execution of the software prototypes and thus invalidates the results of the network emulation [19]. since computational resources can usually not be increased infinitely to speed up the network simulation, several attempts have been made to slow down the execution of the real world implementations to match the execution speed of the network simulation. a common approach is to exploit virtualization to decouple the time perception of the software prototype from the wall clock time [19, 16]. the run-time behavior of such a virtualized system is under full control, so it can be synchronized with the network simulation in virtual time. network emulation based on virtualized pc operating systems such as linux is widely established for evaluating pc-based software, however this methodology is yet novel in the research area of automotive embedded systems and inter-vehicular networks. 3. emulating vehicular ad hoc networks we now present the design and implementation of our emulation framework. after describing the overall concept we explain in detail the four components of which the framework is composed. 3.1 conceptual overview our framework is designed to provide a generic emulation platform for evaluating real implementations of adas which are based on vehicular network communication. the main goal is the support of executing unmodified applications in a high-fidelity and accurate representation of the vanet. the underlying concept is based on the feedback coupling of detailed subsystems for each of the relevant domains constituting a vanet, i.e. the physical domain of each vehicle, the logical domain embodied by the applications running on the ecus as well as the communication network connecting the vehicles through the wireless channel. figure 2 shows the three relevant domains as well as the data flows between those subsystem representations in a conceptual overview of the emulation framework. for reasons of clarity, the data flow from vehicle simulator to network simulator is not depicted but the node positions in the network simulator are kept consistent with the vehicle simulator. swc swc rte os bsw swc swc rte os bsw swc swc rte os bsw vehicle simulator network simulator network packet exchange proxy node simulated wireless channel simulated nodevehicle data exchange ecu virtualization figure 2: conceptual overview of the emulation framework in order to allow evaluation and testing of unmodified applications, the emulation framework needs to provide an execution environment which is as close as possible to the real system on which the applications will be deployed in series production. this could be achieved by representing the logic domain by real hardware ecus executing the software prototypes. however, this approach is infeasible for the following reasons: the development process in the automotive industry is characterized by concurrent engineering in order to shorten the time to market. in the given context this especially covers the parallel design and development of both ecu hardand software, which results in only relatively late availability of the hardware and would thus delay testing of the software prototypes. additionally, conducting large-scale scenarios would require a large number of ecus as well as a high logistic effort for setting up and performing the actual experiments. last but not least, the aforementioned simulator overload resulting from complex models and high node counts in the network simulator can invalidate the evaluation results. for these reasons we choose to integrate virtualized ecus (vecus) as the representation of the logical domain into the overall emulation framework. this approach solves the dependency on hardware availability and the scalability issues and allows us to decouple the emulation from the real time constraint by synchronizing the time progression of the software prototypes with the execution speed of the other simulators. 3.2 network simulation the network simulation is used to model the wireless communication network connecting the vehicles and the applications running on their ecus. as shown in figure 2 each virtual ecu is represented by a proxy node in the network simulation domain. the proxy node acts as a communication endpoint to initiate the simulated transmission of network packets as well as to receive network packets transmitted by other network nodes. additionally, fully simulated nodes can be included, which may for example represent intelligent infrastructure such as traffic lights. we apply the vertical emulation concept which is defined in [7] and also referred to as a split stack in [14]. the network stack is separated into two parts where the upper layers (including the application layer) belong to the vecus, while the lower layers are realized by the network simulator. to offer the highest degree of generality and flexibility, the emulation boundary, i.e. the layer at which the network stack is split up, is drawn at the medium access control (mac) layer. this allows to evaluate arbitrary routing and transport layers as well as the application functionality, which are typically implemented in software and executed in the vecu. network packets generated by these layers are captured at the virtual network interface controller (vnic), which is described in the next section. the packets are then injected into the corresponding proxy node, traverse the simulated mac and physical (phy) layer and are then potentially received in reverse order at other nodes after the simulated transmission has been performed by the network simulator. the proxy nodes therefore handle all lower layer functionality that is usually performed by hardware. this hybrid emulation approach is shown in figure 3. in order to enable communication between fully simulated nodes and vecus above the mac layer, the fully simulated nodes need to have compliant implementations of the relevant vanet protocols (e.g. routing protocols such as geonetworking) and, if necessary and applicable, also application models which can act as traffic sources, e.g. transmitting periodic beacons. simulated wifi channel discrete event network simulator ecu virtualization simulated 802.11 phy simulated 802.11 mac proxy node vnic swc swc rte os bsw figure 3: hybrid vehicular ad hoc network emulation the event-driven network simulator ns-3 is chosen to perform the actual network simulation of the wireless communication domain. ns-3 features an open-source modular architecture that can be extended quite easily. a rich number of simulation models is already available in ns-3, of which we employ the wifi models and specifically the 802.11p mac layer model [2]. network packets in ns-3 are represented as binary packets in network byte order that match their real-world counterparts, so it is possible to directly exchange packets between simulation nodes and external systems without the need for any packet translation through the proxy nodes and a custom data-exchange interface. to allow synchronization of the network simulator with the other domain representations we implemented a custom event scheduler which can be controlled from the outside. in contrast to the default implementation this scheduler executes only those events whose associated simulation time is below a given boundary in virtual time. when this boundary time is reached or a network packet is received by a proxy node, event execution is suspended and the time of the next event in the network simulator’s queue is reported to the outside. the synchronization algorithm is described in detail in section 3.5. 3.3 ecu virtualization as described in section 3.1 our emulation platform is based on the virtualization of ecus. while there are various approaches available for virtualizing such embedded systems, the method of choice is justified by two main reasons. the final hardware design of an ecu is usually determined rather late in the development cycle. therefore important details such as processor architecture, core count etc., which are vital for a detailed modeling of the underlying hardware, are missing until the hardware is specified. additionally, detailed instruction set or even cycle-accurate simulations require a high computational effort, which conflicts with our goal to conduct large-scale evaluations. we have thus chosen the rather hardware abstract approach etas virtual ecu1 which allows us to put the emphasis not on one single, highly-detailed modeled ecu but on the overall system of connected vehicles. this tool enables us to create virtual ecus based on a formal autosar architectural model and the hardware independent c code. this approach can be described as host-compiled paravirtualiza1http://www.etas.com/en/products/isolar eve.php tion [3] where the hardware-abstraction layers of autosar are exploited by porting those abstraction layers as well as an autosar compliant operating system to a standard pc operating system such as linux. this allows the execution of a vecu on a traditional desktop pc on top of the host operating system rather than interacting directly with the actual hardware. a vecu is compiled into a selfcontained executable that can be instantiated as often as necessary, which enables performing large-scale evaluations. each vecu is run as a separate process which has its own virtual hardware (e.g. interrupt controller) modeled on an abstract functional level. in the following we describe the execution concept of a vecu. the execution is stimulated by an internal clock or through virtual interrupts. the internal clock can either progress with respect to the wall clock when running in real-time mode or clock ticks can be injected from the outside, which allows full control over the execution of the vecu. due to the fact that the virtual ecu is executed only on a rather abstract hardware model and since the compiler for the host pc is different from that of the target platform, the execution durations of individual tasks are not representative. we thus interpret the execution of vecu tasks as discrete events which means that a task is executed by an infinitely fast processor in terms of simulated time, as time does not progress during the execution of a task. this assumption leads to the fact that preemption of tasks by higher priority tasks or interrupts does not occur, however considering these scheduling effects only makes sense if a more detailed model of the target platform is available. 0 p ri o ri ty isr task5ms task10ms time (ms) 5 15 2010 execution time preemption interrupt discrete event activation 1 2 3 4 7 5 6 8 figure 4: timing behavior comparison of virtualized ecu figure 4 shows the timing behavior during normal execution and when assuming task activations as discrete events by means of an exemplary ecu, which has two cyclic tasks and one interrupt service routine (isr). during normal execution, tasks can be preempted by tasks of higher priority, which is not accounted for when activating the task execution as discrete events. task activations and interrupt handling are modeled by the discrete-event execution in the correct order but conclusions about the timing behavior of the target hardware platform cannot be drawn. the duration in terms of virtual time between two clock ticks is arbitrary, so the time resolution is configurable for the desired accuracy. by default this time span is set to 1 ms. the discrete event interpretation allows to achieve deterministic and repeatable evaluation of the software implementation under test because influences stemming from the host operating system do not have an impact on the timing behavior of the virtual system. a vecu can communicate with the outside world through virtual hardware devices. since there is yet no standardized integration of vanet hardware in the autosar architecture we have integrated the virtual wireless network interface (vnic) using a complex device driver as shown in figure 5. the vnic redirects the network packets originating from the vecu to the corresponding proxy node in the network simulator. it also offers the interface to inject network packets into the vecu which have arrived at the proxy node. when a packet is injected into the virtual network device, an interrupt in the vecu is raised and in the corresponding isr the packet can be handled by a custom network stack implementation and the autosar software components. vanet complex device driver application layer autosar os runtime environment software component vnic driver vnic figure 5: integration of the virtual network device into the vecu architecture 3.4 traffic and vehicle simulator as stated in section 2.1 the microscopic vehicle models which are usually employed for conducting vanet simulations are not detailed enough for our purpose. the vehicle dynamics as well as actors and sensors need to be modeled in sufficient detail and accuracy in order to supply all necessary state variables to the real implementation of the adas under evaluation. we therefore employ the nanoscopic traffic and vehicle simulator vires virtual test drive (vtd) for the high-fidelity simulation of the physical domain of the vehicles. vtd has been developed for the automotive industry as a virtual test environment used for the development of adas [18]. its focus lies on interactive high-realism simulation of driver behavior, vehicle dynamics and sensors. vtd is highly modular, so any standard component may be exchanged by a custom and potentially more detailed implementation. its standard driver model is based on the intelligent driver model [17], however an external driver model may be applied if necessary. the same concept applies for the vehicle dynamics simulation, where the standard single-track model can be substituted by a complex vehicle dynamic model adapted for specific vehicles. each simulated vehicle can be equipped with arbitrary simulated sensors, for example radar sensors or synthetic video cameras. vtd offers proprietary interfaces to control the simulation execution in a time driven manner as well as to extract the simulation state after the computation of a simulation step. 3.5 simulation synchronizer & scheduler the three described domain representations are either timedriven (vehicle simulator), event-driven (network simulator) or both (vecus). in order to achieve a deterministic cosimulation comprised of all three domains, the subsystems must be synchronized. the simulation synchronizer & scheduler (sss) ensures that the execution of the subsystems is synchronous so that no time drifts can occur as well as causality errors, i.e. executing events from the past, are avoided. since none of the system representations allows to perform rollbacks, an optimistic synchronization algorithm cannot be used; we therefore choose a conservative synchronization algorithm. sss maintains a global event list to determine which system representation is to be scheduled next. after the execution of a system representation is completed, this system is rescheduled when it is due the next time. the determination of this next time depends on the respective system. the vehicle simulator is scheduled once every time step tveh which is configurable for the vehicle simulator. the execution of the vecus can be scheduled every tick ttick which corresponds to the time resolution of the vecus as described in section 3.3. in order to reduce synchronization overhead, the task activation behavior of the vecus, which is contained in the autosar architectural model, can be exploited. if a vecu’s minimum task activation period is tvecu,min, this value can serve as the rescheduling period without sacrificing accuracy. the custom scheduler implementation of the network simulator reports its next event time as described in section 3.2 which serves as the next event time in the global event list of sss for the network simulator. in order to avoid causality errors, the network simulator is only allowed to progress in virtual time until the next vecu will be executed again. this boundary is also derived from the global event list. we illustrate the synchronization algorithm by the sequence diagram in figure 6, which shows the exemplary scenario of two vecus which send ping requests and replies over a simulated wireless channel. for reasons of simplicity the vehicle simulator is left out. the transmission durations in this example are purely fictional and listed for demonstrative purposes only. the vecus in this example exhibit a task activation period of tvecu,min = ttick = 1.0 ms. initially the two vecus execute one tick of virtual time in parallel. vecu2 sends a ping request at time t = 1.0 ms contained in network packet p to vecu1. packet p is captured at the vnic of vecu2 and is then sent to sss which forwards it to the network simulator. this causes the enqueuing of an ns-3 event which injects the packet into the network simulation at t = 1.0 ms through the proxy node associated with vecu1. ns-3 is now allowed to execute events until t = 2.0 ms, which leads to the transmission of p on the simulated wireless channel. at time t = 1.2 ms packet p is received at the proxy node, which corresponds to vecu1. this suspends the execution of events inside the network simulator and packet p is delivered through the sss to vnic of vecu1, which triggers an interrupt. the corresponding isr handles the packet in the network stack and sends a ping reply in a response packet r which travels the exact opposite way back to vecu2. figure 6: synchronization of virtual ecus and network simulation in our implementation, the system representations do not communicate directly with each other but through the sss. the underlying federation concept is derived from the high level architecture (hla), a generic framework for distributed simulations [9]. each system representation is connected to the sss by means of a specific ambassador software component which is responsible for message exchange in both directions as shown in figure 7. these messages involve both the synchronization and the exchange of simulation state data as depicted in figure 2. the ambassadors translate the messages from sss to the respective subsystem and vice versa. this allows to replace any given subsystem by either another software implementation or even by real hardware by modifying just the corresponding ambassador. the flexibility of the architecture also makes it possible to add additional simulators to the overall simulation and to distribute the system representations on multiple machines. figure 7: implementational overview of the emulation framework 4. evaluation and discussion in the following we evaluate the proposed framework by means of a synthetic scenario to examine the timing accuracy and performance with regard to scalability. we then discuss the universal applicability of our approach as well as its limitations. 4.1 evaluation scenario and setup the evaluation is performed by comparing the framework’s results and performance with pure network simulation. in order to achieve a good comparability we chose to use the previously described ping scenario with static node positions. in this scenario there are n = 2k nodes where each node i ∈ [1, k] pings another node j ∈ [k + 1, n] over a simulated 802.11p wifi channel with an interval v between requests. we integrated the open source ip stack lwip [4] (version 1.4.1) in the autosar vecu, which is straightforward due to it being implemented in c. all experiments were carried out on a single machine equipped with an 3.6 ghz intel xeon cpu, 16 gb ram on a 64 bit linux 3.16 kernel using ns-3 version 3.22 and etas isolar-eve version 2.2. 4.2 accuracy and scalability to validate the correct synchronization behavior of our global event scheduler we performed the above described scenario once in ns-3 alone without the sss and any vecus being attached, so all nodes were fully simulated. the same scenario was then run in our emulation framework with each node now configured as a proxy attached to a vecu instance. the transmissions were simulated on a 802.11p wireless channel at 5.9 ghz. the node count was set to n = 20 and the ping interval to v = 10 ms. figure 8 shows an excerpt of the captured round trip times resulting from both the simulation and the emulation experiment between a corresponding pair of nodes. the round trip times vary due to the interference of competing transmissions between the other node pairs on the shared wireless medium. the resulting round trip times are identical for both experiments, which demonstrates that the scheduling of vecus and network simulation in our emulation framework is performed correctly and deterministically. simulation time [ms] 3000 3100 3200 3300 3400 3500 3600 3700 3800 3900 4000 ro u n d t ri p t im e [ m s ] 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 pure simulation emulation with vecus figure 8: round trip times in simulation and emulation before comparing performance of simulation and emulation we ran the scenario with network simulation disabled. this setup allows to examine the influence of the synchronization tightness by either scheduling the vecus every ttick = 1 ms or every tvecu,min = 10 ms. figure 9 shows the impact of the different synchronization periods. while 40 vecus can be run synchronously in real time in our framework when using the 10 ms period, the synchronization overhead of the 1 ms period is clearly visible and the real-time boundary is crossed when executing more than 24 vecus. in order to quantify the computational overhead in comparnumber of vecus 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 d u ra ti o n [ s ] 0 5 10 15 20 real-time boundary sync 1 ms sync 10 ms figure 9: performance comparison of vecu synchronization periods ison with the network simulation, which is introduced by our framework, we conducted a series of experiments with increasing node counts for both the simulation alone and the emulation and measured the real-time duration for each configuration. each configuration was run 10 times for a duration of 10 s of simulated time and the number of node pairs k was increased from 1 to 24. figure 10 shows the durations for the simulation in ns-3 alone as well as for the emulation with the two different synchronization periods of the vecus when running the ping scenario with an interval of v = 100 ms between ping requests. this results in a message frequency of 10 hz, which is typical for cooperative awareness in vanet applications [8, p. 275]. the pure simulation obviously performs fastest since no additional synchronization is necessary. the synchronization overhead, which the emulation results exhibit, stems from the fact that the vecus and the network simulation are executed sequentially when sending and receiving network packets to guarantee a correct and deterministic co-simulation. number of node pairs k 5 10 15 20 d u ra ti o n [ s ] 0 10 20 30 40 50 pure simulation emulation sync 1 ms emulation sync 10 ms figure 10: performance comparison between simulation and emulation the computational effort which is necessary to perform the network emulation depends on multiple factors. the synchronization period of the vecus only shows a rather slight impact on the overall duration, whereas the number of nodes represented by vecus as well as the amount of messages transmitted and received by vecus affect the performance the most. another factor, which is not examined here, is the actual workload of each vecu. if the adas under evaluation performs complex calculations, this will lead to an additional increase of computational requirements. 4.3 discussion the above shown evaluations state that our framework allows to accurately evaluate and test real-world implementations of vanet applications. the overhead introduced by executing vecus for each node as well as synchronizing the three subsystem representations leads to longer simulation durations. however since the simulation is decoupled from the real-time constraint, the accuracy of the results is not affected even when conducting large-scale experiments. in the following we will discuss the universal applicability of the approach as well as its limitations. the chosen virtualization method generally allows to integrate unmodified source code of the adas implementations. however, due to the paravirtualization it is necessary to compile the code to run on the x86 host architecture. typically, software components developed for the autosar architecture are written in ansi c. due to the autosar hardware abstraction layers, they are independent from the underlying hardware which allows to re-compile the code for the x86 architecture without code modification. however, if the standardized interfaces of the autosar architecture are bypassed somehow, the source code may need to be modified. additionally, if source code is not available, e.g. due to ip protection, closed source components can be integrated as precompiled x86 libraries. while we focus on ad hoc communication based on ieee 802.11p, our concept is agnostic to the underlying network topology and transmission medium. this allows to evaluate the network-based adas on other radio technologies such as ad hoc lte only by changing the configuration of the network simulator to apply other simulation models for the phy and mac layer. in our examples we only consider one ecu per vehicle, however the approach is flexible enough to allow the integration of multiple ecus per vehicle and, given that suitable models exist, even the simulation of intra-car networks such as can. since the chosen virtualization approach assumes no detailed knowledge of the target hardware, hardware characteristics which might influence the timing behavior are not taken into consideration. delays which are caused by the target hardware are neglected, which is a limitation of our current implementation. we regard the modeling of hardwareintroduced delays as future work which can be approached by instrumenting and tracing execution on real hardware platforms once they are available in the development process [10]. 5. conclusion in this paper we proposed a novel approach for emulating vehicular ad hoc networks for evaluation and testing of network-aware automotive embedded systems. the presented methodology employs virtualization to allow the integration of real-world automotive software into the overall simulation consisting of the three coupled subsystem representations of the physical, application logic and wireless networking domain. this enables the detailed analysis of network protocol and application implementations in the context of a realistic runtime execution provided by an autosar compliant embedded operating system. a global simulation scheduler synchronizes the execution of all domain representations to achieve a deterministic and correct experiment execution. the evaluation shows that the emulation generates accurate results by synchronously executing the software components encapsulated in virtual ecu instances and the other simulators. the approach allows to perform detailed and large-scale evaluations early in the product development cycle without being dependent on the availability of real hardware. as our next steps we plan to integrate an industry implementation of a car2car communication stack into our proposed virtual prototype solution as well as tackle the area of hardware-in-the-loop simulation by combining both real and virtual ecus. 6. references [1] r. beuran. introduction to network emulation. pan stanford publishing, 1st edition, 2012. [2] j. bu, g. tan, n. ding, m. liu, and c. son. implementation and evaluation of wave 1609.4/802.11p in ns-3. in proceedings of the 2014 workshop on ns-3, wns3 ’14, pages 1:1–1:8, new york, usa, 2014. acm. [3] j.-l. béchennec, m. briday, s. faucou, f. pavin, and f. juif. viper: a lightweight approach to the simulation of distributed and embedded software. in proceedings of the 3rd international icst conference on simulation tools and techniques, 2010. [4] a. dunkels. design and implementation of the lwip tcp/ip stack. technical report, swedish institute of computer science, 2001. [5] k. fall. network emulation in the vint/ns simulator. in proceedings of the fourth ieee symposium on computers and communications, pages 244–250, 1999. [6] o. gietelink, j. ploeg, b. de schutter, and m. verhaegen. development of advanced driver assistance systems with vehicle hardware-in-the-loop simulations. vehicle system dynamics, 44(7):569–590, 2006. [7] e. göktürk. emulating ad hoc networks: differences from simulations and emulation specific problems. in new trends in computer networks, volume 1 of advances in computer science and engineering: reports. imperial college press, october 2005. [8] h. hartenstein and k. laberteaux. vanet vehicular applications and inter-networking technologies. intelligent transport systems. wiley, 1. edition, 2010. [9] ieee. ieee standard for modeling and simulation (m&s) high level architecture (hla)– framework and rules, august 2010. [10] s. kristiansen, t. plagemann, and v. goebel. modeling communication software execution for accurate simulation of distributed systems. in proceedings of the 2013 acm sigsim conference on principles of advanced discrete simulation, sigsim-pads ’13, pages 67–78, new york, usa, 2013. acm. [11] m. rondinone, j. maneros, d. krajzewicz, r. bauza, p. cataldi, f. hrizi, j. gozalvez, v. kumar, m. röckl, l. lin, et al. itetris: a modular simulation platform for the large scale evaluation of cooperative its applications. simulation modelling practice and theory, 34:99–125, 2013. [12] f. j. ros, j. a. martinez, and p. m. ruiz. a survey on modeling and simulation of vehicular networks: communications, mobility, and tools. computer communications, 43:1–15, 2014. [13] b. schünemann. v2x simulation runtime infrastructure vsimrti: an assessment tool to design smart traffic management systems. computer networks, 55(14):3189 – 3198, 2011. [14] c. serban, a. poylisher, and j. chiang. virtual ad hoc network testbeds for network-aware applications. in network operations and management symposium (noms), 2010 ieee, pages 432–439, osaka, japan, 2010. ieee. [15] c. sommer, r. german, and f. dressler. bidirectionally coupled network and road traffic simulation for improved ivc analysis. ieee transactions on mobile computing, 10(1):3–15, 2011. [16] f. sultan, a. poylisher, j. lee, c. serban, c. j. chiang, r. chadha, k. whittaker, c. scilla, and s. ali. timesync: enabling scalable, high-fidelity hybrid network emulation. in proceedings of the 15th acm international conference on modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems, mswim ’12, pages 185–194, new york, usa, 2012. acm. [17] m. treiber, a. hennecke, and d. helbing. congested traffic states in empirical observations and microscopic simulations. physical review e, 62(2):1805, 2000. [18] k. von neumann-cosel, m. dupuis, and c. weiss. virtual test drive provision of a consistent tool-set for [d,h,s,v]-in-the-loop. in proceedings of the driving simulation conference, monaco, 2009. [19] e. weingärtner, f. schmidt, h. vom lehn, t. heer, and k. wehrle. slicetime: a platform for scalable and accurate network emulation. in proceedings of the 8th usenix symposium on networked systems design and implementation (nsdi ’11), boston, usa, march 2011. legeral-aise2015 an open agent-based model to simulate the effect of wom marketing campaigns poster paul leger manuela lópez carmen hidalgo-alcázar hiroaki fukuda escuela de ciencias empresariales, universidad católica del norte, chile shibaura institute of technology, japan {pleger, mlopezp, mchidalgo}@ucn.cl hiroaki@shibaura-it.ac.jp abstract word-of-mouth (wom) is the opinion of consumers about a product. there is currently a clear trend in the use of wom to diffuse information about a new product, known as wom marketing campaigns. marketing researchers are studying the impact of the different types of these campaigns has. the difficulty in getting data and isolating the effect that is analyzed limits the research of marketers in this topic. lastly, some simulation models based on agents have overcome previous difficulty. however, these models are ad-hoc and specific solutions for every study. this poster proposes an open implementation of an agent-based model to simulate different scenarios of wom marketing campaigns. through customizations, this proposal will allow marketing researchers to test wom marketing campaigns in different scenarios. categories and subject descriptors d.3.3 [programming languages]: language constructs and features; i.2.0 [artificial intelligence]: general; j.1.6 [computer applications] computer applications marketing. general terms languages, design. keywords word-of-mouth, agent-based models, open implementations. 1. introduction before purchasing a product or service, consumers usually ask their family or friends, or even consult other consumers’ opinions. in marketing, these opinions are known as word of mouth (wom), which has become the most influential and credible information source for consumers [1]. hence, companies are interested in using wom as a new communication tool to influence consumers’ decisions [2]. using the internet or through an offline channel, companies carry out wom marketing campaigns: give a message to a set of consumers (a.k.a. seeds) to spread the word about a product to other consumers [2]. the goal of these campaigns is to reach a fast and high diffusion of a message. figure 1. agent-based model components. in the state-of-the-art, we can find studies that have analyzed what message characteristics and type of seeds affect consumers’ intention to transmit a message in a network [2][3][4]. other studies have examined the reasons why a message has been highly diffused [5]. unfortunately, each study requires collecting a large amount of data from social network sites such as facebook or many questionnaires. in addition, it is difficult to isolate the effect that we would like to analyze by using the prior techniques. to overcome these difficulties, a simulation model based on agents can be used [6], which basically simulates the diffusion for a wom campaign. in this campaign a message is given to some consumers (agents), who make the decision whether spreading the message to their contacts or not. some simulation models have been proposed [6][7][8], specifically tailored to fit particular characteristics of a campaign, where it is not possible to customize these characteristics. thereby, for each new campaign, developers must a) modify in contorted ways an existing model or b) implement a new agent-based simulation model from scratch; bringing a slow development and prone-error implementations. this paper proposes omc, an open implementation [9] of an agent-based simulation model to measure the effect of a wom marketing campaign. with simple configurations or code extensions, omc will allow developers to instantiate existing models or create new ones that fit particular and unforeseen characteristics of a campaign. in omc, developers will be able to customize strategies in messages, seeds, network, and reporting outputs of a wom marketing campaign. 2. background we start this section discussing each component of a wom marketing campaign, and then we briefly explain how to use agent-based models to simulate these campaigns. 2.1 wom marketing campaign components to develop a successful campaign, this company has to make decisions on the following components: network. a campaign must work through a channel. the channel can be online (e.g., facebook) or offline. this channel will determine the network (with its features) in which the campaign will work. message. a message can consist of only information (text, url links, images, videos) or a product with the aim of spreading the word about it. companies can also give an incentive to encourage consumers in wom. recent research has examined the agent-based model components : action of a consumer : consumer (agent) bict 2015, december 03-05, new york city, united states copyright © 2016 icst doi 10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262533 characteristics that a message should have in order to be much diffused [5]. seeds. companies have a different number of seeds available. these seeds can have different characteristics: hubs (wellconnected consumers), opinion leaders (influential consumers), or bridges (connectors of two otherwise unconnected parts of a network) [3]. 2.2 agent-based model an agent-based simulation model simulates aggregate consequences based on local interactions between individual members of a population [10]. this kind of model consists of an environment, where a set of agents are in one of a finite number of possible states, updated in discrete time steps according to local interaction rules. figure 1 illustrates the main components of an agent-based simulation model: environment. the container where agents interact with others is the environment. depending on the scenario, the environment can simulate an online network (e.g., social network site, networks of email contacts) or offline network (e.g., neighbors of a city). agents. apart of internal states, agents have different properties and behaviors. for example, a type of agent can have a higher influence over other agent. action. using a set of local rules, agents take actions that potentially affect other agents in each discrete time step. for example, an agent can take the action of (re)sending a message. a variety of agent-based models have been proposed to simulate wom marketing campaigns [6][8]. each model sets up previous components to fit particular characteristics of a campaign. 3. problem statement the black box principle (expose the functionality but hide the implementation of a program) offers benefits like reuse, location of changes, and understandability. however, the application of this principle can bring issues of adaptability, performance, and reuse in unforeseen scenarios of a program. as a consequence, developers have to “code around” the program or end up creating an entirely different version of the same program [9]. existing implementations of agent-based models to simulate wom marketing campaigns follow (in an ad hoc manner) the black box principle. thereby, for each campaign with different characteristics, developers must “code around” existing models in contorted ways or create a new version from scratch. as a consequence, the development of these models becomes slow development and prone-error. 4. proposal this paper proposes omc, an agent-based model to simulate wom marketing campaigns that follows open implementation guidelines [9]. omc will allow developers to customize crucial components used to simulate these campaigns, and at the same time, still hiding details of its implementation. as agent-based model, we concretely propose using cellular automata (ca) [10] because its neighborhood concept (direct contact of a consumer in omc) allows an agent to make a decision only considering its neighbors. in addition, ca has been used in simulations of complex networks [11]. figure 2 shows a big picture the core open points of omc. in this figure, we can see that this proposal provides a user and metainterface. the user interface allows developers to select one of available strategies for message, seeds, network, and reporting outputs. the meta-interface offers the opportunity to customize and add strategies for these four components of a wom marketing campaign. as an example of adding a strategy, consider a new type of seed: fringe (a consumer with few connections) [3]. using the meta-interface, developers, for example, can define the average of connections of a fridge seed and its behavior when it receives a message. 5. plan the construction of omc depends on two tracks. first, we will study the literature in marketing to collect other crucial points that should be open in omc. second, we will define abstractions for the user and meta-interface. for the user interface, we will probably construct domain-specific abstractions (or –languages) according to the marketing concepts. instead, the meta-interface will use the full power of a turing-complete language (e.g., objects, first-class functions). among other languages, the scala language brings together needs of both interfaces because of its flexibility, expressiveness, and meta-programming power to define and create new abstractions. we plan to validate it through the emulation of some of existing agent-based models used to simulate wom marketing campaigns. references [1] j. arndt. role of product-related conversations in the diffusion of a new product. journal of marketing research, 4(3), 291-295, 1967. [2] r.v. kozinets, k. de valck, a.c. wojnicki, and s.j.s wilner. networked narratives: understanding word-of-mouth marketing in online communities. journal of marketing, 74(2), 71-89, 2010. [3] o. hinz, b. skiera, c. barrot, and j.u. becker. seeding strategies for viral marketing: an empirical comparison. journal of marketing, 75 (6), 55-71, 2011. [4] j. e. phelps, r. lewis, l. mobilio, d. perry, and d. raman. viral marketing or electronic word-of-mouth advertising: examining consumer responses and motivations to pass along email. journal of advertising research, 44(4), 333348, 2004. [5] k. swani, b. p. brown, and g. r. milne. should tweets differ for b2b and b2c? an analysis of fortune 500 companies' twitter communications. industrial marketing management, 43(5), 873-881, 2014. [6] s. delre, w. jager, t.h.a. bijmolt, and m. a. janssen. will it spread or not? the effects of social influences and network topology on innovation diffusion. journal of product innovation and management, 27(2), 267-282, 2010. [7] j. goldenberg, b. libai, and e. muller. talk of the network: a complex systems look at the underlying process of word-of-mouth. marketing letters, 12(3), 211-223, 2001. [8] b. libai, e. muller, and r. peres. decomposing the value of word-of-mouth seeding programs: acceleration versus expansion. journal of marketing research, 50(2), 161-176, 2013. [9] g. kiczales, j. lamping, g. murphy, c. v. lopes, c. maeda, and a. mendhekar. open implementation design guidelines. proceedings of the 1997 international conference on at the software engineering, 481–490, 1997. [10] j. von neumann, theory of self-reproducing automata. (a. w. burks, ed.). champaign, il, usa: university of illinois press, 1966. [11] d. smith, j. onnela, c. fan, m. fricker, and n. johnson. network automata: coupling structure and function in dynamic networks. advances in complex systems, 14(3), 317-339, 2011. figure 2. potential open points of omc. message seeds network user interface: selecting strategy for meta interface: adding strategy for message seeds network diffusion & acceleration ratio of a message reporting reporting on a mobile phone contact list based on social relations pasteur poda1,∗, rashid ben amed charles zongo1, ibraïma dagnogo1, théodore tapsoba1 1ecole supérieure d’informatique, université nazi boni, 01 bp 1091 bobo-dioulasso 01, burkina faso abstract social relations are unquestionably the major provider of contacts in the mobile devices contact lists. however, they remain marginal in the literature of social software related to the contact list and are not at all integrated in its design. inspired by african social and cultural practices, this paper is about a design of the contact list that integrates the social relationships existing between people in the real life. a desktop prototype of the proposed contact list designing allows to validate it. illustrations of the developed application demonstrate the assets of the proposed contact list regarding issues such as contacts reminding/retrieval and homonymy resolving with respect to the real life. additional capabilities of the proposed contact list reside in the creation of groups of contacts for group communications needs. received on 04 december 2017; accepted on 09 january 2018; published on 12 february 2018 keywords: contact list, context-awareness-based applications, group communication, mobile recommendation, social relations copyright © 2018 p. poda et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eai.12-2-2018.154107 1. introduction one of the basic features available on mobile stations and user equipments is the contact list. the contact list is a database of contacts; a contact being most often a natural person and sometimes a legal entity. basically, the contact list is used to save the contact information (phone numbers, names and surnames, addresses, . . . ) of the mobile subscriber’s contacts. primarily, it is for allowing the users (i.e. the subscribers) to call their contacts without having to remember and dial the contacts phone numbers. nowadays, user equipments comprised of smartphones offer contact lists with advanced features including a diversity of input fields that serve to identify and remember a contact entry. ∗corresponding author. email: pasteur.poda@univ-bobo.bf some of the common input fields are for providing detailed information such as multiple phone numbers, names and surnames, electronic and physical addresses, organization membership, notes for inserting discreet and discretionary data about the contact, etc. however, none of these input fields is intended for clearly describe the relationship that could exist between a given contact and another one of the same contact list. simultaneously, it seems evident that relationships existing between people in the social life explain well how the contact lists are populated. social relations are defined in social sciences as any relationship between two or more individuals. a social relation is therefore a universal concept that depicts the social life from all over the world but it may be assumed that it is not experienced in the same way with africans 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 p. poda et al. as with western people. indeed, in his investigations to formally explain how people construct social relations, fiske established [1, 2] that people in all cultures use the same relational models to generate most kinds of social interactions but he also noted that the moose1 implement the models differently, in different domains, and in different relative degrees, than americans. in the particular case of african societies, some social practices and behaviors make people contact lists to be rapidly and significantly populated. for example, a usually observed practice in african societies is that when a problem has to be solved, people use to resort to an acquaintance who, will in turn resort to his own acquaintance and so on until the right one who can actually help solving the problem. in that endeavor to solve the problem, several kinds of social relations (mainly family and friendly) are activated and can spontaneously give rise to the creation of new entries in the contact lists. consequently, a contact list can be easily “crowded” with hundreds [3] even thousands [4] of contacts entries causing the user not to be always able to efficiently match a contact entry to the individual of the real life that it represents. this is further true insofar the “crowding” of contact lists increases the number of the rarely contacted contacts and gives rise to more homonyms occurrences. in such a situation of the contact list “crowding”, the currently implemented contact information cannot be efficiently helpful whenever contact entries need to be matched to the individuals of the real life that they represent. it is also important to note that another habit in african social life is that the way people do to recognize someone is mostly based on social relations. an individual is sometimes identified by referencing one of his social affiliation. for instance, adults use to identify teenagers of their social environment by referencing the family affiliation (e.g.: a father, a mother, . . . ) of those latters rather than using their names or surnames. in the same vein, it is common for african people to identify married women by referencing their husbands or their father/mother in a certain way. 1the moose (or mossis) are the ethnic majority of burkina faso in west africa throughout these few examples illustrating some facets of african social life, it is clear that social relations play a major role in the process consisting of matching contacts entries to individuals of the real life, recognizing, remembering or identifying contacts of the contact list. this leads us to proposing a redesigning of the contact list by taking into account social relations. the proposed new vision of the contact list was introduced in [5]. it particularly aims at targeting african mobile users as it is inspired by their social and cultural practices. beyong the fact that it could help facing the problems (contact matching, recognizing/identifying, remembering) mentioned above, the proposed new vision of the contact list could also stand for facilitating communications within groups of communities. indeed, there are some events such as funerals, marriages, large family meetings which require a member of a group to share an information of social interest. in this case, if a group can be easily constituted based on the social relations, this could avoid a member of a group to, e.g., send as many short messages services as required to share an information. by this paper, the purpose is to provide a detailed description of the proposed redesigning of the contact list up to validate it with results of a desktop implementation. in the remainder, we deal in section 2 with a state of the art of works and inventions addressing the contact list. we present in section 3 the new approach of the contact list designing. in section 4, we deal with the technologies to be used for the proposed contact list implementation. in section 5, we show results of the developed contact list software. we conclude the paper with section 6. 2. related works the proposed new vision of the contact list design is strongly inspired by social relations as they are experienced in african social life and more specifically in the sub-saharan part of africa. ouoba et al. [6] proposed an approach that they called the toolé approach, an approach based on the cultural values of the peasants of sub-saharan africa, to design an opportunistic networking strategy that facilitates and automates agricultural information broadcasting. 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 on a mobile phone contact list based on social relations during the decade of the 2000s, the design of social software involving the mobile phone contact list has been an active field of research and innovation. several related research works and inventions covered systems built based on the concept of awareness and besides many other issues. lot of those systems are met under the vocabulary of recommendation systems and consist of making the mobile phone able to provide intelligent interactions with the users. various kinds of awareness cues such as the mobile location and status have been used to prescribe recommendations to the users. in [7], a phonebook that contains in addition to phone numbers the context information about the user was implemented. the context information consists of awareness cues such as details on the user’s connection status, his availability preferences or his location (e.g., at work, at home). the context information allows the potential caller to take the situation on the other end into account before setting up a call. these awareness cues about the user situation and environment were found to be very important when using a mobile phone. the smartphone contact list was extended [8, 9] to provide additional contextual information cues such as the time spent in the current location, the phone alarm settings and other cues that are useful to give information about the availability of the user. the design of the awareness cues of [8] was based on social psychological findings whereas that of [9] was inspired by eight hypotheses among which are efficiency of accessing contacts, differentiation of important contacts and contacts as social piggy bank. on the latter hypothesis, the authors were pointing out the need to take into account information that is related to the social relationships between contacts who are natural persons in the design of awareness cues. is also observed [10] the trend for active mobile phone users to add further information that can help reinforcing the context of the relationship between the user and one of his contact. in a study extending awareness to mobile users [11], a desktop prototype called connexus allowed to evaluate the role of awareness in a collaborative environment. a system named isocialize [12] was developed to implement and evaluate several kinds of awareness cues including activity, status, relation and vicinity. unlike, most of the systems based on awareness, fiendlee [13] merged most of the useful awareness indicators and was oriented toward a mobile social networking application. the cues under consideration with friendlee include current location and time spent there, local time and weather, status messages and status indicators (e.g.: available, busy, phone on hold, engaged, . . . ). in [14], a social and personal context modeling method was proposed to support social networking applications of mobile devices. using bayesian networks, the user’s contexts are infered from uncertain logs stored in the mobile device. some of the user logs collected from the mobile device are geographical coordinates, day of the week, anniversary and type of scheduling such as friendship or business. a contact list recommendation system that recommends phone numbers according to the user’s current situation was implemented. with regards to social networking application, we can also mention that solution [15] which was proposed to take advantage of social relationships and context information to provide recommendations to users of social networks. in the proposed new vision of the contact list, social relations are intended to be useful as potential awareness cues for mobile recommendations. for instance, social relations can be combined with location for providing recommendation services to the users. they stand for being well adapted for systems that suggest friends (contacts) in social networking software. as about the context information sharing that the mobile awareness applications enable, a serious concern is that of privacy. authors of [16] found that people decisions of sharing their context information are based mainly on the identity of the recipient of the information. the study reported in [17] also concluded that people decide whom to share context information with based on their relationship (e.g.: spouse, friend, peer, . . . ) to the person. therefore, it comes that casual contacts are assumed receiving less context information than contacts with other kinds of relationships [17, 18]. we therefore expect people to be more confident while sharing their context information with the proposed social relations based contact list. indeed, the proposed contact list stands for being an efficient tool for contacts 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 p. poda et al. identifying with respect to whom they are in the real life. associating mobile awareness to initiation of group communications, a community-aware mechanism [19] was proposed for efficient creation of groups of contacts. mobile phones are thereby provided with a recommendation engine that helps an initiator of a group efficiently create a group from his contact list. hendrey et al. [20] invented a system for location-aware connections of telecommunication units involving group communications. they offer a way for automatically and/or selectively initiating communications among mobile users whenever the mobile users can be geographically located. in the proposed redesigning of the contact list, we deal with group communications to address some needs in african social practices and social relations are hereby used as criteria for groups creation. several other works, involving the contact list but with minor correlation to our proposal, addressed contact information update and exchange. methods for updating automatically mobile phone contact list entries [21] and improved systems for providing phonebook and bookmarked links to web sites for mobile users [22] were developed. a system [23] that proceeds with synchronization and updates enables the mobile phone to initiate, according to the circumstances, the appropriate form of communication with one of the contacts. examples of methods for exchanging contact information include a method [24] of sending contact list data from one mobile phone to another mobile phone within a group and a system that is able to locate the mobile device and gathers contact information for an information server [25]. more recent related works were oriented toward the issue of efficiently retrieve a contact from a “crowded” (hundreds or thousands of entries) contact list. for that, adaptive interfaces exploiting the mobile context led to context-aware algorithms that predict at any time the next callee. in [26, 27], were proposed contextaware algorithms that used frequency and recency of communication as context cues. in [28], physical location was examined as a context cue for predicting the next callee. in the same momentum, several other researches are found, e.g. in [29–31]. although our social relations based design of the contact list is not oriented toward prediction of the next callee, it can help retrieving efficiently a contact in a “crowded” contact list provided a social relation of his is known. 3. new approach of the contact list designing the contact list, also called phonebook, is a database of the mobile phone user’s contacts. it is generally stored in the subscriber identity module (sim) card and/or in an extended memory of the mobile equipment. each entry of the contacts database can be viewed as an object subjected to diverse transactions such as the classical crud (create read update delete) functionalities and the emerging mobile awarenessbased applications which are presented above in section 2. as an object, each contact entry of the contact list can be described by a set of attributes generally called the contact information. these attributes serve to identify the contact and include the contact identity information (names, surnames), his phone number(s), his physical and electronic addresses, etc. the new approach hereby proposed consists of modeling the contact list as a graph g = (c,e) of the contacts. each node cj ∈ c of the graph represents a contact and contains the currently observed contact information. each edge (ci, cj) ∈ e ⊂c×c of the graph is for registering the social relationship that exists between two contacts. as shown in the graph representation of figure 1, a contact list is therefore defined as a set of linked entities cj, 1 ≤ j ≤ n, each with its specific instance of the contact information and all sharing common treatments. the social relations, represented by the edges of the graph representation of the contact list, can be any type of social relation. however, can be considered more meaningful, when considering the african social context, the family category of social relations. in table 1, we provide a non-exhaustive list of social relations that can be considered. with this redesigning approach, the current treatments to which the contact lists are subjected will continue working. thus, the traditional crud treatments are preserved together with the emerging treatments regarding mobile awarness-based applications. beyong 4 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 on a mobile phone contact list based on social relations figure 1. graph representation of the contact list table 1. examples of social relations category social relation name family is_the_father_of, is_the_mother_of, is_the_son_of, is_the_sister-in-law_of, is_the_daughter_of, is_the_brother_of, is_the_sister_of, is_the_cousin_of, is_the_uncle_of, is_the_wife_of, is_the_husband_of, is_the_brother-in-law_of, . . . friendly is_the_classmate_of, is_the_comrade_of, is_the_buddy_of, is_the_friend_of, . . . professional is_the_colleague_of, is_the_collaborator_of, is_the_chauffeur_of, . . . these existing treatments, the proposed approach adds novel smart functionalities. indeed, the new approach of the contact list makes it an interesting instrument of reminder. let us consider a contact list with a rarely contacted contact cj0 and let us assume that the visualization of the classical contact information of cj0 fails to help remember who cj0 is in the real life. in these conditions, the proposed social relations based contact list can help remember cj0. algorithm 1 in table 2 formally describes this novel functionality of contacts reminder. a second novel functionality, given by algorithm 2 in table 3, is for homonymy resolving. let us assume that we are in presence of l homonyms cj, 1 ≤ j ≤ l, among which we need to select the right contact cj0 with whom we desire to communicate. so, for each homonym, his social relations with other table 2. algorithm for forgotten contacts reminding algorithm 1: given a contact list (c,e), find a social relation (cj0, cj1) that helps remember cj0 input: (c,e) read cj0 display d = {ci |∃(cj0, ci) ∈ e} for ci ∈ d if (cj0, ci) = (cj0, cj1) break endif endfor table 3. algorithm for homonymy resolving algorithm 2: given a contact list (c,e), select the right cj0 among l homonyms input: (c,e) display d = {ci, i = 1 . . . l |ci like cj0} for i = 1 : l display di = {ck, k = 1 . . . l, |∃(ci, ck) ∈ e} for k = 1 : l if (ci, ck) = (cj0, ck) select ci as cj0 i ← l + 1, break endif endfor endfor contacts are displayed and analyzed. based on the social relations, we are able to select the right homonym cj0. a third novel functionality is given by algorithm 3 in table 4. it consists of making a search for a contact cj0 for whom we assume not remembering the contact information (including names and surnames) and fortunately we remember one of his social relation (e.g.: cj0 is the cousin of cj1). a search operation on cj1 has to be executed first, then after filtering out display only the contacts who are linked to cj1 by the right social relation. the contact cj0 who is searched for is probabily among these latter contacts. in addition to the three novel functionalities that we have just presented, the proposed contact list offers perspectives to use social relations as potential cues to be integrated in the design of mobile awarenessbased applications. for instance, social relations may be combined with some contextual cues such as the geographical location in order to recommend services 5 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 p. poda et al. table 4. vague search for a forgotten contact algorithm 3: given a contact list (c,e), retrieve an unremembered contact cj0 knowing cj1 such that (cj0, cj1) ∈ e input: (c,e) read cj1, (cj0, cj1) display d = {ci |(ci, cj1) like (cj0, cj1)} for ci ∈ d if ci = cj0 select ci , break endif endfor (e.g.: visiting a relative) that can contribute to the users’ social relationships strengthening. in the context of african social life, it is current to see social events that involve systematically, by the fact of social relations, tens even hundreds of people. examples of such events are funerals (for which any acquaintance of the deceased or of his family should be informed), customary marriages (for which is invited any person linked by a family social relation with the fiancé), civil marriages (involving people with as well family, professional as friendly relations with the two persons getting ready for the marriage), social visits in case of happy events (e.g.: baptism celebration, congratulation of a newborn parents) or in other cases like visiting a sick person or presenting condolences to a person. in the case of social visits, the groups to be created can be guided by professional relations, friendly relations or any other kind of social relations. to address such events management, the proposed approach of the contact list can facilitate groups creation for the purpose of sharing information using for example short messaging services. in addition to groups creation based on social relations, the proposed approach also offer the possibility to develop recommendation systems that can work based on the social relations to suggest to the mobile user the contacts with whom the information about a given social event must be shared. 4. approach of implementation of the proposed contact list the scope of this study suits well with intelligent systems ingineering. to model social relations, a specialized language of artificial intelligence such as prolog can be used. as a language based on first order predicates logic for expressing knowledges, prolog formalism for writing facts and rules is well adapted to express the social relationship that exists between two contacts and for infering new knowledge. more precisely, prolog can be used to implement the proposed contact list in the form of a knowledge base comprising facts (social relationships between contacts) and rules (general laws applying to the social life domain). the prolog interpreter would play the role of an inference engine for the knowledge base management and exploitation. the user interface would be graphical and developed using java programming language. jpl (java interface to prolog), a java application programming interface would stand for interfacing java and prolog. however, this prologbased approach to implement the proposed contact list could be considered as out of date. indeed, emerging technologies namely those of the world wide web consortium (w3c) standards package for linked data are also suitable. with regards to the use of the linked data technologies to implement the proposed contact list, the approach consists of the system architecture of figure 2. the knowledge base is built upon an ontology populated by individuals. the ontology implements the graph representation of the contact list by defining the graph of the concepts related to social relations. a social relationship existing between two contacts is, in this approach, well mapped onto the model of triplets. the model of triplets represents a knowledge in the form of a triplet as (subject, predicate, object). using this model, a social relation can be represented by a predicate and the two contacts that it ties corresponding one to the subject and the other to the object. this model of triplets is used in the resource description framework (rdf) [32]. to efficiently represent the concepts intervening in the proposed contact list and enable reasoning on the knowledge base to build, web ontology language (owl) [33] or resource description framework schema (rdfs) [32] are part of the w3c standards stack of linked data that can be used. 6 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 on a mobile phone contact list based on social relations figure 2. technical architecture of the contact list software to validate the proposed contact list software, we propose to implement it using the desktop oriented architecture depicted in figure 2. in this architecture, three different features have to be distinguished. the presentation feature given by the graphical user interface and for the development of which java programming language is selected. the second feature is the knowlege base implementing the proposed contact list. it consists of an ontology describing the contacts and the social relations that connect them each other. the rules are part of the knowledge base. they are used by the inference engine, the third feature of the architecture, to deduce new knowledge (e.g.: linking automatically contacts on the basis of logical consequence). for the implementation of this part of the arhitecture, protégé, an open-source ontology editor [34] is selected together with the owl syntax. the inference engine is in charge of the reasoning. to implement the inference engine and make it possible to interface both the graphical user interface and the knowledge base, apache jena is selected. apache jena is an open-source java framework for linked data applications building [35]. for the queries management between the knowledge base and the user interface, the sparql protocol and query language [36] is selected. sparql is one of the w3c standards of linked data. 5. results of the developed contact list software we developed the proposed contact list application basing on the technical architecture of figure 2 and figure 3. demo sample of the contact list using the selected technologies previously presented. the developed application is provided with both the classical crud functionalities and the three novel functionalities regarding homonymy resolving, contacts reminding and identifying. it also offers possibilities for groups creation using criteria that are the social relations. for the purpose of the demonstration, we created a contact list in which eight contacts have been registered, hence the instance of the contact list graph depicted in figure 3. to add a new contact in the proposed contact list, the developed application allows the user to fulfill the input fields presented in the screen shot of figure 4. some mandatory contact information that are the user’s name, his surname and his phone number has to be provided. the social relation (i.e. the tie) that ties the new contact being created (i.e. “poda pasteur”) to an already existing contact (i.e. “zongo rashid”) is materialized with the selection of the appropriate social tie (i.e. “cousin of”). the button labeled “ok” allows the new contact information and social tie to be saved in the contact list. upon completing the new contact insertion, the inference engine automatically updates the contact list graph by running the inference rules. this updating can lead to the creation of one or several other social relations with existing contacts. 7 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 p. poda et al. figure 4. creation of a new entry in the proposed contact list one of the inherent novel functionalities of the proposed contact list makes it an effective reminder as explained through algorithm 1 (see table 2). to illustre this, figure 5 is given. we assume not remembering the contact “poda pasteur” (a rarely contacted contact for example) with respect to the real life. the proposed contact list application allows all the contacts of the unremembered contact to be displayed. in the example of figure 5, among the three contacts of the contact “poda pasteur” who are listed, the selection of the contact “zongo rashid” reveals that he is a cousin of the contact “poda pasteur”. knowing this social relation that ties the two contacts, the user is able to remember the contact “poda pasteur”. another inherent novel functionality of the proposed contact list is that described in algorithm 3 (see table 4). figure 6 shows a screen shot of how to vaguely figure 5. exhaustive listing of contacts of any social tie with a given contact search for a contact (e.g.: “dagnogo ibraïma”) whose contact information including his name and surname are forgotten. we assume that fortunately one of his contact (e.g.: “poda pasteur”) is known. knowing that latter contact and his social tie with the unknown contact, we can try by selecting both the type of social tie (e.g.: “is the brother-in-law of”) and the known contact (“poda pasteur”). then, vaguely searching in the list (in the example of figure 6 there is only one element in the list) of the contacts who have “poda pasteur” as their “brother-in-law”, there exist chances that the contact “dagnogo ibraïma” is retrieved. the third inherent novel functionality of the proposed contact list is homonymy resolving. we have introduced it through algorithm 2 (see table 3). we assume having a certain number of homonyms in the contact list and we need to select the right one for initiating a communication with him. homonyms possess identical contact information regarding their names and surnames but some other contact information (such as email address, phone number) can allow to distinguish them by the simple visualization. however, they 8 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 on a mobile phone contact list based on social relations figure 6. vague search of a contact cannot allow to recognize the right contact with respect to the real life. this is the case with the two homonyms occurrences of figure 7 and figure 8 regarding the contacts with name “dagnogo” and surname “ibraïma”. in fact, the email addresses can help distinguish them but remain unpowerful in helping recognize the contact “dagnogo ibraïma” that we desire communicate with. thanks to the proposed contact list, the social relationships between each homonym occurrence and other contacts can help recognize the one with whom we want to communicate. in figure 7, we are about the contact “dagnogo ibraïma” who has “poda pasteur” as brotherin-law whereas in figure 8 the second homonym occurrence is about a different “dagnogo ibraïma” who has “dagnogo bamori” as father. the homonymy is thus resolved. to finish, let us now deal with group communications facilities that the proposed contact list enables. in section 3, we exhibited the motivations for using the social relations as criteria to constitute groups for group communications. in the developed contact list application, we are able to select one or more criteria that are social relations in order to create a group. figure 9 shows several possible choices of social relations as criteria for groups creation. it also let us imagine that the contact “dagnogo ibraïma” would like to create a group comprising of his sisters figure 7. a first homonym occurrence figure 8. a second homonym occurrence and brothers. after clicking on the button labeled “validate”, it results the creation of the group which members are displayed as shown in figure 10. once a group is created, a group communication channel can be identified. it can consist of, e.g., sending 9 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e6 p. poda et al. figure 9. social relations as criteria for groups creation a short message service to all the members of the group or establishing an interactive messaging service conference or a conference call within the created group. 6. conclusions strongly inspired by african social life, we proposed a redesigning of the mobile devices contact list based on social relations. we modeled the contact list as a graph of the mobile device user’s contacts where social relations are the edges. we built the proposed contact list application architecture on a system comprising a knowledge base, an inference engine and a graphical user interface. we implemented this system using technologies of the world wide web consortium standards of linked data and java application programming interfaces. results of the developed system allowed us to figure 10. group communication: created group members evaluate the proposed contact list as an effective instrument that brought to the user additional novel functionalities of social interest. beyond the classical crud (create read update delete) functionalities which are preserved, the proposed contact list furthermore allows contacts reminding, homonymy resolving, social relations based contact retrieval and group communications facilitating. the achieved redesigning of the contact list and its validation giving the results of the implementation open promising perspectives for the integration of social relations in the design of mobile social software including mobile awareness-based applications. this is further important as social relations can play a crucial role in the human well-being. indeed, the proposed approach can contribute much in relationships strengthening in the social life and bring happiness to people. in [37], the author noted that the evidence is substantial in psychology and sociology literature that social relations promote happiness for the individual and investigated in putting a financial value upon social relations and other life events. holder et al. 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(2009) the contribution of social relationships to children’s happiness, journal of happiness studies, 10(3), pp. 329-349. 12 eai endorsed transactions preprint smartphone application for self blood glucose monitoring & disease managementa case report dr. moshe kamar md. department of acute care, wolfson medical center 62 halochamim st. holon israel 972 543301308 moshe@mydario.com categories and subject descriptors j. computer applications j.3 life and medical sciences subject descriptor: medical information systems general terms performance, measurement, management keywords glucose meter, glucose monitor, diabetes, t1 diabetes, type 1 diabetes, diabetes performance, hba1c, diabetes compliance, blood sugar, blood glucose, diabetes selfmanagement abstract self-management of blood sugar glucose, diet and control of daily activities are crucial in overall management of type 2 diabetes mellitus (dm). in order to better adjust insulin type and dosage, educate for better diet patients are seldom requested to conduct a diary of their glucose measurements and meals. in today’s era of smartphone widespread use, it has been suggested that using mobile technology for self-blood glucose measurement together with the ability to automatically capture other factors important to control dm, may be an important method for enhancing disease selfmanagement. the dario™ device and mobile application, is a self-blood glucose monitoring device using smartphone interface. the application accumulates data of measurements, insulin intake, meals and physical activity. users are also members of an electronic dm support group. we present a case of a 55 y.o. type 2 dm patient who reported using the device over a year period. the patient baseline hba1c before using the dario program was 7.4. he started using the dario device and application and over a period of one year he managed to gradually reduce hba1c to 6.2 by keeping his glucose measurements in range from 20% a week to 100%. conclusions the use of mobile technologies together with mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2262011 multidisciplinary approach may revolutionize dm disease management. 1.introduction type 2 diabetes mellitus (dm) is now considered an epidemic in both children and adults in the united states, it affects 18.2 million people or 6.3% of the population. 1,2 estimated health care expenditures associated with diabetes include $91.8 billion in direct and $39.8 billion in indirect costs as of 2002. the cause of such high morbidity, mortality, and costs can be mostly attributed to long-term, chronic diabetes-related complications, such as renal disease, coronary heart disease, blindness, and neuropathy. 3 it has been long advocated that aggressive control of patients’ blood sugar levels, together with lifestyle practices and adherence to prescribed interventions lowers morbidity and mortality associated with the disease. according to the american diabetes association, diabetes self-management is an integral component of diabetes care. improved glycemic control (hemoglobin a1c <7%) has been shown to minimize microvascular complications by decreasing the rates of nephropathy, retinopathy, neuropathy, and cardiovascular disease. 4 disease control is a daily struggle in all aspects of lifestyle, diet, physical activity, mental status, sleep, adherence to medication regiment etc. in an era when smartphone are owned by almost everyone and social networking (i.e. facebook, twitter, whatsapp…) is present and active on every smartphone, the ability is created to monitor dm patients glucose levels, lifestyle, alert them of out of range results, automatic remind them of medication and other activities that are required. results can be sent to their treating physicians for better understanding and holistic care. the use of social networks connects people with the disease, caregivers and other professionals providing “support groups” and motivating channels. we report a case of a type 2 dm patient who used a dario tm (labstyle innovations ltd, israel) type self-blood glucose monitoring device (sbgm) who reported over the social media network, great results in disease management. dario’s diabetes management solution consists of a proprietary software component in the format of an ios (iphone operating system) and android based application where the user's data is saved and managed in one healthy lifestyle management system. dario sets a new standard for diabetes personalization by leveraging social network, medical alerts, insights and pattern recognition techniques in order to provide accurate and proactive analysis and recommendations for a pwd (people with diabetes) . the dario management application supports full diabetes lifecycle – blood glucose monitoring, food intake, insulin dosage and physical activity while allowing the pwd take a proactive role in managing his diabetes. in addition, the dario application incorporates basic features such as a measurement log (when connecting the dario glucose meter), data capturing, personal trend graphs, sharing and alert features. moreover, the dario management system can be accessed through the dario website portal where pwd can observe in more details their history and trends and share their reports with their physicians, caregivers and loved ones. 5 2.case report p.b.* is a 55 y.o. type 2 insulin dependent dm patient diagnosed in 2006 and was put on short acting insulin. at the same time he was diagnosed also to have mild hypertension. after several years of uncontrolled disease with numerous episodes of severe hypo and hypers he was recommended to use a smartphone based glucose monitor in an attempt to better understand the confounders of his disease. he started using the dario diabetes management solution in june 2014 and was instructed to test his blood glucose four times a day. baseline hba1c when entering the program was 7.4%. together with a dietician p.b. was given a diet specifying the amount of carbohydrates he needs to consume daily which he recorded through his dario app. insulin type and treatment regimen were entered baseline visit and updated when treatment was changed. patient was instructed to have 4 measurements a day, and enter his meal contents every time he had one . he could also enter episodes of stress, illness, sleep disorders, travels and other situations which are out of his routine daily activities. after each meal carbs are automatically calculated, dario enabled the patient to receive the recommended dosage of insulin based on all the recorded measurements. patient was also entered into a designated online social community where he could share his experiences with other users, get support from professional and technical personnel as to how to manage the disease and utilize his dario in order to benefit his condition. for each glucose measurement device would categorize measurement as falling “in range” or “out of range” and feedback the patient on his progress by showing percentage of measurements falling in range over time. p.b. dario “in range’ screen shot before each monthly visit to the clinic cumulative data graphically displayed was sent to the clinic for us to assess his progress and tailor treatment accordingly. 3.results at the commencement of use, the patient’s weekly average glucose measurements were 9.4 mmol/l (169 mg/dl). at the end of the year weekly average glucose measurements were down to 5.7 mmol/l (102 mg/dl) a decrease of 60%(figure 1). initial “in range” results were in 20% of the measurements which came up to 100% at the end of the year. these results were reflected in his laboratory hba1c results as well as in device calculated a1c, demonstrating an improvements of 83% with reductions from 7.4 to 6.2. (figure 2) the patient reported overall great satisfaction from the device and application: “the app is so simple to use, take a blood sample, enter what food you are eating and it gives you the carb content then press the symbol and you get the correct dosage of insulin, i love it takes all the guess work out of carb counting. i love the display on the app it's so simple to read and vivid. i have the app on my iphone ipad and ipod i love it that i can use all these to do a test and all my results will sync” (taken from p.b.’s social network postings). figure 1: showing gradual decrease of up to 60% from baseline measurements in blood glucose values (mmol/l) figure 2 – showing 83% decrease in hba1c over 52 weeks period 4.discussion thriving with diabetes is a daily battle in which every patient is required to self-manage and control multiple variables. in order to tailor treatments and assist in construction of “the dm routine” patients are typically required to manage a diary. there is a constant “wild goose chase” to understand one’s food content, activities and other variables affecting blood glucose levels. it has been shown previously how integrated daily use is more likely if the self-management components are offered in a mobile phone app, and electronic diaries are thought to improve self-management. 6,7 certainly the patient should be the primary “user” of that data, but even the most motivated patient needs a little guidance, a few reminders, and a lot of education to be maximally effective. the medical community is unprepared to collect or analyze all data 5 5.5 6 6.5 7 1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 45 49 a1c week glu week requested. the logical step would be to streamline the process, automate as much as possible, and help each patient become as self-efficacious as possible. management of chronic disease, including diabetes, has passed the point in which quarterly visits with a quick review of daily home measurements is adequate to maintain optimal health. data collected should be used to be an effective tool. minimal action resulting from home monitoring destroys the motivation necessary to continue the collection of that data. certainly the patient should be the primary “user” of that data, but even the most motivated patient needs a little guidance, a few reminders, and a lot of education to be maximally effective. the medical community is unprepared to collect or analyze all data requested. the logical step would be to streamline the process, automate as much as possible, and help each patient become as self-efficacious as possible. the wide spread use of smartphones, internet and social networks open up the possibility for multimodal approach. from the patient side automated features reduce some burden of entering data, other data can be entered in an easy and friendly way. furthermore the device can notify the patient of activities/actions needed (i.e. medications, bg testing, doctor appointments etc.), compiling all data in real time assists the patient in determining insulin dosage and it can also alert the patient of significant changes which require special attention or action. the use of smartphone technology allows for a freer interchange between patients and the health care team. physicians are capable of understanding the data over time and effectively focus on events/ periods affecting patient glucose balance. 8 studies of mobile phone-based interventions have had varied success in improving self -management and glycemic control in individuals with diabetes. 9,10 one explanation is that mobile phones are a platform, not a solution in itself, and interventions vary widely. a major gap in the literature is the lack of behavioral models to explain how these interventions improve diabetes self-management. 11 reviews of diabetes selfmanagement interventions studies of mobile phone applications to date have been largely theoretical. the prevailing theoretical assumption is that mobile phone-based interventions lead to behavior change through prompts and conditioning. 12 however, barriers to self-management are complex, and it is unlikely that sustained behavior change can be observed through conditioning alone. 13 this case report demonstrates the ability of new technologies to have significant impact on patient disease self-management. the availability, low cost, prevalence use of smartphone apps’ and interfaces increased the patient’s ability to control his disease and gradually for the first time take charge. together with the device, support group and health care provider he has managed to produce a routine that promoted him to maintain his blood glucose to a desired range, lower his hba1c and above all self-satisfaction from his freedom, to carry the device everywhere, getting real time information and feedback on the process. 5.conclusions smartphone based technologies for controlling diabetes, have a promising role in the holistic and multidisciplinary of disease management. *patient p.b. has given complete consent to utilize his measurements and information. 6.references 1. centers for disease control and prevention. national diabetes fact sheet: general information and national estimates on diabetes in the united states, 2003. atlanta (ga): 2. u.s. department of health and human services, centers for disease control and prevention; 2003. 3. hogan p, dall t, nikolov p; american diabetes association.economic costs of diabetes in the us in 2002. diabetes care.2003;26:917-32. 4. american diabetes association. standards of medical care for patients with diabetes mellitus. diabetes care. 2003;26:s33-s50 5. vuong am, huber jc, bolin jn, ory mg, moudouni dm, helduser j, et al. factors affecting acceptability and usability of technological approaches to diabetes self-management: a case study. diabetes technol ther 2012 dec;14(12):1178-1182 6. labstyle innovations; dario diabetes management solution. www.mydario.com 7. holmen h1, torbjørnsen a, wahl ak, jenum ak, småstuen mc, arsand e, ribu l. a mobile health intervention for selfmanagement and lifestyle change for persons with type 2 diabetes, part 2:one-year results from the norwegian randomized controlled trial rene wing health. jmir mhealth uhealth. 2014 dec 11;2(4):e57. 8. malasanos t. analysis: mobile phones integrated into diabetes management: a logical progression. j diabetes sci technol. 2008 jan;2(1):154-5 9. krishna s, boren sa. diabetes self-management care via cell phone: a systematic review. j diabetes sci technol. 2008; 2:509–517 10. holtz b, lauckner c. diabetes management via mobile phones: a systematic review. telemed j e health. 2012; 18:175–184 11. riley wt, rivera de, atienza aa, nilsen w, allison sm, mermelstein r. health behavior models in the age of mobile interventions: are our theories up to the task? transl behav med. 2011; 1:53–71 12. dick jj, nundy s, solomon mc, bishop kn, chin mh, peek me. feasibility and usability of a text message-based program for diabetes selfmanagement in an urban african-american population. j diabetes sci technol. 2011; 5:1246– 1254 13. nundy s1, dick jj, solomon mc, peek me. developing a behavioral model for mobile phonebased diabetes interventions. patient educ couns. 2013 jan;90(1):125-32. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=holmen%20h%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=torbj%c3%b8rnsen%20a%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=wahl%20ak%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=jenum%20ak%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=jenum%20ak%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=sm%c3%a5stuen%20mc%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=arsand%20e%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=ribu%20l%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=25499872 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=a+mobile+health+intervention+for+self-management+and+lifestyle+change+for+persons+with+type+2+diabetes%2c+part+2%3a+one-year+results+from+the+norwegian+randomized+controlled+trial+renewing+health http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19885192 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19885192 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19885192 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=nundy%20s%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23063349 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=dick%20jj%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23063349 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=solomon%20mc%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23063349 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=peek%20me%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=23063349 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=developing+a+behavioral+model+for+mobile+phone-based+diabetes+interventions http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=developing+a+behavioral+model+for+mobile+phone-based+diabetes+interventions this is a title 1 classification and analysis of spectrum sensing mechanisms in cognitive vehicular networks a. riyahi 1, *, s. bah 2 , m. sebgui 3 and b. elgraini 4 1 centre de recherche ersc, emi. université mohamed v de rabat. aminariyahi@research.emi.ac.ma 2 centre de recherche ersc, emi. université mohamed v de rabat, bah@emi.ac.ma 3 centre de recherche ersc, emi. université mohamed v de rabat, sebgui@emi.ac.ma 4 centre de recherche ersc, emi. université mohamed v de rabat, elgraini@emi.ac.ma abstract vehicular ad hoc networks (vanets) is an essential part of intelligent transportation system (its), which aims to improve the road safety. however, the main challenge in vanet is the spectrum scarcity which is more severe especially in the urban environment. in this view using cognitive radio (cr) technology in vanet has emerged as a promising solution providing additional resources and allowing spectrum efficiency. but, vehicular networks are highly challenging for spectrum sensing due to speed and dynamic topology. furthermore, these parameters depend on the cvns’ environment such as highway, urban or suburban. therefore, solutions targeting cvns should take into consideration these characteristics. as a first step towards an appropriate spectrum sensing solution for cvns, we first, provide a comprehensive classification of existing spectrum sensing techniques for cvns. second, we discuss, for each class, the impact of the vehicular environment effects such as traffic density, speed and fading on the spectrum sensing and data fusion techniques. thirdly, we derive a set of requirements for cvn’s spectrum sensing that takes into consideration specific characteristics of cvn environments. finally, we propose a new cvn scheme adopted in particular for urban environment where the spectrum sensing is more challenging due to dense traffic and correlated shadowing. keywords: cognitive radio, cvns, spectrum sensing, data fusion, dense traffic, correlation. received on 08 december 2017, accepted on 22 december 2017,published on 12 february 2018 copyright © 2018 a. riyahi et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.12-2-2018.154105 * corresponding author. email:aminariyahi@research.emi.ac.ma 1. introduction recently, vehicular ad hoc network (vanet) [1] has attracted a lot of interest from industries and research institutions, particularly with increasing number of vehicles on the road especially in urban area. vanet is a special kind of mobile ad hoc networks (manets) that are applied to vehicular context. they provide vehicle to vehicle (v2v) and vehicles to infrastructures (v2i) communications. on the opposite of manet, in vanet the movements of vehicles are predictable due to the road topology. besides, the high mobility leads to a higher probability of network partitions, and the end to end connectivity is not guaranteed [1]. the vanet applications can be classified into two categories: safety applications which provide the drivers with early warnings to prevent the accidents from happening, this represent the higher priority traffic, and user applications which provide road users with network accessibility which represent traffic with less priority. growing usage of applications such as exchanging multimedia information with high data in car-entertainment leads to overcrowding of the band and thereby giving rise to communication inefficiency for safety applications [1]. furthermore, the 10 mhz reserved in the ieee 802.11p standard as a common control channel is likely to suffer from large data contention, especially during peaks of road problem cognitive radio (cr) technology has been eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ a. riyahi, s. bah, m. sebgui and b. elgraini 2 proposed [2]. the main role of cr is to allow the unlicensed users (a.k.a secondary vehicular users: svus) to identify spectrum holes and exploit them without interfering with the licensed users (a.k.a primary users: pus). this makes the spectrum sensing (ss) a crucial function in cr networks. even if spectrum sensing in cr networks is well studied, however the research solutions proposed in static cr networks may not be directly applicable to cvns due to high dynamic networking environment. the works in [3–5] provide comprehensive surveys about spectrum sensing in cvns. the authors in [3] review the existing studies related to ss in cvns and provide the open issues in this area. in [4, 5], the authors provide an overview of distributed and centralized cooperative ss for cvns and review some challenges and open issues in cvns. in this paper, we provide an overview of spectrum sensing mechanisms and we propose a classification for existing cvn schemes. in fact, four classes are presented: centralized, distributed, partially centralized and integrated schemes. indeed, the main characteristic that influences the spectrum sensing mechanisms used in cvns is the changeable topology of vehicular environment which may be urban, suburban or highway area. the common features of these vehicular environments are the vehicles speed, fading and traffic density. but, the effect of these features differs from vehicular environment to another. therefore, we analyze for each class the impact of the characteristics of each vehicular environment including speed, fading and traffic density on the spectrum sensing techniques and data fusion techniques used to combine the reported or shared sensing results for making a cooperative decision. this analysis allowed us to derive the main spectrum sensing requirements in cvns. in addition to the set of sensing and data fusion techniques that we recommend to use according to the specific characteristics of cvn environment, we develop a new cvn architecture that should be adequate with vehicular environment of the urban context. the rest of this paper is structured as follows: in sect. 2, we present background information on cvns and we present the most used spectrum sensing techniques. in sect. 3, we classify the existing cvns sensing schemes. in sect. 4, we analyze the environment effects on the sensing mechanisms used by these classes and we derive the corresponding spectrum sensing requirements for each environment. in sect. 5, we present our proposed cvn scheme for urban environment. finally, we draw final conclusions in sect. 6. 2. background on cvns and spectrum sensing this section provides some background on cognitive vehicular networks and the properties of vehicular environments that affects the spectrum sensing, followed by an overview of spectrum sensing techniques. 2.1. cognitive vehicular networks the cvns are composed of vehicles equipped with the cr system, allowing svus to change their transmitter parameters based on interactions with the environment in which they operate. similarly to the traditional cr, the execution of cvns is defined by a cycle which is composed by four phases: observation, analysis, reasoning and act [6]. figure 1.the cognitive vehicular cycle the observations phase consists of sensing and gathering the information (e.g. modulation types, noise, and transmission power) from its surrounding area in order to identify the best available spectrum hole. in analysis phase, after sensing, some parameters have to be estimated (e.g. interference level, path loss and channel capacity). in reasoning phase, the best spectrum band is chosen for the current transmission considering the qos requirement. the optimal reconfiguration is finally done in act phase. however, the main novel characteristic that differentiates cvns from the traditional cr is the nature of svus mobility. in one hand, due to road topology and usage of navigational systems, the vehicles can predict the future position and then it can know in advance the spectrum resources available on its path. on the other hand, the mobility increases spatial diversity in the observations taken on the different locations. this may influence the sensing performance. furthermore, fast speed increases the number of collected samples which improves the sensing performance and requires less cooperation from other svus [7]. but, when the high fading (i.e. correlated shadowing) and the presence of obstacles are taken into account, the correlated samples affect the performance [8]. besides, with faster speed the svus will have a higher probability to miss detect the pus, because the pu will be outside the sensing range of svu very quickly [9]. in addition, another parameter which can affect particularly the cooperation is the traffic density; the road topology becomes congested with dense traffic which declines the speed and the vehicles tend to be closer to each others, this decreases the performance due to correlation [8]. thus, the main features of vehicular environment which influence the sensing are speed, fading, traffic density and the obstacles. these parameters vary according to the area type (i.e. urban, suburban, or highway). reasoning observationanalysis act eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 classification and analysis of spectrum sensing mechanisms in cognitive 3 table 1. vehicular environment characteristics urban suburban highway density traffic very high light low vehicle’ speed low medium very high degree of fading very high high low to high the urban area is characterized by high fading, and dense traffic with low speed (around 50 km/h). the main features of suburban area are light traffic with medium speed, surrounded by some buildings which give rise to fading. the highway area is characterized with few surrounding structures which decline the fading effect, and vehicles can exceed 120 km/h [10]. 2.2. spectrum sensing techniques the spectrum sensing techniques are divided into two types local spectrum sensing (performed individually) and cooperative spectrum sensing [11]. depending on the availability of the knowledge about the primary users (pus), the local spectrum sensing techniques can be classified into two main classes: informed and blind spectrum sensing techniques [12]. 2.2.1. the local informed spectrum sensing techniques these techniques require the prior knowledge about pu’s features such as sine wave carriers, hopping sequences, pulse trains, repeating spreading, modulation type etc. [12]. in addition they are robust to noise uncertainties, but their implementation is complex. in the informed techniques, we mention matched filtering detection (mfd) [12] and cyclostationary detection (cd) [12]. the mfd could achieve the higher sensing accuracy with less sensing time, whereas sensing accuracy in cd requires long sensing time and it is not capable to differentiate the pus from the secondary users. 2.2.2. the local blind spectrum sensing techniques the blind techniques don’t require any information about the primary signal. among these techniques: energy detection (ed) [12], eigenvalue-based detection (ebd) [12] and the compressed sensing (cs) [11]. they present the advantage of requiring less sensing time. even if the ed is the most popular technique due to its simplicity, it is the worst performer technique, especially in the case of noise uncertainty. the ebd deals well with noise uncertainty than the ed, while the cs facilitates wideband ss, and reduces the channel switching overhead of narrowband ss. however the cs incurs additional hardware cost and computational complexity [11]. 2.2.3. cooperative spectrum sensing the cooperative spectrum sensing (css) has been proposed in [11] and [13] to improve the performance of ss under fading environment conditions which is especially in the case of vehicular channels characterized by a strong fading. the key concept of css is to exploit spatial diversity among observations made about the status of channel by multiple svus [11]. the process of css requires the use of some techniques such as: local observations using individual sensing techniques, cooperation models, eventually a user selection technique can be used, reporting, and data fusion [11]. however the gain of css is limited by cooperation overhead which includes: sensing delay, shadowing, energy efficiency, mobility and security [11]. table 2.summary of spectrum sensing techniques blind ss techniques informed ss techniques ed ebd cs cd mfd sensing time short medium short long short performance low high high high high 3. classification of the spectrum sensing schemes in cvns in literature, cvns are usually based on the cooperative spectrum sensing, but can also integrate a geo-localization database to assist the traditional spectrum sensing. hence, in this section, we classify these spectrum sensing schemes in cvns into four classes: centralized, distributed, partially centralized and integrated. and we identify the ss and fusion techniques used in these classes (table 3) figure 2.spectrum sensing mechanisms in cvns 3.1. centralized cvn schemes in centralized cvn schemes, a central node act as fusion center (fc) that controls the process of cooperation. in the case of v2i a fixed node such as rsu (road side unit) or bs (base station) acts as a fc [14, 15]. but, having a fixed fc may not be always possible in the case of cvns. thus, some works focus on a clustering strategy where the vehicles are selected to act as a fc cluster head [16, 17]. sensing mechanisms in cvns centralized distributed partially centralized integrated eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 a. riyahi, s. bah, m. sebgui and b. elgraini 4 the cooperation process is defined as follow: firstly, the svus sense the channels selected independently by the fc using compressed sensing (cs) in [14], eigenvalue-based detection (ebd) in [15] and energy detection (ed) in [17]. the fc combines the local sensing received from svus for making a final decision by using the data fusion techniques such as hard fusion (hf) [14, 17], soft fusion (sf) [15] or hidden markov model (hmm) [16]. using sf at fc provides better sensing accuracy than hf [11], because the svus report to fc the entire local sensing samples. however it incurs control channel overheads in terms of time and energy consumption especially with large number of cooperating svus. while, the hf requires much less control channel because the svus report to fc one decision bit (0 or 1), the performance can be decreased. while, the hmm is used to speed up the detection of pus by indicating to fc the observations’ number that should be received before making the fusion [16]. once the final decision is made, the fc broadcasts it to svus. figure 3.centralized cvn schemes 3.2. distributed cvn schemes works in [18–20] focus on using decentralized cvn architectures where svus are cooperating in a distributed way. in [18], a distributed scheme based on the belief propagation algorithm is proposed specifically for highway, where each svu senses the spectrum independently. then, each vehicle combines its own belief with information received from other neighbors and a final decision can be generated after several iterations. in [19] the road topology is taken into account, where the highway road is divided into equal short segments which can be recognized with a unique identifier. periodically, each svu senses the spectrum, stores the results in its internal memory and share it later to inform others vehicles about spectrum holes in their future segments. this framework is further enhanced in [20] by an experimental study. the measurements are undertaken from moving vehicle travelling under different urban conditions and vehicular speeds. and then, a cooperative spectrum management framework is proposed, where the correlated shadowing is taken into consideration. data fusion in [19, 20] is based on a weighted algorithm. figure 4.distributed cvn schemes 3.3. partially centralized cvn schemes the partially centralized cvn schemes [21, 22] are composed of two sensing levels. the first level is fast sensing (generally energy detection) performed by a central node [21] or by a set of selected nodes using cooperation [22]. in the second level, the requesting vehicles (rvs) rescan the list of holes received from coordinators using fine sensing such as cyclostationary detection [21, 22]. this may reduce the overhead of identifying all holes. besides, the rvs use the sensed holes without seeking permissions from the coordinator. this scheme is then a partially unshackle master/slave sensing relationship between fc and svus. figure 5.partially cvn schemes 3.4. integrated cvn schemes in cr the integrated concept is based on the use of a geolocalization database. this later is described in [23] as a spectral map of available channels in a given geographical eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 5 area, that can be provided to secondary users according to their location. however, its implementation may not be suitable for cvns when road traffic is congested which leads to many vehicles trying to query the database. thus, to mitigate the problems above, the use of database is combined with traditional sensing [24, 25]. in [24], in each segment of the highway, the vehicles should dynamically select their role (mode i, mode ii or sensing-only) according to the traffic load. in low traffic, vehicles choose the mode ii to access the spectrum database through an internet connection. in mode i the vehicles get informed from vehicles on mode ii. while in high traffic, the vehicles perform sensing-only and cooperate to detect pus. in [25], a bs is directly connected to a tv white space and database similarly to [24], the vehicles should dynamically select their role but this time according to the traffic load and the coverage of bss. figure 5.integrated cvn schemes table3.summary of classification of cvn schemes 4. derived requirements of spectrum sensing in cvns as seen in previous section each area has its own features including speed of vehicles, traffic density, and the surrounding obstacles. in fact, the spectrum sensing accuracy depends on the vehicle’s speed, traffic density and the channel fading. to the best of our knowledge, the conditions of the surrounding area are not taken into account in literature. in this section, we first analyze the impact of the vehicular environment (i.e. highway, suburban and urban), especially the effect of traffic density, mobility and fading, on both spectrum sensing and fusion techniques for each class. second, we derive the corresponding spectrum sensing requirements for each environment. 4.1. the impact of cvn environment on the local spectrum sensing the detection techniques for local spectrum sensing include cyclostationary detection (cd), matched filtering detection (mfd), energy detection (ed), compressed detection (cs) and eigenvalue-based detection (ebd). each of these techniques has its pros and cons in terms of sensing time and performance as shown in table 2. thus, the choice of the appropriate spectrum sensing according to the environment properties is very important. in highway context, high speed requires fast detection (ed, cs and mfd). however, ed could be used for open space but with high fading, it is better to use the fast and accurate detection (cs or mfd). in suburban context, the speed is light which can affect the sensing performance, and fading effect is more challenging than highway context. thus, in these cases the fast and accurate detection (cs or mfd) is favored. whilst in urban context, the fast detection is not necessary due to low speed, but the accurate detection classes ref. coordinator nodes sensing technique data fusion algorithm road topology centralized [14] base station compressed sensing hard fusion highway [15] base station eigenvalue-based detection soft fusion not specified [16] vehicle not specified hidden markov model not specified [17] three vehicles energy detection hard fusion highway/ suburban distributed [18] coordination is not needed not specified belief algorithm highway [19] energy detection weighted algorithm highway [20] energy detection weighted algorithm urban partially centralized [21] rsu or vehicle -energy detection at coordinator -fine sensing at requesting vehicles data fusion is not needed highway [22] three vehicles -cooperation among coordinators -fine sensing at requesting vehicles hard fusion (majority rule) highway/ suburban integrated [24] coordination is not needed dynamic detection: mode i, mode ii or sensing-only (local or cooperative detection) data fusion is not needed highway [25] hard fusion (majority rule) not specified eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 classification and analysis of spectrum sensing mechanisms in cognitive a. riyahi, s. bah, m. sebgui and b. elgraini 6 (ebd, cs, mfd or cd) is required due to strong fading. 4.2. the impact of cvn environment on data fusion of the centralized schemes generally, the cooperative spectrum sensing schemes are a composition of local ss and data fusion. as previously mentioned, each fusion technique in centralized schemes such as soft fusion (sf), hard fusion (hf) or hidden markov model (hmm), has its pros and cons in terms of delay and overhead. thus, we have to carefully choose the appropriate fusion techniques according to the environment properties. in highway context, the data fusion such as hf and hmm present the advantage of fast fusion, but due to low density, sometimes there will not be enough vehicles to cooperate for sensing, thus the sf is preferred. in suburban context, the traffic density effect is challenging than highway context. thus, it is better to use fast fusion. while in urban context, the fast fusion is vital due to high traffic. 4.3. the impact of cvn environment on data fusion of the distributed schemes the data fusion techniques which may be used in distributed schemes are belief algorithms and weighted algorithms. in belief algorithm, the data from different cooperating vehicles is merged considering the spatial and temporal correlation of different observations hence the performance of this algorithm will be affected by fading (i.e. correlated shadowing). furthermore, belief procedure is rather time consuming when larger number of svus participate in the process. while in weighted algorithm, the data is merged using weights and only if the correlation between the sensing samples of two vehicles are below a given threshold. besides, the performance of weighted algorithm degrades under low density. in highway context with open space, belief algorithm performs well under low density. but, if fading is considering this algorithm is not preferred. in both suburban and urban contexts, the data fusion techniques are affected by dense traffic and fading. hence in this case, it is better to use the selection of cooperating nodes (i.e. correlation selection) either to reduce the number of cooperating svus and to select the uncorrelated svus. generally, for both urban and suburban contexts, belief algorithm may not be suitable due to fading and high traffic density. while, weighted algorithm is required because it performs well under dense traffic. 4.4. the impact of cvn environment on the partially centralized schemes as mentioned in sect. 3, in the partially centralized, the first level (i.e. fast sensing) is based on the local sensing at the coordinator or at a subset of selected coordinators. at second level (i.e. fine sensing), it is possible to use cyclostationary detection (cd) or eigenvalue-based detection (ebd). in highway context, to speed up the detection at first level it is required to use fast detection or both fast and accurate detection according to fading effect. while in the case of cooperation at first level, it is possible to use fast fusion. at second level, it is better to use ebd because sensing time of ebd is less than cd. in suburban and urban context, it is favored to use at first level the cooperation among the coordinators to alleviate the problem of hidden pu due to presence of obstacles. at second level, it is required to use ebd in the suburban context because the effect of speed is considered, while in the urban context it is possible to use cd and ebd. 4.5. the impact of cvn environment on the integrated schemes for integrated schemes, an optimal ratio between querying the spectrum database and sensing according to the traffic density and bss coverage is required. in dense traffic the svus perform in sensing-only mode (local ss or cooperative sensing). the accuracy in this mode is also important; hence the choice of the appropriate sensing and fusion techniques depends on the environment requirements as mentioned above in subsects. 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. generally, in highways, it is preferred to use mode i and mode ii due to low traffic density. while in suburban and urban context, it is possible to use sensing only mode due to high traffic density. however, as mentioned above, due to the hidden pu issue it is better to use cooperative spectrum sensing (css) at sensing-only mode. 4.6. summary of spectrum sensing requirements in cvns the main constraints in urban and suburban context are hidden pu, strong fading and dense traffic. the hidden pu issue requires css among svus, but due to fading and dense traffic a correlation selection is very important. the cooperation in highway context is affected by fast speed and low density, thus the accurate ss techniques with short sensing time at local ss are required such as matched filtering detection (mfd) or compressed detection (cs). the fusion techniques in css (centralized or distributed) should be adequate with the surrounding environment. for example, soft fusion (sf) and belief algorithm are favored in low traffic, while, hard fusion and weighted algorithm are required in dense traffic. in contrast, we can observe that these requirements are not always respected in literature, as in [14] where the cs with hard fusion (hf) is considered for highway. hence the effect of low density is not taken into account by using hf. in [17], the energy detection (ed) with hf is considered applicable for both highway and suburban, which could not be optimal since sf is preferred for highway and ed does not provide the required accuracy in urban context. furthermore, the schemes in [15, 16] are eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 7 considered applicable for all contexts, and in [16] the ss technique is not also specified. therefore, the real features of the surrounding area are not studied well in the literature either for centralized or distributed cvns. generally, it is important to use adequate spectrum sensing and fusion techniques according to the properties of the surrounding environment. furthermore the restricted and predictable mobility is not addressed for improving the spectrum sensing accuracy (table 4). table 4.summary of sensing requirements in cvns classes context highway suburban urban centralized fast and/or accurate local detection with soft fusion fast and accurate local detection with fast fusion accurate detection and fast data fusion. distributed fast and/or accurate local detection with belief algorithm fast and accurate local detection weighted algorithm accurate local detection weighted algorithm with correlation selection partially centralized first level :local spectrum sensing or css second level : ebd first level : css (fast local detection with fast fusion) second level: ebd first level: css (fast local detection with fast fusion). second level: ebd or cd integrated mode i and mode ii sensing-only mode (css) sensing-only mode (css) 5. proposed cvn scheme for urban context in addition to the set of sensing and data fusion techniques that we recommend to use according to the specific characteristics of cvn environment (table 4), we want to develop a new architecture that should be adequate for cvns especially in the urban context. we are mainly interested in spectrum sensing in the urban context because the spectrum scarcity is more severe, and secondly the spectrum sensing in urban context is not studied well. thirdly in the urban context, there are many challenging constraints that significantly deteriorate the performance of spectrum sensing. according to our analysis, in the urban context the strong fading and the pu’s hidden problem requires the collaboration among the svu to make more reliable decision [13]. but, its application in the urban environment which characterized by dense traffic and mobility of svus provokes significant problems. for instance, as the traffic density is always rising, the number of collaborating svus is increasing, and then the signalling overhead associated with reporting the sensing results tends to be considerably large. moreover, the svus tend to be closer to each other and then the svus are likely suffer from similar shadow fading which will reduce the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing. besides, due to the mobility of svus, the correlation between the svus varies over time and the svus need to join or leave the group of collaborating svus which increases the overhead in cooperative sensing [11]. thus, under the mobility condition, the connectivity among the collaborating svus should be maintaining for a long period of time. in this view the approach of clustering will be very helpful to stabilize a group of collaborating svus moving together along the road. in other hand, to minimize the overheads and the correlated shadowing associated with dense traffic, the svu selection based on the correlation should be taken into account in the clustering approach. figure 6.the main cvn requirements for urban context 5.1. the main components of the proposed cvn scheme for urban context our proposed cvn architecture is composed of the following entities as shown in the figure 7: the cluster head (ch): is local coordinator of a cluster; it has multiple roles such as:  ensuring the stability of cluster in order to maintain the collaborating svus in contact for a long period of time.  selecting among its members the uncorrelated svus that will participate in the cooperation. in this case, these uncorrelated svus are called by the active svus.  collecting and combining the local sensing results received from the active svus. the active svus: are the uncorrelated svus that will perform local sensing and participate in cooperation. the passive svus: are the correlated svus that don’t participate in cooperative spectrum sensing, but they can get the information about opportunities from ch. gateways: are used to exchange the sensing results between the chs. fading & pu’s hidden cooperative spectrum sensing mobility clustering strategy to stabilize the collaborating users dense traffic correlation svu selection to minimize overhead and correlated shadowing eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 classification and analysis of spectrum sensing mechanisms in cognitive a. riyahi, s. bah, m. sebgui and b. elgraini 8 figure 7.the main components of cvn scheme for urban context the general idea of our propose cvn scheme for urban context is that each ch can collect the information about the availability of the licensed channels at future location along its path. for example if it was said that the cluster c2 performs sensing in the space y, but due to the mobility, this cluster will enter another space z, and it will not be able to use the spectrum opportunities found in the previous space y. thus, the cluster c2 can benefit from the sensing results found by cluster c3 at the future space z, and the chs get these information by using gateways (figure 7). each entity (i.e. ch and its members: active and passive) in our proposed scheme has a specific role in cluster. hence for selecting the appropriate ch and its members, we need to define what metrics and specifications that should be available in each entity. therefore, in the next subsections 5.2 and 5.2 we define the metrics for ch selection and for active svu selection. 5.2. the metrics used for ch selection if we suppose that the svus have the same capability of sensing data fusion, it is not necessary to consider it as a metric. in fact, the ch has to be able to manage its cms by accepting or refusing the adhesion of new arrivals. besides, due to mobility the selected ch is expected to maintain the cluster stability to minimize the overhead associated with reclustering. hence, the svus which may be more qualified for winning the act of ch, are supposed to have a higher connectivity degree and a closer speed to the average speed of their neighbors. therefore, the metrics of ch selection are related to the nodal degree and the relative speed. the nodal degree the nodal degree 𝑑𝑁𝑖 is the total number of neighbors of a given 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 . usually, svus broadcast their current state to all other nodes within their transmission range 𝑟. therefore, two svus: 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 and 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑗 are said to be neighbors if the distance between them is less than the transmission range 𝑟, and we define the neighborhood 𝑁𝑖 of a 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 at time t as follows: 𝑁𝑖 = 𝑗, 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎𝑠 𝑑𝑖,𝑗 < 𝑟 𝑑𝑖,𝑗 is the distance between 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 and 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑗 . thus, the nodal degree 𝑑𝑁𝑖 of 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 is finding by counting their neighbors and it is deduced as the cardinality of the set 𝑁𝑖 as follows: 𝑑𝑁𝑖 = 𝑁𝑖 the relative speed the elative velocity 𝑟𝑣𝑖 of 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 is calculated as follows: 𝑟𝑣𝑖 = 𝑣𝑖 − 𝐴𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦 the smaller the value of 𝑟𝑣𝑖 , the closer the velocity of the 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 to the average velocity. procedure of calculating the score function of 𝑺𝑽𝑼𝒊 for being a ch each 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 in one-hop have to measure its utility for being a ch while considering the aforementioned criteria 𝑑𝑁𝑖 and 𝑟𝑣𝑖 . we define the utility of each 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 through a function called 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝐹𝑢𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 that combines those criteria with each other. we can define the score function by the following formula: 𝑆𝑖 = (𝑑𝑁𝑁𝑖 ) 𝑤𝑑𝑁 ∗ (𝑟𝑣𝑁𝑖 ) 𝑤𝑟𝑣 where 𝑑𝑁𝑁𝑖 and 𝑟𝑣𝑁𝑖 are the normalized values of 𝑑𝑁𝑖 and 𝑟𝑣𝑖 respectively. we use the normalization in order to prevent the compensatory problem. to normalize the value of 𝑑𝑁𝑖 we use the value 𝑀, where 𝑀 is the maximal number of neighbors that a ch can accept as neighbors: 𝑑𝑁𝑁𝑖 = 𝑑𝑁𝑖 𝑀 to normalize the value of 𝑟𝑣𝑖 we use the value 𝐿, where 𝐿 is the difference between maximum and minimum allowed speeds on the road: 𝑟𝑣𝑁𝑖 = 𝑟𝑣𝑖 𝐿 the values of 𝑤𝑑𝑁 and 𝑤𝑟𝑣 are the relative weights of importance of 𝑑𝑁𝑁𝑖 and 𝑟𝑣𝑁𝑖 respectively. according to our problem description there are contracting criteria, such as we want to maximize the nodal degree and minimize the relative speed. therefore, we can assume that the 𝑤 values are in rang −1,0,1 , then our relative weights would be: 𝑤𝑑𝑁 = 1, 𝑤𝑟𝑣 = −1. therefore, the svu with high 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒 will be chosen as ch. 5.3. correlation-based member selection spatial correlation is a crucial factor that may affect the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing. thus, after ch selection, ch should select among their members the uncorrelated members (svus) that are supposed to perform sensing (active svus). the spatial correlation can be evaluated by correlation coefficients. it describes the correlation index between the samples observed by two vehicles 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 and 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑗 . we model the correlation function with the exponential decaying model proposed by gudmundson [26] as follows: 𝑅𝑖,𝑗 = 𝑒 −𝑑𝑖,𝑗 (𝑡) 𝑑𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑟 where 𝑅𝑖,𝑗 is the distance dependent correlation index and it is time-varying on account of vehicle mobility, and eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 9 𝑑𝑖,𝑗 (𝑡) denotes the separation distance between 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 and 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑗 at time 𝑡. and 𝑑𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑟 is the threshold distance which represents the correlated distance of shadow fading which usually varies according to the environment and it set to 20𝑚 for the urban environment. if 𝑅𝑖,𝑗 exceeds a given threshold 𝜂, then 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑖 is strongly correlated with 𝑆𝑉𝑈𝑗 . the selection procedure based on spatial correlation our proposed algorithm for selection the active svu is as following:  at first step the ch computes the correlation coefficients 𝑅𝑖,𝑗 for all possible pairs of members.  a matrix m of size n*n is built. n is the total number of candidate cooperative members that belong to a cluster, {n} ={svu1 , svu2 , ….., svun}  a threshold of correlation is defined 𝜂  the diagonal elements of matrix m are auto-correlated coefficients 𝑅𝑖,𝑗 = 1. svu1 svu2 svu3 ….. svun svu1 1 r1,2 r1,3 ….. r1,n svu2 r2,1 1 r2,3 ….. . . . . 1 . . . . . . svun rn,1 rn,2 1 figure.8.the matrix m of correlation coefficients  the algorithm of selection of the active svus: we suppose that {𝐴} is the list of the active svus and {𝑃} is the list of the passive svus. at the beginning 𝐴 = ∅ and 𝑃 = ∅ // initialization to start the selection procedure, one svui is selected randomly from {n}. best  svu {n} {n}{svu} {a} {svu} while 𝑁 = ∅ do // the svus that are correlated with best will be removed from {n} to the {p} for each 𝑆𝑉𝑈 ∈ 𝑁 do if r(best, svu) > then {n} {n}{svu} {p} {svu} end if end for // selecting randomly one svu from {n} to be the new best best  svu {n} {n} {svu} {a} {best} end while compared with the existing works [16, 17] that are based on clustering, we don’t just describe the entities of our proposed cvn scheme for urban context but we also provide a set of metrics and procedure for selecting the ch and the active svus that participate in cooperation. in our future we will give more details about the process of clustering phase and the cooperative sensing phase 6. conclusion in this paper, we have analyzed the impact of environment effects (traffic density, speed and fading) on spectrum sensing and fusion techniques applied in cvns. and then, we have derived the main spectrum sensing requirements in cvns. this analysis enabled us to conclude that the real effects of vehicular environment are not studied well in literature for cvns, this motivate further research needed for practical implementation. thus, our discussions on the environmental effects on cvns are needed to be grounded in established empirical studies as a part of future directions pertaining to cvns. in addition to the set of sensing and data fusion techniques that we recommend to use according to the specific characteristics of cvn environment, we develop a new cvn architecture that should be adequate with vehicular environment of the urban context. references. [1] toor, y., muhlethaler, p., laouiti, a., de la fortelle, a.: vehicle ad hoc networks: applications and related technical issues. ieee commun. surv. tutor. 10(3), 74–88 (2008) [2] ghandour, a.j., fawaz, k., artail, h.: data delivery guarantees in congested vehicular ad hoc networks using cognitive networks. ieee iwcmc 2011, 871–876 (2011) [3] abeywardana, r.c., sowerby, k.w., berber, s.m.: spectrum sensing in cognitive radio enabled vehicular ad hoc networks: a review. in: ieee iciafs, pp. 1–6 (2014) [4] ahmed, a.a., alkheir, a.a., said, d., mouftah, h.t.: cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive vehicular ad hoc networks: an overview and open research issues. ccece 2016, 1–4 (2016) [5] chembe, c., noor, r.m., ahmedy, i., oche, m., kunda, d., liu, c.h.: spectrum sensing in cognitive vehicular network: state-of-art, challenges and open issues. comput. commun. 97, 15–30 (2017) [6] singh, k.d., rawat, p., bonnin, j.m.: cognitive radio for vehicular ad hoc networks (crvanets): approaches and challenges. eurasip j. comm. netw. 2014, 49 (2014) [7] min, a.w., shin, k.g.: impact of mobility on spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks. 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integrating spectrum database and cooperative sensing for cognitive vehicular networks. ieee vtc fall 2013, 1–7 (2013) [25] doost-mohammady, r., chowdhury, k.r.: design of spectrum database assisted cognitive radio vehicular networks. ieee crowncom 2012, 1–5 (2012) [26] m. gudmundson, “correlation model for shadow fading in mobile radio systems,” electronics letters, , 27(23): 21452146 (1991). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2017 02 2018 | volume 2 | issue 7 | e4 addressing the deployment challenges of health monitoring devices for a dementia study t. collins s. i. woolley school of electronic, electrical and systems engineering university of birmingham edgbaston, birmingham, uk. t.collins@bham.ac.uk s.i.woolley@bham.ac.uk s. aldred s. rai school of sport, exercise and rehabilitation sciences university of birmingham edgbaston, birmingham, uk. s.aldred.1@bham.ac.uk sxr294@student.bham.ac.uk abstract this paper presents the findings of a technological adoption assessment of health monitoring devices for a dementia study. the work was motivated by the need to monitor physical activity interventions in a study cohort of dementia patients living with caregiver support in the community. the system requirements were for a discrete and unobtrusive solution with activity level (energy expenditure) and heart rate monitoring. in addition to fulfilling system requirements, successful technology adoption requires careful consideration of practical challenges in deployment. the paper addresses these challenges in particular, aspects relating to the servicing and maintenance of units over the study period and the access and synchronisation of data. test data visualisations and data mining results for sustained, long-term data capture are provided. categories and subject descriptors j.3 [life and medical sciences]: health; j.3 [life and medical sciences]: medical information systems general terms health monitoring, activity monitoring keywords activity monitoring, dementia 1. introduction dementia is a term used to describe several neurodegenerative disorders, of which alzheimer’s disease is the most common, affecting millions worldwide. physical activity and exercise are known to reduce risks for diseases such as alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease and diabetes by decreasing oxidative stress and inflammation in mobihealth 2015 london, uk the periphery [10]. evidence from animal-based research has shown that exercise promotes extensive vascular changes and adaptive mechanisms in the central nervous system (e.g. growth of blood vessels), consequently improving brain blood flow. however, whilst the most effective exercise has arguably been characterised for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular complaints, little is known about the best form of exercise to benefit people with dementia. monitoring the levels of physical activity in people with dementia is not straightforward. dementia sufferers are anxious about change [5] and they can become very agitated by anything new appearing in the home, or on the person [12]. in addition, the loss of short-term memory can make simple solutions, such as the compilation of an activity log, unsuitable. a wearable, self-contained, solution is preferable. a 2012 review of wearable and ambient sensing systems for health and rehabilitation highlighted the potential of objective monitoring for home-based rehabilitation interventions [9]. in addressing dementia, the authors observed that an “important factor in this patient population is that the monitoring system must be totally unobtrusive and, if possible, collect information in a transparent way without patient intervention”. while research effort in remote and “sensor-less” sensing (opportunistic sensing from devices in daily use) [8] offers some potential in terms of future solutions meeting the twin ideal of totally unobtrusive and nothing new, the recent surge in commercially available solutions for wearable activity and health monitoring devices evidences moves in the right direction. in this paper we explore and compare candidate products closest to this ideal and which comply with the study requirements. the practical issues surrounding implementation are reported together with test results for sustained, long-term data capture with visualisation analytics from raw data and data mining. 2. system requirements study requirements in terms of system sensing, data access and invasiveness were determined. the study design was for a 4-week physical activity intervention for a patient cohort with a moderate degree of dementia living with caregiver mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261638 table 1: comparison of monitoring systems device activity pulse eda other raw data price manufacturer product monitoring monitoring monitoring sensors access basis peak yes yes yes skin temp. yes £200 polar ft60 yes yes∗ no gps yes £160 mio alpha no yes no yes £150 jawbone up24 yes no no no∗∗ £100 withings pulse ox yes yes no spo2 ∗∗∗ yes £100 nike fuelband yes no no no∗∗ £90 fitbit flex yes no no yes £80 ∗ requires separate chest-strap sensor for pulse rate measurement ∗∗ raw data access is not supported by the manufacturer but ‘hacks’ to achieve it are reported online ∗∗∗ spo2 = peripheral capillary oxygen saturation (pulse oximetry) support in their own homes. up to 30 study participants could require concurrent monitoring over 4 weeks. device monitoring was provisioned to supplement other study data including health, behaviour and quality of life assessments. 2.1 sensors activity monitoring is attempted to some degree by even the most basic of commercial devices and can also be achieved, in part, via embedded smartphone accelerometers. however, to better inform the assessment of energy expenditure, additional measures such as heart rate and electrodermal activity (eda) (an indicator of perspiration) were desirable. in combination with accelerometer data, these metrics allow different types and intensities of physical activity to be characterised. gps location data was also desirable but not essential. 2.2 access to raw data access to raw data may seem an obvious requirement but its support cannot be assumed. a number of systems use proprietary communication protocols to relay sensor data to a smartphone or pc and only provide access to summarised data rather than the full set of recorded sensor data. we planned to analyse and mine the data and therefore required access to the raw sensor data, for example, in csv (commaseparated value) or xml (extensible markup language) form. 2.3 invasiveness systems with separate sensors that attach to different parts of the body can give good results but were deemed too invasive for the dementia study cohort. expert advice recommended that less invasive, single unit, belt-worn devices and wrist-watch formats were preferred. 3. comparison of activity monitoring systems a survey of commercial activity monitoring systems was conducted in december 2014. the candidate devices, summarised in table 1, were: fitbit flex [2]; nike+ fuelband se [7]; jawbone up [4]; withings pulse ox [13]; mio alpha [6]; polar ft60 [11]; and basis peak [1]. all are wrist watch formats with the exception of withings pulse ox which can optionally be belt-worn. the activity monitoring market is evolving very quickly and within six months of the survey, several models had already been superseded. for example, newer devices from fitbit, mio, jawbone and microsoft include pulse monitoring and gps. these devices would be good candidates for future studies. at the time of our survey, however, these models were not available. devices that did not measure pulse rate were eliminated first. the withings’ pulse ox can measure pulse rate but not continually. to measure pulse the wearer removes the device from their wrist and puts their finger over an optical sensor on the back. this requirement was deemed unsuited to the study participants. the mio alpha was eliminated because it did not provide activity monitoring data. the remaining contenders were the polar ft60 and the basis peak. although the polar ft60 provided gps sensing, it was eliminated because of the practicalities of the pulse sensor. unlike the other devices which use optical sensors to detect pulse rate, the ft60 required a separate heart-rate sensor mounted on a chest strap. the basis peak, made available in the uk in january 2015, was the only remaining device that met the study requirements and also provided additional skin temperature data. 4. deployment challenges study adoption required the technology to be deployed with up to thirty participants concurrently for four weeks. to reduce participant invasion and researcher workload, the preferred number of researcher visits to participant homes was limited to one per week. 4.1 battery life limited battery life is a common problem associated with wearable computing devices. the basis peak watch has a battery life of between 3-5 days depending on usage. wireless data synchronisation, for example, is an energy-demanding function. with only one researcher home visit per week, there was a need for additional recharging. it was determined that placing the watch in its charging cradle for ten minutes each day would maintain the charge and could be adopted into caregiver responsibilities. 4.2 data synchronisation data synchronisation presented something of a challenge. the watch is designed to synchronise data with an iphone figure 1: examples of steps-per-minute, eda and pulse rate data collected during two four-hour periods during testing. (ios) or android smartphone via a wireless bluetooth connection using the basis app which communicates via the internet with the database held by basis. there were initial problems with android phone use because the bluetooth interface was not compatible with the latest version of the operating system (v5). however, using an older phone (with android v4.4) and disabling system updates provided a workaround. no similar problems were encountered with ios devices. 4.3 deploying multiple units although slightly convoluted, the process of data acquisition worked satisfactorily with a single watch. in the study, however, thirty watches would be deployed simultaneously. each watch expects to pair with a phone but the current phone app does not support multiple watches or multiple users. in order to synchronise data from more than one watch with a single phone, it is necessary to first create separate user accounts for the different watches. then to synchronise, the phone and watch must be paired and the account details entered into the app. once synchronisation is complete, the account details must be deleted and the watch unpaired in order to repeat the process with another device. this is not a procedure that one would wish to repeat daily. the watch is capable, however, of buffering at least a week’s worth of data although the time taken to upload this via the bluetooth link can be quite lengthy. a simple solution to the multiple unit problem would be to provision a phone for every participant. this increases the equipment costs and is wasteful given that the phone’s capabilities would otherwise not be required. single-board computers running android os were considered for an alternative solution. the most cost-effective options being media-streaming android boxes which, at the time of writing, can be sourced for as little as £20. these devices require an hdmi monitor to set-up initially, but can then be left to operate without a display and will automatically upload data from the watch to the internet at regular intervals. 5. pilot testing and visual analytics as part of the technological pilot testing, researchers wore the basis peak watches for periods of several days and weeks. reliability is a common problem with ambulatory sensing especially with sensors requiring skin contact: pulse rate, eda and skin temperature in this case. however, analysis of the raw sensor data revealed fairly good performance with 90% of sensor losses lasting less than five minutes. for the purposes of study monitoring, it was judged that this missing data could be approximated by interpolation. data recorded during different examples of fairly intense activity are plotted in figure 1 and show the result of this processing. raw data for both eda and pulse rate exhibits several short losses. the filtered data was processed by averaging valid samples within a cosine-squared windowed block of 30 minutes duration. also shown in figure 1 is the ‘expected’ value of each parameter calculated by averaging the readings from each of the 45 days during the testing period. the data in figure 1(i) was gathered during a circuit training exercise class and, as shown, the steps per minute, eda and pulse are significantly higher than average. in this example, physical activity could have been detected from the pedometry data alone. however, figure 1(ii) shows data collected from a spin (indoor cycling) session. in this case, the wrist remains virtually static so the accelerometer senses very low activity. figure 2: example of motion chart visualisation of 45 days of data. it is only the eda and pulse data that show evidence of significant physical exertion. relationships between the multiple sensed parameters were visualised using google’s motion chart [3] dynamic visualisation tool. figure 2 shows a snapshot. each ‘bubble’ represents data from a different day, bubble size varies according to eda and colour according to skin temperature. animating over the course of 24 hours reveals patterns of behaviour that can be difficult to visualise by other means. data mining techniques were used to characterise activities. the example scatter plot in figure 3 shows the results of k-means clustering. here the data has mostly been segregated across the pulse/skin-temperature plane. cluster c6, however, appears to overlap with several other clusters but, in fact, is differentiated by a higher steps-per-minute parameter. 6. conclusions careful device selection decisions, including timely consideration of practical implementation issues, are important to the design of monitoring studies. with devices evolving very quickly there is, necessarily, a new improved option near-market or another just arrived but too late for adoption. waiting for the ideal device could take years and, with crises in dementia care from the scale of demands in our aging societies, there is a need to make the best of currently available technology. careful assessment of deployment challenges has the potential to contribute by substantially reducing obstacles to effective study adoption of new technologies. in addition, pilot testing and data analysis can provide a degree of confidence in terms of system robustness and data processing requirements with visual analytics and data mining providing insights into the substance of sensed recordings. 7. acknowledgments this work was funded, in part, by the european union through a european regional development fund accelerating business knowledge base activity award in collaboration with care companions ltd. figure 3: results from k-means clustering of 45 days of data. (point colours correspond to clusters c1-8; point size corresponds to steps-per-minute.) 8. references [1] basis. basis peak, 2014. http://en-gb.mybasis.com/ [accessed 10-dec-2014]. [2] fitbit. fitbit flex, 2014. https://www.fitbit.com/uk/flex [accessed 10-dec-2014]. [3] google. motion charts, 2014. https://developers.google.com/chart/ [accessed 17-jun-2015]. [4] jawbone. jawbone up, 2014. https://jawbone.com/up [accessed 10-dec-2014]. [5] m. s. mega, j. l. cummings, t. fiorello, and j. gornbein. the spectrum of behavioral changes in alzheimer’s disease. neurology, 46(1):130–135, 1996. [6] mio. mio alpha, 2014. http://www.mioglobal.com/ [accessed 10-dec-2014]. [7] nike. nike+ fuelband se, 2014. http://store.nike.com [accessed 10-dec-2014]. [8] p. paredes, d. sun, and j. canny. sensor-less sensing for affective computing and stress management technology. in pervasive computing technologies for healthcare (pervasivehealth), 2013 7th international conference on, pages 459–463, may 2013. [9] s. patel, h. park, p. bonato, l. chan, m. rodgers, et al. a review of wearable sensors and systems with application in rehabilitation. j neuroeng rehabil, 9(12):1–17, 2012. [10] a. m. w. petersen and b. k. pedersen. the anti-inflammatory effect of exercise. journal of applied physiology, 98(4):1154–1162, 2005. [11] polar. polar ft60, 2014. http://www.polar.com/ [accessed 10-dec-2014]. [12] h. ragneskog, l. a. gerdner, k. josefsson, and m. kihlgren. probable reasons for expressed agitation in persons with dementia. clinical nursing research, 7(2):189–206, 1998. [13] withings. withings pulse ox, 2014. http://www2.withings.com [accessed 10-dec-2014]. propaganda fragment detection and auto-fact-check in bi-lingual corpus 1 propaganda detection and challenges managing smart cities information on social media pir noman ahmad1 and khalid khan2,* 1school of computer science and technology, harbin institute of technology, harbin, china 2computer science and software engineering, university of stirling, uk abstract misinformation, false news, and various forms of propaganda have increased as a consequence of the rapid spread of information on social media. the covid-19 spread deeply transformed citizens' day-to-day lives due to the overview of new methods of effort and access to facilities based on smart technologies. social media propagandistic data and high-quality information on smart cities are the most challenging elements of this study. as a result of a natural language processing perspective, we have developed a system that automatically extracts information from bi-lingual sources. this information is either in urdu or english (ur or eng), and we apply machine translation to obtain the target language. we explore different neural architectures and extract linguistic layout and relevant features in the bi-lingual corpus. moreover, we fine-tune roberta and ensemble bilsm, crf and birnn model. our solution uses fine-tuned roberta, a pretrained language model, to perform word-level classification. this paper provides insight into the model's learning abilities by analyzing its attention heads and the model's evaluation results. keywords: machine translation, span, linguistic, neural architectures, bilsm. received on 10 december 2022, accepted on 25 january 2023, published on 30 march 2023 copyright © 2023 pir noman ahmad et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc bync-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v7i2.2925 1. introduction as information dissemination has become more widespread without quality control, users can spread misinformation and target individuals with propaganda campaigns via social media to advance their ideological agendas. there are two main forms of disinformation, which are propaganda and fake news, which differ in that propaganda may be constructed based on accurate information, whereas fake news may be built on top of false information or on top of intentional distortions. propaganda refers to actions or opinions of individuals or groups that are intentionally planned to inspire the actions or opinions of other individuals or groups toward specific goals [1,2]. various solution utilizes bert [3], a transformer-based [4] model relying on multiheaded attention, it purpose of the fragment-level propaganda (flp) classification. social *corresponding author. email: khk00014@students.stir.ac.uk media, mainstream media, and the online internet have become increasingly popular sources of information because of their sheer volume, which makes manual analysis impossible. translating text is an essential task to be able to into natural language sentences to accomplish this goal. an initial method of neural machine translation based on handcrafted translation rules [5]. data-driven approaches have gained more attention as large-scale parallel corpora have become available. the covid-19 crisis redefined administrative policies, citizens’ day-to-day lives, and communications among administrations and users by presenting new methods of working and providing public services. the most recent contributions in literature highlight the need to explore how humane smart cities can help manage critical issues in the administration of smart cities through entrepreneurship, governance, and citizens' inclusion [6], [7]. we are entering a new phase in automating our critical infrastructure when it eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ pir noman ahmad and khalid khan 2 comes to smart cities. internet-of-things devices now allow city operators to monitor granular levels of key municipal infrastructures and adjust resources accordingly because of their low cost. we detect bi-lingual propaganda fragments in a given text sample and perform two types of methods one is to use a direct dataset for identification. eng/ur or eng-ur using neural machine translation. additionally, we perform deep automatics machine learning techniques to retrieve information and fact-check on detected datasets [8], [9]. we cluster each using a k-mean cluster based on the rating score of each dataset. this paper presents a computational framework for detecting and extracting knowledge conflicts in text sources and identifying misinformation/propagandist fragments. based on deep mining algorithms, our solution translates structured information, and identify propaganda fragment and misinformation, which makes the following contributions: • we proposed a two-step transformers model that detects propaganda fragments in a bi-lingual text sample. • our model predicts and gathers the text sample through information extraction architecture, which assists the dataset in the training process. • the translation strategies applied by the subtitler in the english translation of the text, especially within the domain of the specific topics, that is, of the parts in the propaganda fragments with different denotative and connotative meanings. our paper is organized as section 1 represents the introduction. section 2 overview the brief on related work. the collection of data and the proposed method is explained in section 3. this section also explains propaganda fragment detection, which uses the nmt technique to detect the information retrieved data. section 4 explains the results and implementation of our experiments. section 5 concludes our paper and gives us future research directions. 2. related work when studying the inferences of social media on smart cities, it is vital to know the phases approximately new cities have previously approved in their placement. in a framework where mobile expertise modernizes governments and local authorities, stakeholders have gradually presented an attention in numerous kpis (key performance indicators) at a city level, using social media to simplify connections with citizens. a rahimi et al. answer numerous claims could assist in thoughtful the overall public expressive preference, a complex factor persuading decision-makers at several administration planes. social media stages are shown actual in identifying the granular particulars of local communities, playing a pivotal role in encouraging responsibility and transparency within a culture. a important volume of indication pointed out that us government representatives utilized social media platforms for responsibility in governing, which also aided participants and politicians in a more creative and precise study of a sequence of events that had earlier appeared dissimilar. health care has gone over numerous phases called healthcare 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0. individually, khairol et al. [10] proposed these phases is a logical chain of one whole progress, ensuing in answering open challenges and earlier problems. the individual phase has its benefits, shortcomings, distinguishing features, approaches to providing health care, and technical and procedural novelties, where the research is required for considering the classification as a whole, classifying trends, and evolving future directions. several components have been artificially separated from the information extraction problem, including entity type classification, entity mention boundary identification, and event detection and categorization. there is rarely any feedback from the downstream classifiers when upstream errors are compounded and propagated to it, such as mislabeling an entity type [11]. bidirectional lstms and a bidirectional rnn (bi-rnn) are used in the new model for joint extraction of entities and relations. based on a bit-wise parsing operation between two entities, the bi-rnn structure predicts their relationship [12]. we studied the likelihood of the distribution of attention heads, the importance of the attention heads, and the impact of masking out layers [13]. the direct learning of this conditional distribution has been proposed in a variety of papers [14]. the neural machine translation (nmt) approach involves encoding sentence x source and decoding sentence y to target. the variable sentence source length encodes the target sentence using rnn fix-variable vector length [5], [15]. it is essential to convert unstructured text into a structured representation prior to developing automated knowledge analysis and fusion algorithms [16]. thus, to increase the accuracy of crossdocument entities, text fusion must solve cross-document entity co-reference problems simultaneously [17]. a recent study by rashkin et al. (2017) examined trust, satire, hoax, and propaganda (tshp) formats of text news for the detection of deception [18]. it is also considered as a task to fill a table with different entity extractions for multi-way classifications [19]. the active research areas cover textual record analysis involving linguistic and stylistic properties [16,17,18], in contrast to [23], a bidirectional rnn to label each pair of words. online fraud detection has extensively used authorship attribution and stylistic cues, including sockpuppet detection in wikipedia [24], the detection of deceptive online profiles, and the detection of fraudulent online behavior on social media [25]. these methods combine statistical classifiers with rule-based feature specifications, making high-level decisions based on the outcome of these methods. instead, our objective is to extract knowledge information in english language. for about twenty years, the concept of a “smart city” has received increasing attention in urban planning and governance [26], [27]. in light of current worldwide events, applying new knowledge in smart cities needs a combined structure to identify and stop a community health emergency. numerous numerical solutions have been established during the epidemic to implement an approach to comprehend the eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first propaganda fragment detection and auto-fact-check in bi-lingual corpus 3 spread of virus, which controls human anxiety, and joint comfort, and gather complex space-time procedures in a smart city associated to covid-19 protection methods. in several smart cities, the government set up contact-tracing apps, robots, and digital thermal gantries as well as civil society involvement in managing the spread of the virus to contain the pandemic crisis after the early first wave of the pandemic [28]. this combination proved essential to contain the pandemic crisis. technology enables people to maintain social distance while continuing their lives as a result of a pandemic, thus mitigating negative effects. digital skills and the willingness to adopt new technologies are not always present among citizens, governments, and organizations. it will be important to conduct further research to understand how citizens and individuals have adjusted to the technological changes imposed by the pandemic [29]. by strengthening citizens' involvement in policymaking, creating added value in the urban context, and enhancing crisis response capabilities, multiple technological points and their real-time data collection and sharing capabilities can significantly enhance well-being and quality of life. we are doing work on translation knowledge information extraction and bi-lingual propaganda detection is strongly related to treating conflict patterns [30], [31]. a global conflict pattern is constructed in a data corpus (text/smart cities mining) using local conflict rules as a basis for bilingual multi-source knowledge conflict detection, ass hsown in table 1. table 1. the previous proposed model and limitation smart cities method limitation risk management misinformation and fake news [32] smart city risks in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. survey on computing security over smart city [33] it focuses only on who accesses the data developed and conceptualized for the safety and privacy smart cities architectures [34] it does not provide non-repudiation that improves the quality of life propaganda detection system [35] support for numerous languages and a pull mode less instances sample that can facilitate the detection of propaganda character-level detection [36] computational text segregation in mixed-code pre-trained bert language model (lm) [31] identify specific propaganda span prosoul [32] generic analysis of various aspects of the propaganda detection system massive amounts of misinformation, hoaxy [33] track spreading and fact-checking in online information propaganda as neuro-linguistic [36] symbolic data corpora emerging forthcoming human-centered smart cities [41] safety, strength, interpretability, and principled 2.1. processive model given the best-performing systems from the last challenge, we chose the transformer-based model as our solution, focusing primarily on roberta [42]. roberta improves the language masking method of bert by eliminating the ns (next-sentence) pre-training target and training with abundant mini-batches and lr (learning rates) [43]. in recent years, many improved models based on bert have emerged, including distilbert [44], xlnet [45], albert [46] etc. roberta has been trained for longer than bert on massive data provided by researchers from facebook and washington university. we developed a roberta-based architecture with language masking and byte-level byte pair encoding (bpe) as a tokenizer to classify propaganda techniques [47]. our model used the roberta transformer for text classification. we used a pre-trained model on a given dataset and fine-tuned it with a fully-connected (fc) layer. rf (random forest classifier), providing precise baselines on classification and regression tasks. cnb (complement naive bayes classifier), using the similar value behind mnb while modifying its expectations and execution it appropriate for imbalanced data. mnb (multinomial naive bayes classifier), calculating the likelihoods of fitting to a class as a purpose of the rate of dissimilar words. 3. method a lot of research attention has been devoted to transformerbased networks in the recent past, such as bert [3] transformerxl and roberta [42]. the key mechanism for eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first 4 tracking mutual influence in these models is the use of a multi-head self-attention mechanism. the primary aim of the study is to signify text data based on their text contents and then assess words trend to comprehend citizens' sentiment and perception of the calculated smart cities in the pre-covid and post-covid times. 3.1. dataset the dataset provides nlp4if [48], and the training, the development, and the test contain 16,000 and 3,400 sentences, respectively. we also collect data through the information and knowledge extraction process and apply machine translation (google translation) to the extraction information data (ied), as shown in table 2. table 2. the statistics of train/test corpus used in our experiments dataset docume nt senten ce span nmt tshp train 430 7,184 7,184 eng-ur test 107 1,796 1,796 nlp4if train 16,000 32,800 eng-ur test 3,400 6,180 prosoul train 7400 11600 ur test 1100 2300 protext train 800 11,327 11,327 ur test 200 2,260 2,260 ied train 256 6,528 6,528 eng test 64 2832 2832 3.2. smart city tweets collection the twitter advanced search allows web scrapers to collect tweets that respond to query parameters. this application meets both adoption and privacy concerns. for pre-covid (before the covid period) and post-covid (after the covid period), we searched for tweets responding to the keyword "smart city" between january to december 2019 [49]. only the most relevant tweets from 32,334 tweets by 22,202 users are kept after a filter based on indicators related to identified constructs (e.g., virus, infrastructure, transportation, etc.). post-covid, there are 15,130 tweets compared to 17,204 tweets during the pre-covid period. as shown in table 3, cities are distributed as follows. table 2. an overview of the distribution of tweets among cities. city tweets london 18.086 milan 3.896 dublin 1.769 berlin 4.384 madrid 4.199 total 32.334 3.2. neural machine translation encoderdecoder the neural machine translation (nmt) approach is emerging newly to machine translation [14], [15]. with neural machine translation, a single, large neural network is built and trained, which reads and outputs a sentence correctly. in contrast to phrase-based translation, which contains many smaller subcomponents tuned separately. most nmt models are based on encoder–decoders in a multi-lingual task in which an encoder and a decoder for each language. nmt involves encoding specific languages (source) onto each sentence, then comparing the outputs to the source. we now propose a model in which each conditional likelihood is defined according to eq. 1. 𝑃(𝑦𝑖 𝑦1, 𝑦2, . . .⁄ 𝑦𝑖−1, x) = g(𝑦𝑖−1, 𝑠𝑖 , 𝐶𝑖 ) (1) where 𝑠𝑖 is hidden state (h) for time 𝑇𝑖 , computed in rnn by 𝑠𝑖 = f( 𝑠𝑖−1; 𝑦𝑖−1; 𝐶𝑖 ) (2) the likelihood on each target word 𝑦𝑖 having a distinct context 𝐶𝑖 vector, unlike the current encoder-decoder as in eq. 2. the depends of input sentence of context 𝐶𝑖 vector on a hidden ( ℎ𝑖 = ℎ1, ℎ2, ….,ℎ𝑇 ) sequence annotations on an encoder. the collection of annotation sequence ℎ𝑖 focus on the input of i-th word which contains information of sourrounding part of input. the 𝐶𝑖 is, computed in eq. 3. which sum weighted of these annotations represented. 𝐶𝑖 = ∑ 𝛼𝑖𝑘 𝑇𝑥 𝑘=1 ℎ𝑘 (3) the weight 𝛼𝑖𝑘 of individual annotation hidden sequence ℎ𝑘 is calculated by 𝛼𝑖𝑘 = 𝑒𝑥𝑝 (𝑒𝑖𝑘) ∑ 𝑒𝑥𝑝 (𝑒𝑖𝑘) 𝑇𝑥 𝑘=1 (4) where alignment model show the position of input/output k and i match. 𝑒𝑖𝑘 = a( 𝑠𝑖−1, ℎ𝑘 ) (5) the birnn-based hidden ℎ𝑖 state score 𝑠𝑖−1 input sentence just before emitting 𝑦𝑖 , and the j-th annotation ℎ𝑘 eq. 5. a feedforward neural network is used to parametrize the alignment model a while other components of the proposed system are used as well. by calculating an expected annotation from a weighted sum of all annotations, we can understand the approach of taking an expected alignment. the likelihood of 𝛼𝑖𝑘 the target word 𝑦𝑖 aligning with a source word, or converting from a source word, is 𝑥𝑘 . then, pir noman ahmad and khalid khan eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first propaganda fragment detection and auto-fact-check in bi-lingual corpus 5 context 𝐶𝑖 vector of the i-th word is expected 𝛼𝑖𝑘 likelihoods over all the annotations. the likelihood 𝛼𝑖𝑘 , or its related 𝑒𝑖𝑘 , reflects the significance of the annotation ℎ𝑘 with aforementioned hidden state 𝑠𝑖−1 in determining the following state 𝑠𝑖 and making 𝑦𝑖 . this method does not consider alignment as a latent variable like traditional machine translation, as shown in figure. 1. figure. 1 neural machine translation source-target pipeline the input sequence x in eq. 1 described rnn starting symbol 𝑥𝑖 to t the last one 𝑥𝑇𝑘 . the proposed method summarizes the annotation of each word, which lead us to use multi-layer bidirectional rnn and lstm (birnn|bilstm) [50], which has been used successfully in text classification, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition [51]. a birnn and bilstm consists of forward and backward layers. the forward and backward layers rnn/lstm 𝑓 reads the sequence input/output as forward and reverse order. the rnn/lstm read (𝑥𝑖 − 𝑥𝑇𝑘 .) and calculates hidden states ( ℎ𝑖 ⃗⃗⃗⃗⃗ = ℎ1 ; ℎ2 , … , 𝑥𝑇𝑘 ) of the 𝑓 forward layer. while the backward rnn/lstm read ( 𝑥𝑖 − 𝑥𝑇𝑘 .) and calculates hidden states ( ℎ𝑖 ⃖⃗⃗⃗⃗ = ℎ1 ; ℎ2 , … , 𝑥𝑇𝑘 ) of the 𝑓 backward layer. the forward 𝑓 and backward hidden state [ℎ𝑖 ⃗⃗⃗⃗⃗ ℎ𝑖 ⃖⃗⃗⃗⃗], i.e., ℎ𝑘 = [ℎ𝑖 𝑡⃗⃗ ⃗⃗ , ℎ𝑖 𝑡⃖⃗ ⃗⃗ ] concatenating an annotation for each word 𝑥𝑗 . to summaries preceding and the following words contains the annotation ℎ𝑗 using forward backward rnn/lstm approach. 3.3. propaganda fragment given a text sample, detect all fragments/spans of propaganda present in the given sample text. it is also necessary to identify, for each span, the propaganda technique that was employed. the sentence-level propaganda (slp) and fragment-level propaganda (flp) approach is followed by two components: the information extraction feature and information classification and ensemble component. information extraction features indicate the combination of linguistic investigation, layout, and topical features of rnn and logistic regression. while our rnn/bilstm model, we concentrate the pruning feature in the last hidden layer before classification using roberta. our final model fine-tuned roberta and achieved the sota results with an ensemble of bi-rnn, crf and bilstm. in the final component, we gather the likelihoods propaganda label for each sentence and thus, obtain m number of prediction classifiers for each word token, as shown in figure. 2. figure 2. the proposed fragment level propaganda classification ensemble model flowchart eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first 6 eai endorsed transactions on ...................................... .................-.............. 2013 | volume .... | issue ........ | e... in multi-models, we designed fragment-level propaganda (flp) as sequence taggers [19]. bilstm-crf with word embeddings (𝐸𝑤 ) and character embeddings 𝐸𝑐 , tokenlevel features (𝐸𝑇 ) i,e, pos, ner, etc. flp and slp performs jointly with lstm-crf+fine-tune that roberta 𝐸𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑡 , and 𝐸𝑊 (sentence and word embedding) respectively. we fine-tune roberta and ensemble multi-task bilstm-crf, in each sequence tagger considering propagandista span/fragments. when the span overlaps exactly, our model performs at fragment level majority voting for span/fragment, while non-overlap span/fragment our model considers all and truncates it. but when span/fragment overlap with the identical label our model selects the larger span, as shown in figure. 3. figure. 3. prop/nprop and bioe tags samples with the given instance 4. method the model trained nvidia rtx 3090 ti graphic cards. a python-torch-transformers package is used to implement our implementation. a mixed precision model was used to train all the models in the aim of accelerating training time. 4.1. evaluation metrics the f1-score can be classified as a primary metric in the context of our study, whereas p and r can be classified as a secondary metrics, as shown in eq. 6. f1 = ( p ∗ r p + r ) ∗ 2 (6) p = precision = tp/(tp + fp) r = recall = tp/(tp + fn) where tp is true positive, fp, fn is a false positive and false negative, respectively, while p = precision = tp tp+fp , r = recall = tp tp+fn are statistics for the binary classification. evaluation metrics for classification were used the following metrics evaluating the rule-based classification results. as roberta-based is case-insensitive, we chose a version that uses lowercase letters throughout the text, whereas biobert only uses case-insensitive letters. according to table 3, all models were based on the same hyperparameter values. using tensorflow, the roberta layer's hyper parameters were the same as those used in the roberta layer. table 3 list of all hyperparameter values used in experiments. parameter values learning rates 3 x 10−5 epochs 15 bach-size 16-64 sequence length 80-150 embedding size 8-16 token size 4-50 4.2. implementation process the results obtained on bi-lingual corpus, which identify propaganda fragment, with fine-tuned roberta, and ensemble our model with bi-rnn, crf and bilstm model. our model with twelve layers and 64 batches, 180 sequences, 0.1 weight decay, and 15 epochs were trained on all models, on protext ur, as shown in table 4. table 4. fragment identification on bi-lingual corpus results protext ur. model f1 p rl baseline 0.4134 0.4029 0.4188 roberta-rnn 0.4657 0.4780 0.4622 roberta-crf 0.5969 0.5803 0.5811 roberta-bilstm 0.6615 0.6628 0.6529 roberta-bilstm-crf 0.7031 0.7002 0.6984 our tc 0.8871 0.8840 0.8798 our model use the roberta baseline show low results with f1-score 0.4134, precision 0.402, and recall 0.418. roberta-rnn tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.4657, precision 0.478, and recall 0.462. roberta-crf tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.5969, precision 0.5803, and recall 0.5811. roberta-bilstm tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.661, precision 0.662, and recall 0.652. roberta-bilstm-crf tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.703, precision 0.7002, and recall pir noman ahmad and khalid khan eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first propaganda fragment detection and auto-fact-check in bi-lingual corpus 7 0.698. our tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.887, precision 0.884, and recall 0.879. the corpus on fragment identification on protext eng (english), as shown in table 5. our model use the roberta baseline show low results with f1-score 0.452, precision 0.461, and recall 0.451. roberta-rnn tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.312, precision 0.328, and recall 0.320. roberta-crf tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.490, precision 0.485, and recall 0.489. roberta-bilstm tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.545, precision 0.539, and recall 0.541. roberta-bilstm-crf tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.516, precision 0.509, and recall 0.519. our tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.628, precision 0.624, and recall 0.628. the corpus on fragment identification on protext eng (english), as shown in table 6. table 5. fragment identification on bi-lingual corpus results on protext eng. model f1 p r baseline 0.4527 0.4613 0.4518 roberta-rnn 0.3120 0.3283 0.3204 roberta-crf 0.4909 0.4856 0.4891 roberta-bilstm 0.5425 0.5399 0.5419 roberta-bilstm-crf 0.5164 0.5098 0.5197 our tc 0.6285 0.6243 0.6280 table 6. fragment identification on bi-lingual corpus results on protext nmt. model f1 p r baseline 0.6582 0.6677 0.6648 roberta-rnn 0.5378 0.5289 0.5274 roberta-crf 0.6909 0.6896 0.6886 roberta-bilstm 0.7815 0.7628 0.7649 roberta-bilstm-crf 0.8137 0.8095 0.8177 our tc 0.9071 0.8940 0.8898 compared to the protext with ur, and eng, the nmt achieved f1-score of 0.658, precision of 0.667, and recall of 0.664 on the baseline. roberta-rnn tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.537, precision 0.528, and recall 0.527. roberta-crf tokenized with crf with an f1score of 0.690, precision 0.689, and recall 0.688. roberta-bilstm tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.781, precision 0.762, and recall 0.764. robertabilstm-crf tokenized with crf with f1-score of 0.813, precision 0.809, and recall 0.817. our tokenized with crf with an f1-score of 0.907, a precision of 0.894, and recall of 0.889. the protext ur uses google translation to achieve the target language from protext eng. in the above performance comparison, the protext nmt corpus shows a higher f1-score of 0.9071 among all other corpora. finally, the evaluation performance accuracy is compared with 100 examples for each dataset, as shown in figure 4. figure. 4. prop model evaluation performance comparison with the given instance (100) of various datasets in covid-19, the widespread propaganda sentiment analysis that appeared from civilians' tweets from various cities (milan, madrid, london, and dublin) is propagandist. the analysis reveals that in madrid, the propaganda is created from the awareness of the failure to use identity and technology, the requirement to raise information and study how digital tools would be employed. furthermore, p-values are re-counted to estimate the coefficients' degree of awareness (importance). the dissimilar significance values are p < 0.26, as shown in figure 5. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first 8 figure 5. covid-19, the widespread propaganda sentiment analysis in cities-based 4. conclusion and future direction the rapid spread of information on social media has resulted in an increase in misinformation, false news, and propaganda, which is most challenging aspects of this study, securing high-quality bi-lingual propaganda data from news sources. our system analyzes bi-lingual sources and extracts information automatically based on a natural language processing perspective. using neural machine translation or google translation, to get urdu or english bilingual corpus instances is explore neural architectures, as well as extract linguistic features. furthermore, we use fine-tuned roberta, a pretrained language model, to perform word-level classification as well as experiments with different ensemble schemes such as majority votes and relax votes. moreover, the 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[51] a. graves, n. jaitly, and a. mohamed, “hybrid speech recognition with deep bidirectional lstm,” in 2013 ieee workshop on automatic speech recognition and understanding, 2013, pp. 273–278. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first this is a title eai endorsed transactions on smart cities review article 1 iot applications to smart campuses and a case study d. minoli,* and b. occhiogrosso dvi communications, new york, ny abstract internet of things (iot) concepts are now being broadly investigated for actual deployment initiatives. although ecosystem-wide architectures and standards are still slowly evolving and/or still lacking, some progress is being made; standardization fosters flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and ubiquitous deployment. applications range from infrastructure and critical-infrastructure support (for example smart grid, smart city, smart building, and transportation), to end-user applications such as e-health, crowdsensing, and further along, to a multitude of other applications where only the imagination is the limit. this article discusses a specific example of an iot application supporting smart campuses. smart campuses are part of a continuum that spans cities at the large-scale end to smart buildings at the small-scale end, and encompass universities, business parks, hospitals, housing developments, correctional facilities, and other real estate environments. the specific use case example covered in this article relates to an actual project to automate some key functions at a set of large campuses, but the nature of the campus is not directly revealed. after a review of the applicable iot and control technologies, this best practices article describes technological solutions that were employed to support the requisite control functions and serves as an example for the applicability of iot to smart campus applications. keywords: iot, smart campus, scada, m2m, emergency generators, wireless, 900 mhz radio, ism. received on 23 november 2017, accepted on 29 november 2017, published on 19 december 2017 copyright © 2018 d. minoli and b. occhiogrosso, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.19-12-2017.153483 1. introduction – what is the iot the basic concept of the internet of things (iot) is to enable objects of all kinds to have sensing, actuating, and communication capabilities, so that locally-intrinsic or extrinsic data can be collected, processed, transmitted, concentrated, and analyzed for either cyber-physical goals at the collection point (or perhaps along the way), or for process/environment/systems analytics (of predictive or historical nature) at a processing center, often “on the cloud”. applications range from infrastructure and critical-infrastructure support (for example smart grid, smart city, smart building, and transportation) [1-20], to end-user applications such as e-health, crowdsensing [21], and further along, to a multitude of other applications where only the imagination is the limit (noting that the references included are only a miniscule subset of the available literature). some refer to the field as “connected technology”. while the reach of iot is (expected to be, or become) all-encompassing, a more well-established subset *corresponding author. daniel.minoli@dvicomm.com deals with machine-to-machine (m2m) communication, where some architectural constructs and specific use cases have already been defined by the standardization community, including but not limited to etsi, the european telecommunications standards institute [22, 23]. a discussion of the ecosystem entails an assessment of the end-point sensors (their capabilities, cost, power supply, communication interfaces, security, and data reduction or computing mechanisms – if any), the local edge network (typically but not always wireless [4]), the aggregating network (e.g., a low power wide area network [lpwan]), and the advanced analytics engines needed for appropriate processing. figure 1 provides a logical view. many iot applications, especially m2m applications, require only low data-rate streams; however, some evolving applications involving real time multimedia (e.g., surveillance) entail higher data-rate streams and also specified quality of service (qos) goals. nearly all iot streams require the basic confidentiality, integrity, and availability (cia) security mechanisms encompassing the eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ d. minoli and b. occhiogrosso 2 end-to-end environment. table 1 provides a high-level synthesis of the iot ecosystem. figure 1. a logical view of an iot ecosystem the use case example covered in this article relates to an actual project to automate some key functions at large (but geographic-confined) campuses. after a review of the applicable iot and control technologies, the article describes technological solutions that were employed to support the requisite control functions. this real-life case serves as an example for the applicability of iot to smart campus applications. table 1. a taxonomy of the requisite synthesis to achieve broad-scale deployment of iot area subdiscipline iot/m2m technologies sensors, including electric and magnetic field sensors; radiowave sensors; optical-, electrooptic-, and infrared-sensors; radars; lasers; location/navigation sensors; seismic sensors; environmental parameter sensors (e.g., wind, humidity, heat); pressurewave/presence sensors, biochemical and/or radiological sensors, gunshot detection/location sensors, and vital sign sensors for e-health applications. networking (especially wireless technologies for personal area networks, fogs, and cores, such as 5g cellular) analytics system architectures proposed iot architectures, e.g., arrowhead framework, internet of things architecture (iot-a), the iso/iec wd 30141 internet of things reference architecture (iot ra), and reference architecture model industrie 4.0 (rami 4.0) m2m architecture (etsi high level architecture for m2m) architectures particularly suited for scada-based legacy systems iot/m2m standards layer 1, wireless (ism, pan, lpwan) layer 2/3, ip, ipv6, mipv6 upper layers vertical-specific cybersecutity confidentiality integrity availability 2. smart city/smart campus/smart building there is a relatively small body of literature on the topic of smart campus; a few key references include [24-35]. in the context of infrastructure management, a subset of iot applications apply to the physical continuum that spans a smart city, a number of institutional campuses, and a plethora of independent smart buildings, as illustrated in figure 2. a campus is typically comprised of several buildings under one administrative jurisdiction, such as a (private) university or college, or a hospital complex encompassing of several structures in a small geographic area. some also consider a stadium to be a campus. a campus can also be seen as a group of clusters in various regions, but all managed by an oversight entity, for example a state university that may have a number of campuses (say two dozen or more) throughout the state, or a state prison system with a number of sites, each comprised of several buildings. an example of campuses in new york state (nys) is included in table 2, compiled from public sources. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 iot applications to smart campuses and a case study 3 figure 2. graphical view of smart city, smart campus, smart building continuum typically, one building acts as an administration office where all the campus communications might terminate, e.g., if there is a control center, and where possibly there is a wide area network (wan) handoff. in multi-site campuses, there may be one centralized site where the various data (environmental parameters, control, video, and so on) is centralized to one, say state-wide or city-wide, control center for monitoring, processing, storage, or analysis. the in-campus connectivity may be supported by campus fiber, or may not be present a priori (or even if present, not usable for m2m/iot applications for various administrative, security, or technological reasons.) a newly built campus, e.g., a business park (for example, the capital one financial campus in goochland county, virginia) may well have interbuilding fiber connectivity, but older campuses may not have such wired connectivity. either way, a dedicated campus network for m2m applications may be needed, and it may typically be wireless in nature. while the applications that are being considered for smart cities are fairly encompassing, as seen in table 3, the applications that are typically considered for smart campus are somewhat more limited. these might include external campus surveillance; internal and external surveillance; building emergency generator, automatic transfer switch (ats) and digital meter (dm – aka smart meter) monitoring and control; elevator monitoring and control; and hvac monitoring and control. other campus-related applications include remote door control, water leak detection, washing machine scheduler, smart parking, smart trash cans, light control, and emergency notification [24]. energy efficiency and conservation are becoming more important, especially considering governmental mandates in many jurisdictions to reduce energy consumption by 20% by 2020 or 2025; iot-based capabilities can facilitate the achievement of these goals (e.g., tracking the electricity use of various systems and appliances in the building by monitoring the energy usage data from a smart meter). it goes without saying that smart building iot applications (e.g., occupancy, lighting, daylight harvesting, access control, fire safety, and so on) also can be considered to be part of smart campus applications [7]. table 2. example of ny state campuses new york state (nys) agency name no. of buildings total sqft metropolitan transportation authority 43 ~ 11,000,000 office of general services 22 ~ 19,000,000 office of mental health 24 ~ 19,000,000 city university of new york 14 ~ 20,000,000 dep. of corrections 71 ~ 38,000,000 state university of new york 35 ~ 86,000,000 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 d. minoli and b. occhiogrosso 4 table 3. typical smart city applications area examples public safety & security, intelligent transportation systems (including smart mobility, vehicular automation and traffic control) for example, traffic monitoring, to assess traffic density and vehicle movement patterns, e.g., to adjust traffic lights to different hours of the day, special events and public safety (e.g., ambulances, police and fire trucks). smart grids for example, advanced metering infrastructure (ami) and demand response (dr) lighting management control light intensity when area is empty or sparsely populate and/or when background light is adequate (e.g., depending on lunar phases, seasons, etc.). smart building for example, building service management, specifically for city-owned real estate to remotely monitor and manage energy utilization waste management for example, for disposition of public containers or cityowned properties sensing (including crowdsensing, smart environments, and drones) environmental monitoring, for example sensors on city vehicles to monitor environmental parameters. in crowdsensing the citizenry at large uses smartphones, wearable, and car-based sensors to collect and forward for aggregation a variety of visual, signal, and environmental data water management for example, to manage water usage or sprinklers, considering rain events surveillance/intelligence for example, streets, neighborhoods, ring-of-steel applications, gunshot detection smart services as an example, the new york city transit department of buses has recently designed a 700/800 mhz radio digital system to be deployed in up to 6,500 city buses and 1,500 non-revenue generating vehicles. applications include advanced computeraided dispatch automatic vehicle location to track the position of buses in real-time via global positioning system (gps) using cellular overlay mechanisms and provide advanced fleet management and next-bus time of arrival notification at bus stops throughout the region and on customer smartphones. goods and products logistics (including smart manufacturing) for example, optimized transportation, warehousing, goods tracking, trucks monitoring 3. early efforts automatic meter reading (amr) is a process for automatically collecting consumption information from energy metering devices or water meters and transmitting that information to a processing site, typically to process billing statements. some basic concepts and systems were developed in the 1970s and early 1980s [35]. as noted, meters that support data transition are known as dms or smart meters. the basic open systems interconnection reference model (osirm), is applicable in this context. at the lower layers one has physical and networking communication mechanisms. at the application layer (or beyond) one has a control protocol such as scada (supervisory control and data acquisition), although the layering may not be perfectly pristine with this early control protocol. at the lower layers, the issue of ubiquitous connectivity was a limiting factor. one of the design goals of the integrated services digital network (isdn) was to support a cost-effective packet-based “d channel” that not only supported out-of-band-signaling but also cost-effective distributed data collection for meter reading, home security systems, and telemetry, effectively an early version of iot/m2m [36]. for example, u.s. patent 5,452,343 (september 1995) states that “this invention relates to a method and apparatus for accessing customer meters and for controlling customer devices over a telephone line” [37]; a variety of related research emerged in the late 1980s-early 1990s (e.g., but not limited to [38] [41].) unfortunately, isdn proved too expensive, too complex, and not innovative enough to see broad deployment in the u.s., or for that matter in other parts of the world. more cost-effective solutions were sought, including wireless technologies that ranged from non-standard metro-level packet transmission, to 2 g and 3 g cellular. (two decades later, the currently-evolving narrowband-iot [nb-iot], a cellular technology connecting iot devices that replaces a gsm carrier with an nb-iot cell and provides ~25 kbps in downlink and ~64 kbps in uplink, and/or lpwan systems, may eventually play a key role in this arena.) eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 5 4. scada is an example of m2m effectively, scada is an example of an early m2m protocol [42-50]. scada is a well-known control system architecture for industrial process management. scada concepts have roots to work done in the u.s. in the 1940s. general electric and westinghouse advanced the concept in the 1960s and 1970s (with the advent of computers.) the term scada per se came into use after the utilization of a computer-based master station became common, by the mid-1960s (e.g. westinghouse prodac systems and ge getac systems.) scada has evolved through four generations: (1)"monolithic" systems based on minicomputers (e.g., dec pdp-11s) and the communication protocols used were proprietary. (2) "distributed” systems, where scada information and command processing was distributed across multiple lanconnected stations. (3) "networked” systems based on standardized components connected through internet-suite communication protocols. and, (4) “iot/cloud based” computing, where scada systems have progressively adopted internet-oriented transmission protocols and “utility computing” methods. scada system performs four functions: (i) data acquisition; (ii) networked-based data communication; (iii) data presentation; and (iv) control. these functions are performed by four kinds of scada components: 1. sensors (either digital or analog) and control relays that directly adjoined with the managed system. 2. remote telemetry units (rtus), effectively small computerized units located in the field at sites where the entity to be monitored/managed resides. rtus serve as local collection points for gathering information from sensors and delivering commands to control relays. 3. scada master units, high-power computer workstations or consoles that operates as the central processor. these units provide a human interface to the system and automatically manages the system under control in response to sensor inputs. 4. the communications network that connects the scada master unit to the dispersed rtus. for the purpose of this project, the campuses rtus are located the emergency generator, the ats, and the dm. modbus is a defacto protocol standard that defines how the scada data is communicated over networks. modbus was originally a serial communications protocol developed in the late 1970s for use with programmable logic controller (plc) devices; the basic machinery is currently utilized for connecting many types of industrial electronic devices connected on different types of networks. multiple rtus and/or intelligent electronic devices that supports the modbus protocol can be connected to the same physical network to create a modbus network. modbus uses a basic message structure: it transacts raw words and bits. more specifically, modbus-rtu and modbus-tcp are the specifications on how this scada data is packaged for transmission over specific types of networks: • modbus-rtu addresses transmission of data over serial communication networks, by adding a station id and cyclic redundancy check (crc) trailer to the scada data. this approach typically operates over serial connections (rs-485.) • modbus-tcp addresses transmission of data over ip networks, by adding an ip header and checksum trailer to the scada data. modbus-tcp is the more ‘modern’ solution; when usable, modbus-tcp approaches may be ideal and afford excellent flexibility and the ability to integrate, if desired, multiple (iot/m2m) campus applications. these environments are comprised of scada devices that support the modbustcp protocol and utilize 10baset ethernet (or faster) for their connectivity. in modbus-tcp the scada data payload is wrapped with tcp/ip; the devices then communicate over a modbus network structured with an ip infrastructure (e.g., an intranet, if desired.) in large or tall buildings, however, there may be distance limitations for the raw ethernet runs. modbus-rtu uses rs-485 links to connect the devices to the local controller. depending on the height, conduits, and cable runs of the building, the 100-meter limit of ethernet may be exceeded, and intermediary (active) switched may be required. rs-485 (also called tia-485) is a serial interface that allows up to 32 devices to communicate in a half-duplex mode on a single pair of wires (plus a ground wire), at distances up to 1200 m. all devices are individually addressable, allowing each device to be accessed independently. the rs-485 standard specifies differential signaling on two lines; the information is transmitted differentially to provide high noise immunity over the twisted pair medium. an rs-485 arrangement can be configured as "two-wire" or "fourwire." in the "two-wire" case the transmitter and receiver of each device are connected to a twisted pair, while "fourwire" arrangements have one master port with the transmitter connected to each of the "slave" receivers on one twisted pair (the "slave" transmitters are all connected to the "master" receiver on the second twisted pair.) only one device can actively drive the line at a time. two-wire rs-485 networks have lower wiring costs and the ability for nodes to communicate amongst themselves but transmission is limited to half-duplex; four-wire arrangements allow full-duplex operation, but are limited to master-slave setups where a "master" node must request information by polling individual "slave" nodes (“slave" nodes cannot communicate with each other.) 5. applicable radio technologies for campus wireless connectivity, typically, one wants to make use of license-free industrial, scientific, and medical (ism) bands. while a number of such bands exist, the ism unlicensed radio band at 900 mhz (specifically at 902-928 mhz) may optimally be employed due to better weatherrelated performance, due to the reduced congestion from wi-fi and other devices (operating in the 2.4 ghz or 5 ghz eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 iot applications to smart campuses and a case study d. minoli and b. occhiogrosso 6 region), and due to the support for “long distance links”, being that these links can span several miles. however, wireless services operating in the ism band(s) must intrinsically accept potential interference from other users since there is no regulatory protection from ism device operation: the transmissions of near-by devices using ism (e.g., including other similar radios, cordless phones, bluetooth devices) can give rise to electromagnetic interference and disrupt radio communication utilizing the same frequency. fortunately, there are power restrictions mandated by fcc to minimize interference and thus unlicensed low power users are generally able to operate in these bands without being impacted by or causing problems to other ism users. traditional spread spectrum techniques, where a radio signal generated with a particular bandwidth is by design spread in the frequency domain into a signal with a wider bandwidth, will reduce the interference (however, spread spectrum system are slightly more expensive than normal transmitter-receivers.) for the purpose of this use case we assume that the campuses in question are relatively small: 1 mile x 1 mile (or at most, 2 miles x 2 miles); the institutional campuses (universities, housing complexes, hospitals, business parks) fit this description. some of the transmission considerations to be taken into account include the following: • signal attenuation, such as free space loss (fsl) and atmospheric attenuation. fsl is due to propagation, according to the laws of electromagnetism; attenuation relates to the spreading of the wave front in free space (vacuum). this is ldb = 21.98 + 20*log10 (d/), where d is the distance and is the wavelength of the transmission [51]. for any given distance the free space loss at 2.4 ghz is 8.5 db larger than at 900 mhz. for small campuses (e.g., 1 mile x 1 mile), the fsl loss is relatively small. oxygen, water vapor, fog and rain will add to the fsl attenuation (their effects are worst at 2.4 ghz); however, the total attenuation is still fairly small and is usually no worse than 0.02 db/km. for small campuses (e.g., 1 mile x 1 mile) this attenuation a nonissue in most reasonable weather conditions. • trees and other obstructions can be a problem. 900 mhz transmission (and much more so at 2.4 ghz) mode requires line of site (los) (or at least near los) for proper and predictable operation (trees typically cause more higher attenuation at 2.4 ghz.) the expectation is that for small campuses (e.g., 1 mile x 1 mile) that have tall buildings (8-10-12-14 stories high), tree will not be an issue; however, intervening buildings will be an issue – to address this challenge, repeaters will be used in the appropriate topological configuration. regardless, the design goal is to elevate the antennas so that one clears all obstructions. • fresnel zone clearance. in order to obtain proper propagation conditions one typically need to clear 60% of the first fresnel zone (a long imaginary ellipsoid between the two end points). at 900 mhz, for a 1 km link one will need one to elevate the antennas 6.5 meters above the roof line on both sides to clear obstruction (e.g., another building), at mid-point. • effective transmit power limitations. the fcc part 15 rules limits the effective transmit power of transmitters in the ism bands to 36 dbm. the maximum transmitter output power into the antenna must not exceed 30 dbm (1 watt) and the maximum effective isotropic radiated power (eirp) must be less than 36 dbm (4 watts). • antenna gain. this relates to the amount of signal energy received. the gain of a reflector-type antenna increases as one increases the area of the parabolic surface. for a given physical size, the antenna gain at 2.4 ghz is higher than an antenna at 900 mhz (e.g., for a semi-parabolic grid antenna measuring 40x24 inches has a 15 dbi gain at 900 mhz and 24 dbi at 2.4 ghz). for small campuses (e.g., 1 mile x 1 mile), the use of a whip (omnidirectional) or yagi (directional antenna) may suffice, although both of these have low gain. these parameters (and some others) need to be fed into a link budget analysis calculation, to ascertain that there is sufficient transmission and reception margin. for small campuses (e.g., 1 mile x 1 mile) the expectation is that the margins are adequate when using typical off-the-shelf radio components. round-robin polling by the scada master allows a conflict-free management of the radio channel and transmissions. iot security (iotsec) in general, as well as and especially in the case of critical infrastructure and/or wireless links, is very important [52] – [54]. link encryption, encryption of data at rest, and trusted execution environments (tees) (also intel’s trusted execution technology [txt] and others) at the operating system (os) level are needed at a minimum. 6. case study this case study is drawn from actual deployment projects. it deals with interconnecting emergency generators on roof of buildings in institutional campuses, where the ats and dm is located in the basement. the campus may or may not have available fiber, therefore a radio network is needed to interconnect the various buildings to a designated administrative building. that building may have a control center, or in the case of a larger agency there may be clusters of campuses over a geographic region, with only one centralized city-wide or region-wide control center; in this case it is assumed that a wan network is present to interconnect the dispersed campuses to the control center. the electrical devices are scada controlled. there will be a need to connect the rtus in the basement and the rtu at the generator on the roof. because the building may be tall, the modbus-rtu (rs485) approach is used. these networks can be variously classified as campus area networks (cans), neighborhood area networks (nans), or even field area networks (fans). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 7 figure 3 depicts an example of a deployment at the logical level. the actual project entails providing connectivity at 30+ campuses with an average of 8 buildings per site (but some campuses have a larger number of buildings.) these campuses are not greenfield. all buildings that do not have fiber will be equipped with radios. roof-top radios and equipment will be housed in a nema enclosure. omnidirectional whip antennas are planned to be used, but if directional yagis are needed (perhaps in very highdensity campuses), they will be used. the goal is to create star topologies with los links, as shown in an illustrative example in figure 4. if repeaters are needed due to building obstructions, they will be judiciously employed as illustrated in figure 5. strong link encryption is utilized for security. figure 3. logical view of iot/scada design figure 4. example of iot/scada design for a campus (los solution) eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 iot applications to smart campuses and a case study d. minoli and b. occhiogrosso 8 figure 5. example of iot/scada design for a campus (repeater solution) conclusion this paper described a real-life use case of an iot/m2m/scada application in a smart campus environment. references [1] a. al-fuqaha, m. guizani, m. mohammadi, m. aledhari, and m. ayyash, "internet of things: a survey on enabling technologies, protocols, and applications", ieee communication surveys & tutorials, vol. 17, no. 4, fourth quarter 2015 pp. 2347ff. 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[50] s. k. tan, m. sooriyabandara, and z. fan, "m2m communications in the smart grid: applications, standards, enabling technologies, and research challenges", international journal of digital multimedia broadcasting, volume 2011 (2011), article id 289015. [51] d. minoli, satellite systems engineering in an ipv6 environment, francis and taylor 2009. [52] d. minoli et al, “iot security (iotsec) considerations, requirements, and architectures”, ieee ccnc 2017, january 2017. [53] j. granjal, e. monteiro, and j. sá silva, "security for the iot: a survey of existing protocols and open research issues", ieee comm. surveys & tutorials, vol. 17, no. 3, 2015, pp. 1294ff. [54] c. lai, r. lu, d. zheng, h. li, and x. shen, "toward secure large-scale machine-to-machine communications in 3gpp networks: challenges and solutions", ieee communications magazine communications standards supplement, december 2015, pp.12ff. bios daniel minoli, principal consultant, dvi communications, has published 60 well-received technical books, 300 papers and made 85 conference presentations. he has many years of technical-hands-on and managerial experience in planning, designing, deploying, and operating secure ip/ipv6-, voip, telecom-, wireless-, satelliteand video networks for global best-in-class carriers and financial companies. over the years, mr. minoli has published and lectured extensively in the area of m2m/iot, network security, satellite systems, wireless networks, ip/ipv6/metro ethernet, video/iptv/multimedia, voip, it/enterprise architecture, and network/internet architecture and services. mr. minoli has taught it and telecommunications courses at nyu, stevens institute of technology, and rutgers university. benedict occhiogrosso is a co-founder of dvi communications. he is a graduate of new york university polytechnic school of engineering. mr. occhiogrosso's experience encompasses a diverse suite of technical and managerial disciplines including sales, marketing, business development, team formation, systems development, program management, procurement and contract administration budgeting, scheduling, qa, technology operational and strategic planning. as both an executive and technologist, mr. occhiogrosso enjoys working and managing multiple client engagements as well as setting corporate objectives. mr. occhiogrosso is responsible for new business development, company strategy, as well program management. mr. occhiogrosso also on occasion served as a testifying expert witness in various cases encompassing patent infringement, and other legal matters. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e4 evaluation of a self-organized traffic light policy michelle borm technical university eindhoven m.a.m.w.borm@student.tue.nl brendan patch the university of queensland, university of amsterdam b.patch@uq.edu.au thomas taimre the university of queensland t.taimre@uq.edu.au ivo adan technical university eindhoven i.j.b.f.adan@tue.nl abstract this paper presents a preliminary assessment of the potential performance gains of a self-organized traffic light policy developed by lämmer and helbing. a large amount of data was obtained for a complex real-world intersection that serves as an ideal test-bed for comparison of traffic control policies. we provide evidence that a change in policy may drastically decrease average queue lengths and waiting times, suggesting the self-organized policy is a promising approach to the control of traffic intersections deserving further investigation and potentially implementation. categories and subject descriptors i.6.3 [simulation and modelling, applications]; i.6.8 [simulation and modelling, types of simulation] discrete event; g.3 [probability and statistics] queueing theory keywords local control, dynamic control, traffic light policy, traffic network 1. introduction recent increases in computational power and new technologies (e.g. sensors) enable sophisticated traffic light control methodologies. classically, traffic light policies use periodic schedules based on the assumption that the average number of cars flowing through a road approximates the actual flow at any particular time. this assumption may result in suboptimal traffic light policies. recent research has focused on relaxing this assumption to develop traffic light policies that depend on real time traffic patterns (see e.g. [1] and the references therein). in this work we use data from a real-world system to investigate the effectiveness of a self-organized traffic light control policy developed by lämmer and helbing [2], which we refer to as “lämmer’s policy”. the policy uses the number of approaching cars from each direction of traffic flow to an intersection and the number of waiting cars to prioritize directions and determine the duration of green time per direction for each cycle. the policy prioritizes minimization of total waiting times over the reduction of the total number of cars in queue in all traffic directions. we provide evidence that introducing lämmer’s policy to a network of intersections (figure 1) in brisbane (australia) may reduce congestion. currently this intersection exhibits congestion at peak times, and is controlled by the sydney coordinated adaptive traffic system (scats) [3]. the exact specification of scats is unknown to the authors; we will instead use a scats-like policy based on observation in our case study, which is a fixed green times policy. 2. case study: toowong we model the traffic intersection depicted in figure 1 as an open queueing network by viewing cars as customers and the set of traffic lights at intersections as servers. this model is studied computationally through the use of discrete event simulation. for each traffic direction cars are served first12 34 56 7 8 9 10 11 1213 14 15 16 17 toowong shopping center library and train station royal exchange hotel a b c figure 1: schematic of our case-study traffic network, the toowong shopping center intersection. come-first-served and the intersection can only serve predefined subsets of the approaching roads at any given time. we take the topology of the intersection to be fixed. arrivals are valuetools 2015, december 14-16, berlin, germany copyright © 2016 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-12-2015.2262666 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 20 60 100 140 180 time [hours] to ta l q ue ue le ng th current policy self−organized policy (a) expected total queue length for the scats-like and self-organized policy. 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 0 40 80 120 160 time [hours] q ue ue le ng th ro ad i (b) contribution of each road to the total queue length for the scats-like policy. 4 8 12 16 20 240 10 20 30 40 time [hours] 0 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (c) contribution of each road to the total queue length for the self-organized policy. figure 2: comparison of total queue lengths and road contributions to total queue lengths for both policies in simulation. assumed to follow a nonhomogeneous poisson process. the network consists of three intersections, which all are regulated by traffic lights. the roads (or lanes) are labeled from 1 up to 17, however road 17 has no traffic light and will not be shown in the results. the network is divided over three intersections, a, b, and c. 2.1 results all figures are the result of the average of ten runs of one day. figure 2a shows the total queue length of all roads for the two different policies with a constant service rate of 0.45 cars per second. from this, we see the simulated ex0 4 8 12 16 20 24 0 100 200 300 400 time [hours] a pp ro ac hi ng c ar s pe r 15 m in ut es n1 n2 n3 n4 n5 n6 figure 3: estimated average daily arrival of cars at intersection a. 4 8 12 16 20 24 0 20 60 100 time [hours] g re en ti m e g ro ad i [m in ] 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 figure 4: simulated green time of each road for the selforganized policy. pected total number of cars in queue in the morning is much higher for the scats-like policy than for the self-organized policy. however, the actual difference would probably be smaller, because we assumed that the scats-like policy uses fixed green times, which is less flexible than the real scats. to examine the differences between the two policies the total queue length of each road for each policy will be compared. figures 2b and 2c show the contribution of each road to the total queue length under the two policies; note that the figures have different scales. the figures show that the scats-like policy has a large queue on road 11; this is not observed for lämmer’s policy in which the queue length is more balanced between the different roads. to get a better understanding of the behavior of lämmer’s policy the minutes of green time for each road during 15 minutes is studied; see figure 4. this figure shows the adjustments of lämmer’s policy to the arrival rate of traffic at intersection a over the course of a typical week day in september 2014. as is shown in figure 3, the number of approaching cars to intersection a is increasing around 4 am, which also shows up in the self-organized policy at this time as a new apportioning of the green times in figure 4. 3. outlook from this preliminary study it can be concluded that lämmer’s policy improves traffic flows and is promising for the future of adaptive traffic control in congested road networks. for further research it would be interesting to investigate what effect unpredictable (adaptive) traffic lights have on drivers; it may cause irritation or confusion when one lane is served twice before another lane is served. 4. acknowledgements we thank yoni nazarathy for initiating this dutch–australian collaboration through partial support of australian research council (arc) grants dp130100156 and de130100291. 5. references [1] j. de gier, t. m. garoni, and o. rojas. traffic flow on realistic road networks with adaptive traffic lights. journal of statistical mechanics: theory and experiment, 2011(04):p04008, 2011. [2] s. lämmer and d. helbing. self-control of traffic lights and vehicle flows in urban road networks. journal of statistical mechanics: theory and experiment, 2008(04):p04019, 2008. [3] a. g. sims and k. dobinson. the sydney coordinated adaptive traffic (scat) system philosophy and benefits. vehicular technology, ieee transactions on, 29(2):130–137, 1980. c-abac: an abac based model for collaboration in multi-tenant environment mohamed amine madani1,*, mohammed erradi1, yahya benkaouz2 1networking and distributed systems research group, itm team, ensias, mohammed v university in rabat, morocco 2conception and systems laboratory, fsr, mohammed v university in rabat, morocco abstract collaborative systems allow a group of users to collaborate through distributed platforms in order to perform a common task. collaborators usually use cloud-based solutions to outsource their data and to benefit from the cloud capabilities. ensuring access control in a cloud-based collaborative session is an important problem that should be addressed, especially in a multi-tenant configuration. in this paper, we present c-abac, a collaboration attributes based access control model that ensures access control in multi-tenant cloud environments. c-abac supports the workflow concept, preserves the tenants autonomy in defining their local policies and preserves the confidentiality of the object attributes. the implementation of c-abac in the swiftstack environment demonstrates the feasibility of the suggested model. received on 15 december 2017; accepted on 18 april 2018; published on 26 june 2018 keywords: abac model; tasks; collaborative session; access control. copyright © 2018 mohamed amine madani et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eai.26-6-2018.154831 1. introduction nowadays, multiple organizations collaborate by performing common tasks in order to reach a common goal. such collaborations optimize the usage of the distributed resources of the collaborators, hence, the productivity and the benefit improvements. in this context, collaborative applications bring new solutions and technologies to enable a group of users to communicate, cooperate and collaborate through distributed platforms to perform common tasks. most organizations rely on cloud-based solutions to outsource their it infrastructure such as compute, network and data storage in a cloud service provider (csp). this provides remote access to software and hardware services via internet. in order to ensure the confidentiality and the privacy of these services, the cloud service provider segregates the data and customers services into multiple tenants. each tenant hplease ensure that you use the most up to date class file, available from eai at http://doc.eai.eu/publications/transactions/ latex/ ∗corresponding author. email: amine.madani@um5s.net.ma is assigned to an organization or to a person that uses a given cloud service. during collaborations, the cloud tenants need to access and use the information shared by other collaborating tenants. this information often contains sensitive data. it is meant to be shared only during specific collaborative sessions [5]. this arises the access control issue [4]: the tenants need strong access control model supporting cross tenants access and collaboration. moreover, users may intervene dynamically without a prior knowledge of which user will request an access to a given object. in this direction, designing a fine-grained access control model is mandatory [5]. note that a collaboration might be seen as a set of tasks and workflows. each task is performed by a given tenant and a tenant may achieve one or more tasks. a task might be active (i.e. a part of a workflow) or passive (i.e. does not belong to a workflow). on the other hand, access control models for collaborations in multi-tenant environments might be classified into two categories: centralized and decentralized (peer to peer) access control models. in centralized approaches, the access enforcement and decisions are taken in a 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ http://doc.eai.eu/publications/transactions/latex/ http://doc.eai.eu/publications/transactions/latex/ mailto:<publications@eai.eu> m. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz specific central point. these models enable granting and revoking permissions while a task is running. in decentralized approaches, each tenant is responsible of its own access control policy. in this respect, tenants are loosely coupled. such approaches could support the following requirements: • autonomy and independence: each tenant maintains control over its resources. each tenant defines its local access control policy and respects the global access control policy. • confidentiality: each tenant is be able to maintain the confidentiality and the privacy of its local policy and its own data. in this paper, and based on the fine-grained access control model "abac: attribute based access control", we propose "c-abac: collaboration abac". c-abac is especially designed for collaborations in multitenants environments. c-abac model overcomes the limitations of the classical access control models that are based on rbac model. it supports an access crosstenant in which a tenant could use shared ressources on the cloud while preserving access control policies. the c-abac model is a centralized model that allows the collaborating tenants to specify a global policy (authorizations) in a specific central point. c-abac supports the task and the workflow concepts. it is scalable and preserves the autonomy of each tenant in defining their policies. in addition, it preserves the confidentiality of the object, resource and environment attributes that are used in the access decision process. this paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents the background of this work, in which, the concepts of cloud-based collaborative applications and the abac model are explained. the related work are presented in section 3. section 4 describes the suggested cabac model. section 5 presents the implemented architecture, the enforcement model and discusses the evaluation results. finally, we conclude in section 6. 2. background this section aims to present the necessary background of this work. it mainly focus on the presentation of the concept of cloud based collaborative application. then, it presents the attribute based access control model. cloud based collaborative applications. collaborative applications are among the services that can be provided by the cloud computing. they enable collaboration among users from the same or different tenants of a given cloud provider [2, 3]. during collaborations, the participants need to access and use resources held by other collaborating users. these resources often contain sensitive data. they are meant to be shared only during specific collaborative session [5]. the collaborative session is an abstract entity, comprising a set of users, called members of the session. these members play either the same role or different roles. they might have concurrent access to shared objects in the collaborative session depending on the access control policy. case study: a collaborative application for telemedicine in this study, we consider the telemedicine scenario shown in figure 1. in this real use case, the school hospital (sh), the emergency medical services (ems), and the home hospital (hh) are three collaborating issuers sharing a common private cloud service. the cloud service provides storage services for the home hospital issuer, and for the three sh’s departments: neurology, radiology and cardiology, as segregated tenants. this private cloud provides a service of collaborative sessions for the emergency medical services (ems). this service allows a group of users, from different tenants, to collaborate in order to observe and treat a patient admitted in the home hospital (hh) emergency. in this scenario, we have a collaborative session cs1 of a telemedicine type. the members of this session are: • user1: neurologist in the tenant neuro of the issuer sh; • user2: cardiologist in the tenant cardio of the issuer sh; • user3: radiologist in the tenant radio of the issuer sh; • user4: doctor_ems (emergency doctor) in the tenant emr of the issuer ems; • user5: doctor_hh in the tenant storage of the tenant hh. abac model. abac is an adaptive and a flexible fine-grained access control model. the core components of abac model [9] are: • u, o and e represent finite sets of existing users, objects and environments respectively. • a = {create, read, update, delete} is a finite set of actions. • uat t , oat t and eat t represent finite sets of user, object and environment attribute functions respectively. • for each att ∈ {uat t ∪oat t ∪eat t }, range(att) represents the attribute’s range, which is a finite set of atomic values. 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 c-abac: an abac based model for collaboration in multi-tenant environment figure 1. a collaborative session in cloud environment • attt ype : uat t ∪oat t ∪eat t → {set, atomic}, specifies attributes as set or atomic values. • each attribute function maps elements in u to an atomic value or a set – ∀ua ⊆ uat t . ua : u → range(ua) if attt ype(ua) = atomic – ∀ua ⊆ uat t . ua : u → 2range(ua) if attt ype(ua) = set • each attribute function maps elements in o to an atomic value or a set – ∀oa ⊆ oat t .oa : o → range(oa) if attt ype(oa) = atomic – ∀oa ⊆ oat t .oa : o → 2range(oa) if attt ype(oa) = set • each attribute function maps elements in e to an atomic value or a set – ∀ea ⊆ eat t .ea : e → range(ea) if attt ype(ea) = atomic – ∀ea ⊆ eat t .ea : e → 2range(ea) if attt ype(ea) = set • an authorization that decides on whether a user u can access an object o in a particular environment e for the action a, is a boolean function of u, o, and e attributes: rule: authorizationa(u, o, e) → f (at t r(u), at t r(o) , at t r(e)). 3. related work several works have been in the literature to ensure access control in multiple environments. in the task based access control [4] (tbac), the permissions are granted according to the progress of several tasks. the trbac [18] model is constructed by adding the "task" concept to the rbac model. in trbac, the user has a relationship with permission through role and task. on the other hand, in the team access control model (tmac) [6], the permissions are granted to each user through its role and the current activities of the team. these models enable fine-grained access control but they do not incorporate contextual parameters into security considerations and do not support collaboration in multi-tenants environments. moreover, the notion of "team" used in tmac model is static. therefore, this model does not support dynamic collaboration. other access control approaches have been suggested to secure resources in cloud environments [2, 3, 19– 21]. calero [2] suggests a multi-tenancy authorization system. this work is based on hierarchical role-base access control with a coarse-grained trust relation and path-based object hierarchies . calero et al [2] assumes that each issuer may use several cloud services and could collaborate with other issuers. tang [20] proposes a multi-tenancy authorization system (mtas) model. this model is based on the rbac model and the trust relations established between the cloud issuers in order to support collaboration between these issuers. the issuer that establishes the trust is called the truster and the one being trusted is called the trustee. the trustee 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 m. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz can authorize one of the trusters roles to access to a trustee resource. the multi-tenant role-based access control (mtrbac) proposed by tang et al in [3] is a model that provides fine-grained access control in collaborative cloud environments by using trust relations among tenants. in this work, trust relations among issuers were not considered (i.e. they distinguish between issuers and tenants). in mt-rbac model, the truster exposes some trusters roles to the trustee. this trustee assigns their users to the trusters roles. thus, the users can access to the trusters resources by activating the trusters roles. in collaborative task role-based access control ctrbac model [21], authors propose an approach to ensure access control to the shared resources in a collaborative session in multi-tenants environments. the suggested ctrbac model is an extended version of rbac in which new entities were added in order to support together the cross tenants access and the task concept. nonetheless, in this model, a given tenant may use some roles owned by other tenants which will compromise the confidentiality requirement. furthermore, this model is based on rbac model which is not flexible enough to support a complex policy rules. these models are based on a decentralized approach. it supports the following requirements: (1) autonomy and independence: each local administrator maintains control over his system. each organization defines its local access control policy, and respects the global access control policy. (2) cross tenant access: tenant uses some resources shared by other tenants. however, these models do not support task and scalability requirements, especially if we assume that the collaboration is a workflow composed of a set of tasks. moreover, these approaches are based on role based access control (rbac) model. nevertheless, various limitations of rbac have been recognized such as: flexibility and scalability. in this direction, attribute based access control model (abac) is of a great interest. abac model [9, 10] overcomes the limitations of the classical access control models (i.e, acl, mac and rbac). this model is adaptive and flexible. abac is more suitable to describe complex, fine-grained access control semantics, which is especially needed for collaborative environments. there have been few works that used abac in multitenant environment. the multi-tenant attribute-based access control model (mt-abac)[11] presents model to enable collaboration between tenants in the cloud. this model is based on a decentralized approach and supports cross-tenant attribute assignment. however, this model does not support the task concept. in mt-abac model, authors defined a trust relationship established between the truster tenant and the trustee tenant in order to support cross tenants access. in this relationship, the trustee is authorized to assign values for trustee’s user attributes to truster’s users. however, before assigning the users to the attributes, the trustee should know some informations about truster’s users such as their jobs in the organization which will compromise the confidentiality requirement. moreover, the trustee has the full control to assign the truster’s users to the trustee’s authorizations which will compromise the autonomy requirement. therefore, in this paper, we propose c-abac, a novel abac based model following a centralized approach. c-abac allows the collaborating tenants to specify the global policy in a specific central point. c-abac supports the concepts of task and workflow. it ensures the tenants autonomy and preserves the attributes confidentiality of the tenants objects. 4. c-abac: the collaboration abac model in this section, we present the suggested collaboration attributes based access control model: c-abac. in this section, we first define the notion of collaborative tenant. then, we describe the business process for the collaboration. after that, we present the c-abac model definition. finally, we show a use how c-abac might be used in the previously described telemedicine use case. 4.1. a collaborative tenant the collaborative tenant is the tenant responsible for ensuring the collaboration between multi tenants. it provides the collaboration as a service for the collaborating tenants. this collaborative tenant allows a group of users from different tenants to collaborate through distributed platforms in order to perform a common process. note that each set of tenants that want to collaborate with each other should first create this collaborative tenant. then, they should define in this collaborative tenant the collaboration process which is a workflow composed of a set of tasks, each task will be performed by a given tenant and a tenant may achieve one or more tasks. for instance as shown in figure 2, the tenants sh, ems and hh are three collaborating tenants using the collaborative tenant that provides the collaboration as a service. figure 2. collaboration as a service (caas) 4 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 c-abac: an abac based model for collaboration in multi-tenant environment figure 3. a collaboration workflow 4.2. a business process in our approach, each collaboration is specified as a business process that is defined as a set of tasks that are connected to achieve a common goal. for example, figure 3 shows the diagnosis process related to the our use case. in this collaboration, each task will be performed by a given tenant using some resources shared by others tenants. as shown in the tasks assignment (figure 4), the tenant sh is responsible to achieve the task t 7. moreover, in order to perform this task, the tenant sh needs to access to the resources mr, scan and video that are owned by the tenant hh. in this section, we present our core c-abac model which is designed to be suitable for ensuring access control in collaborative multi-tenants environments. abac model has been defined in various ways in the literature, usually for some specific goals. in our approach, we add the tasks (t ) entity in addition to the users and objects of core abac0. the task is a fundamental unit of business work or business activity. tasks are assigned to tenants according to their roles in the collaboration. the task is defined using the triple (task name, tenant that is responsible to achieve the task, set of resources (owned by others) tenants used for achieving the task). for example as shown in figure 4, the tenant sh achieves the task t 7 by using some resources owned by the tenant hh. in order to specify abac authorization while supporting collaboration and tasks requirements related to multi-tenants environments, we should use the notation illustrated in figure 5. c-abac model introduces the task entity to the user and object entities of the abac model. in this model, each task is defined by a set of task attributes like: the task name, the workflow of the task, previous tasks and the collaborative session of the task. moreover, in each task, the responsible of this task may have many authorizations. for example in the task t 7 : t ake_a_decision, a user from the tenant sh needs have four authorizations: (1) read the patient medical record mr1; (2) read the patient scan image scan1; (3) read the patient video file; (4) write the final decision. in c-abac model, each authorization related to a given task is defined as shown in figure 2 by: (1) set of task attributes related to this task; (2) set of user attributes that represent the user who is responsible to achieve this task; (3) set of object attributes related to the resource used in this task; (4) an action which is a specific operation on object. for each task, the user that is responsible of the task should have many permissions to accomplish this task. so each task is assigned to many permissions (abac authorization). a c-abac authorizations are defined using task, user, and object attributes that are independent of one another. moreover, each task attributes have the same value for all c-abac authorizations related to this task. likewise, each user attributes have the same value for all authorizations related to one task the fact that we consider that the user who is responsible to achieve one task is authorized to perform all actions related to this task. a c-abac model is composed of the three basic components: users (u), objects (o), and tasks (t ). in this model, each user has an attribute uowner which is a many-to-one function from users u to tenants t e. moreover, the model requires each object to have an attribute oowner which is a many-toone function from objects o to tenants t e. further, each user attribute, each object attribute and each task attribute is also uniquely owned by a single tenant, depicted respectively by the many atomicvalued functions uaowner, oaowner and t aowner. the crucial concept is that each tenant is responsible for assigning values to attributes that it owns. with isolated tenants, a user can have assigned values only for those attributes owned by the user’s owning tenant. actions are allowed operations in the system. these operations typically include create, read, update and delete. we use the terms actions and operations interchangeably. an action is applied to an object by a user. in our approach, a global c-abac authorizations for a given task of the collaboration includes global attributes which will be defined at the collaborative tenant level. such attributes are the task attributes, user and object attributes related to the collaboration (for instance, membercs(u): member of the collaborative session; sharedcs(o): shared in the collaborative session). on the other hand, in this authorization, the administrateur of the collaborative tenant uses the attributes related to the user who is responsible 5 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 m. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz figure 4. tasks assignment figure 5. c-abac authorizations for executing this task. these user attributes will be defined by the task executor (the tenant assigned for executing this task) in a confidential, autonomous and independent way from other collaborating tenants and the collaborative tenant. for this purpose, we propose a new attribute function assignuser() which will be defined at the level of the local tenant. this attribute function is responsible on executing the task and will be used by the collaborative tenant at the level of the global autorization. moreover, in this authorization the administrator uses the attributes related to the object shared within the task. similarly, these object attributes will be defined by the object owner in a confidential and independent way from the other collaborating tenants. for this purpose, we propose a new attribute function usedobject() which will be defined by the object owner and will be used by the collaborative tenant to define the global autorization. 4.3. assignuser function assigneduser(ta:t a;te:t e)(u : u) →{t rue; false}, a boolean attribute function, mapping user to true or false, which means that the user attributes that represent the user who is responsible to achieve this task t will be defined by the tenant te in a confidential way. this compound attribute is used by the tenant responsible of the task to define the user attributes of the user who will perform this task in the local policy with a confidential and an autonomy way. for instance, the compound attribute assigneduser(t 7;sh)(u) will be defined by the tenant sh to specify the user attributes of the user responsible of the task t 7. the indices used in this function are: • (ta : t a): the current task (the active task) of the workflow collaboration. • (te : t e): the tenant that will perform the this task ta (the task executor). • the couple (ta : t a, te : t e), means that the tenant te is responsible to accomplish the task ta. 4.4. usedobject function usedobject(objt ype;a:a;te:t e)(o : o) →{t rue; false}, a boolean attribute function, mapping object to boolean true or f alse, which means that the object attributes related to the object of the type objtype will be defined by the tenant te in a confidential way. this compound attribute is used by the tenant provider of the resource to define the object attributes of this resource and the allowed action in the local policy with a confidential and an autonomy way. for instance, the compound attribute usedobject(mr;read;hh)(u) will be defined by the tenant hh to specify the object attributes of the object (of the type mr) used in the collaboration. the indices used in this function are: • objt ype: set of objects that satisfy a common property are classified into an object type. • (a : a): the action related to the authorization. • (te : t e): the tenant that will share the object o in the collaboration. 6 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 c-abac: an abac based model for collaboration in multi-tenant environment figure 6. example: tasks definitions 4.5. a collaboration attributes based access control: c-abac model core c-abac is defined by the basic component sets, functions and authorization policy language given below: • u, o, t and t e represent finite sets of existing users, objects, tasks and tenants respectively. • a represents a finite set of actions available on objects. typically a = {create; read; update; delete}. • ct e represents finete set of collaborative tenants (ct e ⊆ t e). • ua, oa and t a represent finite sets of user, object and task attribute functions respectively. • for each att ∈ ua∪oa∪t a, range(att) represents the attribute’s range, which is a finite set of atomic values. • attt ype : ua∪oa∪t a →{set; atomic}, specifies attributes as set or atomic values. • collabors : (cte : ct e) → t e, specifies the tenants that will use this collaborative tenant cte. • each attribute function maps elements in u to an atomic value or a set – ∀ua ∈ ua. ua : u → range(ua) if attt ype(ua) = atomic – ∀ua ∈ ua. ua : u → 2range(ua) if attt ype(ua) = set • each attribute function maps elements in o to an atomic value or a set – ∀oa ∈ oa. oa : o → range(oa) if attt ype(oa) = atomic – ∀oa ∈ oa. oa : o → 2range(oa) if attt ype(oa) = set • each attribute function maps elements in t to an atomic value or a set – ∀ta ∈ t a. ta : t → range(ta) if attt ype(ta) = atomic – ∀ta ∈ t a. ta : t → 2range(ta) if attt ype(ta) = set • uowner : (u : u) → t e, required attribute function mapping user u to owner tenant te. • oowner : (o : o) → t e, required attribute function mapping object o to owner tenant te. • t owner : (t : t ) → t e, required attribute function mapping task t to owner tenant te. • uaowner : (uatt : ua) → t e, meta attribute function, mapping user attribute ua to attribute owner tenant te. • oaowner : (oa : oa) → t e, meta attribute function, mapping object attribute oa to attribute owner tenant te. • t aowner : (ta : t a) → t e, meta attribute function, mapping task attribute ta to attribute owner tenant te. 7 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 m. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz • ua(u : u) is defined only if (uaowner(ua) = uowner(u)) ∪ (uowner(u) ∈ collaborators(uaowner(ua))). • oa(o : o) is defined only if (oaowner(oa) = oowner(o)) ∪ (oowner(u) ∈ collaborators(oaowner(oa))). • ta(t : t ) is defined only if (t aowner(ta) = t owner(o)). • assigneduser(ta:t a;te:t e)(u : u) →{t rue; false}, a boolean attribute function, mapping user u to true or f alse, which means that the user attributes that represent the user who is responsible to achieve this task ta will be defined by the tenant te in a confidential way. • usedobject(objt ype;a:a;te:t e)(o : o) → {t rue; false}, a boolean attribute function, mapping object o to true or f alse, which means that the object attributes related to the object of the type objt ype will be defined by the tenant te in a confidential way. • an authorization that decides on whether a user u can access an object o in a particular task t for the action a, is a boolean function of u, o, and t attributes: rule: authorizationa(u; o; t) → f (ua(u); oa(o); t a(t)), with the additional required condition that (uowner(u) = oowner(o) = t owner(t)) ∪ (uowner(u) ∈ collaborators(t owner(t)) ∩oowner(o) ∈ collaborators(t owner(t))). 4.6. example: c-abac authorizations let us consider a telemedicine scenario where the school hospital (sh), the emergency medical services (ems), and the home hospital (hh) are three collaborating organizations. in this example, we apply the c-abac model on the telemedicine use case a telemedicine previously depicted by specifying authorizations for the tasks interpret_scan and take_a_decision as shown in figure 7. first, for each task we define a set of task attributes, set of user attributes that represent the user who is supposed to achieve this task and set of access permissions related to this task. a permission is an action on object. an object is defined by a set of object attributes. for instance (write, mr), (read, scan) and (read, video) are three permissions related to the task take_a_decision. access control authorizations in c-abac model are defined by the following the formalism shown in the figure 7: the authorization authorizationwrite(ti; u; o) that is shown in the figure 7 matches to ’the rule the radiologist interprets the scan images’ as specified at the first line in figure 6. this authorization is defined in the collaborative tenant ct 1 and is composed of a set of task attributes, user attributes and objects attributes. this authorization is valid for the action write if only if : (1) the instance ti is instantiated of the task interpret_scan; (2) the task instance ti belongs to the workflow tenemo; (3) the previous task instances of the ti are accomplished; (4) there is a collaborative session in which the task runs; (5) the user u is member of the collaborative session cs; (6) the object o is shared in the session cs; (7) the tenant sh authorizes his user u to perform the task t 5; (8) the tenant hh shares the object o of the type objectt ype with others collaborating tenants for the action write. the attributes assigneduser and usedobject are defined and evaluated in the tenant sh and hh respectively. this attribue assigneduser(t 5;sh)(u) = t rue if only if: (1) the user u plays the role radiologist; (2) u is at least level 1 of the neurology expertise; (3) u is at least level 2 of the radiology expertise; (4) u is at least level 0 of the cardiology expertise. the attribute usedobject(scan ;w rite;hh)(o) = t rue if only if: (1) the object o of the type scan; the sensitivity class of object o is less than or equal to class2. 5. implementation 5.1. system architecture openstack is a robust open-source iaas software for building public, private, community or hybrid clouds. opensteck is adopted by many cloud providers such as rackspace, ibm and redhat. openstack contains the following components: nova, swift, glance, cinder, keystone, and horizon. each component acts as a service which communicates with other services via message queues. keystone provides authentication and authorization for all openstack services. in our work, we focus on the swift object storage. swift is a multitenant, highly scalable and durable software defined storage system designed to store files, videos, virtual machine snapshots and other unstructured data [7]. it allows building, operating, monitoring, and managing distributed object storage systems that can scale up to millions of users. the account server is responsible for listings of containers, while container server is responsible for listings of objects. a container is a mechanism that stores data objects. an account might have many containers, whereas a container name is unique. a user represents the entity that can perform actions on the object in the account. each user has its own account and is associated to a single tenant. swift uses the access control lists (acl) to manage the access permissions. in fact, the acl model defines static access rules. it is not suitable for collaborative environment. in this paper, we implemented the c-abac model on the swift storage 8 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 c-abac: an abac based model for collaboration in multi-tenant environment figure 7. example: c-abac authorizations component. this component acts as a service that communicates with other components (nova volume, nova compute, nova network, glance and keystone) via message queues. these components are loosely coupled. keystone is the identity service used by openstack for authentication and authorization. it provides a token signed by each user’s private key. let us consider the telemedicine scenario where the school hospital (sh), the emergency medical services (ems), and the home hospital (hh) are three collaborating organizations. these organizations share a common private cloud openstack. we consider that these organizations use the swift component for the storage service. in this use case, each organization is assigned to a swift account. (e.g. the accounts acc_sh, acc_ems and acc_hh represent the organizations sh, ems and hh respectively). this cloud provides a service of collaborative sessions for these organisations. this service allows a group of users, from different tenants, to collaborate in order to observe and treat a patient admitted in the home hospital (hh) emergency. in this example, we have a collaborative session cs1 of a telemedicine type. during a collaborative session, users may intervene dynamically without a prior knowledge of which user will access which object. in order to support c-abac model in the openstack swift environment and overcome the limitations of swift acl, we propose to extend the swift component by implementing a new c-abac module (figure 8). the c-abac module is composed of five components: figure 8. the system architecture user attributes, object attributes, task attributes, authorizations and the policy decision component. in the following, we describe each of these components: 9 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 m. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz • user attributes: the security administrator defines the user attributes as a function that takes user as input and returns a value from the attribute’s range. (user1 : attr1 : val1) means that for the user user1 the value of the attribute attr1 is val1. for example, a user attribute function such as role ∈ uat t maps user1 ∈ u to a value neurologist. furthermore, the cloud administrator defines the attribute function uowner to specify the user owner. for instance (user1 : uowner : acc_sh) means that the user user1 is owned by the account acc_sh. finally, the administrator defines the attribute function joincs to specify which users could join the collaborative sessions. the value of this attribute is either true or f alse. (user1 : joincs : true) means that the user user1 could participate in the collaboration. • object attributes: the tenant administrator assigns the object attributes as a function that takes object as input and returns a value from the attribute’s range. (obj1 : attr1 : val1) means that for the object obj1 the value of the attribute attr1 is val1. furthermore, the cloud administrator defines the attribute function oowner to specify the object owner. for instance (mr1 : uowner : acc_hh) means that the object mr1 is owned by the account acc_hh. finally, the administrator defines the attribute function sharedcs to specify which objects could be shared in the collaborative session. for example, (p er_inf o1 : sharedcs : f alse) means that the object p er_inf o1 (personal information) could not be shared in the collaborative session. • task attributes : the administrator assigns the task attributes as a function that takes task instance as input and returns a value from the attribute’s range. (ti1 : attr1 : val1) means that for the task instance ti1 the value of the attribute attr1 is val1. furthermore, the cloud administrator defines the attribute function t owner to specify the task owner. for instance (ti1 : t owner : acc_ems) means that the task instance ti is performed by the account acc_ems. • compound attributes: the administrator of the local tenant defines the new attributes assigneduser and usedobject with a confidential and an autonomy way. these compound attributes are specified here as follows: usedobject|scan |w rite|hh : −o : objectt ype : scan ∧o : sensitivity : class0|class1|class2, which means that this attribute is true if only if: (1) the object o of the type scan; the sensitivity class of object o is less than or equal to class2. • authorizations: the administrator specifies the authorizations policy. in our scenario, we consider that each tenant defines its policy rules. note that at this level, we suppose that the security policy rules are valid and conflict-free. the policy rules are specified here as follows: write − ti : task : interpret_scan∧ ti : workf low : tenemo ∧ ti : previoustask : true ∧ ti : csession : cs1 ∧u : membercs : cs1 ∧o : sharedcs : cs1 ∧u : assigneduser|t 5|sh : t rue ∧o : usedobject|scan |w rite|hh : t rue, which means that for the action write’, this authorization is valid if only if : (1) the instance ti is instancied of the task interpret_scan; (2) the task instance ti belongs to the workflow tenemo; (3) the previous task instances of the ti are accomplished; (4) there is a collaborative session in which the task runs; (5) the user u is member of the collaborative session cs; (6) the object o is shared in the session cs; (7) the tenant sh authorizes his user u to perform the task t 5; (8) the tenant hh shares the object o of the type scan with others collaborative tenants for the action w rite. • policy decision: this component is responsible for evaluating the access request to the resources in the collaborative session based on the collected attributes values and authorizations. when a user sends a request to access a resource stored in the cloud swift, the policy decision component evaluates this request according to the policy rules in order to decide whether the user is authorized to access this resource or not. 5.2. enforcement model a general authorization process for swift component with c-abac module is illustrated in figure 9. when the user user1 attempts to access the resource mr1 stored in the swift. first, (1) the user requests keystone to get his/her token. (2) keystone generates a token and sends it to the user. (3) the user sends a request to abac module by using his/her token to access the resource mr1. the policy decision component receives this request to evaluate it. (4) during the evaluation process, the policy decision component requests the components: user attributes, object attributes and task attributes (5) to receive user1’s attributes, mr1’s attributes and the attributes related to the collaborative session wherein this user is member. (6) the policy decision component requests the authorizations component and (7) receives all the policy rules stored in this component. these attributes and 10 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 c-abac: an abac based model for collaboration in multi-tenant environment figure 9. the enforcement model policy rules will be used by the policy decision to evaluate access request in order to decide whether the user is authorized to access this resource or not. (8) the policy decision will execute an acl command to assign the authorization decision (permit or deny) to the user in the swift environment. (9) the policy decision component executes a swift api command in the swift component using user1’s token in order to send the user1’s access request to swift. (10) user1 access to the resource mr1 if the authorization decision is permitted. 5.3. evaluation in this paper, we implement the abac and c-abac on the swift storage component of openstack. our experiments were run on a virtual machine with the following characteristics (memory 1024mb, 2 cores cpu, hard disk 30gb). we consider the download time of a swift object using abac model and cabac model. we observe that the performance of enforcing our approach depends on many factors, such as numbers of rules, number of attributes and number of concurrent collaborative sessions. in our analysis, we have used a synthetic dataset that contains up to 2000 rules, 2500 attributes and 25 concurrent collaborative sessions. figure 10(a) shows that the average time to authorize the access to a swift object with abac model increases with 13.4% and 22.7% for policies of 400 and 2500 rules respectively using the c-abac model. the waiting time for getting a policy decision becomes larger when there are too many authorizations to be collected. we acknowledge that our implementation works well for a large number of authorizations. furthermore, we compute the running time for access/deny decisions to a swift object using abac and c-abac model for 400 rules and for 500 to 2500 attributes. figure 10(b) shows that the average time for download of a swift resource with abac model increases with 7.6% and 19.6% for 500 and 2500 user attributes assignments using c-abac module. we acknowledge that our implementation works well for a large number of authorizations. finally, we compute the running time for access/deny decisions to a swift object using abac and c-abac model for 400 rules, 500 attributes and number of concurrent collaborative sessions with 10 to 50 active ones. figure 10(c) shows that the average time for access/deny decisions to swift resources using abac model increases with 20.1% and 34.7% for 10 and 50 concurrent collaborative sessions respectively using the abac module. we observe that our implementation works well for a medium number of active concurrent collaborative sessions. the overhead reaches 34.7% in an unusual situations where there are 50 concurrent parallel collaborative sessions. 6. conclusion in this paper, we present a novel abac based access control model called (c-abac). c-abac enables to ensure access control in collaboration between tenants in the cloud. c-abac allows the collaborating tenants to specify a global policy in a specific central point. it supports multiple concepts such as: task and workflow. the suggested model ensures the autonomy of tenant and preserves the confidentiality of each tenant object. finally, an architecture that integrates c-abac in the storage level of the cloud platform openstack has been described. the implementation results have shown that the suggested approach has a very limited overhead. 11 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 m. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz figure 10. running time overhead for access/deny decisions references [1] p. mell and t. grance. the nist definition of cloud computing. nist special publication 800145 (draft). retrieved september 10, 2011, from http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/800-145/draftsp-800-145-cloud-definition.pdf. 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[8] y. zhang, r. krishnan, r. sandhu. secure information and resource sharing in cloud. codaspy, pp. 131-133, 2015. [9] jin, x., krishnan, r., sandhu. a unified attribute-based access control model covering dac, mac and rbac. dbsec 12, pp. 41-55 (2012). [10] e. yuan, and j. tong. attributed based access control (abac) for web services. icws ieee computer society, pp. 561-569. 2005. [11] n. pustchi, r. sandhu. mt-abac: a multi-tenant attribute-based access control model with tenant trust. nss. pp. 206-220. 2015. [12] r. thomas. tmac: a primitive for applying rbac in collaborative environment. 2nd acm, workshop on rbac, pp. 13-19, fairfax, virginia, usa, november 1997. [13] r. thomas and r. sandhu. task-based authorization controls (tbac): a family of models for active and enterprise-oriented authorization management. 11th ifip workingconference on database security, lake tahoe, california, usa, 1997. [14] o.h. sejong, s.park. task-role-based access control model. in: information systems, 28(6): pp. 533-562, 2003. [15] x. jin, r. krishnan, r. sandhu. role and attribute based collaborative administration of intra-tenant cloud iaas. collaboratecom. pp. 261-274. 2014. [16] p. biswas, f. patwa, r. sandhu. content level access control for openstack swift storage. codaspy. 123-126. 2015. [17] p. biswas, r. sandhu, r. krishnan. an attribute based protection model for json documents. in nss. 303-317, 2016. [18] d. lin, p. rao, e. bertino, n. li, j. lobo, policy decomposition for collaborative access control, sacmat 2008: 103-112. [19] a. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz. access control in a collaborative session in multi tenant environment. 11th international conference on information assurance and 12 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 c-abac: an abac based model for collaboration in multi-tenant environment security, marrakech, december 2015. [20] b. tang, r. sandhu, q. li. multi-tenancy authorization models for collaborative cloud services. in ieee international conference on collaboration technologies and systems, 2013. [21] m. a. madani, m. erradi, y. benkaouz. a collaborative task role based access control model. journal of information assurance and security, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 348-358, 2016. 13 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 02 2018 06 2018 | volume 2 | issue 8 | e3 1 introduction 2 background 3 related work 4 c-abac: the collaboration abac model 4.1 a collaborative tenant 4.2 a business process 4.3 assignuser function 4.4 usedobject function 4.5 a collaboration attributes based access control: c-abac model 4.6 example: c-abac authorizations 5 implementation 5.1 system architecture 5.2 enforcement model 5.3 evaluation 6 conclusion towards strategies to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers 1 towards strategies to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers marta campos ferreira1,2,*, catarina ferreira1 and teresa galvão dias1,2 1faculty of engineering, university of porto, rua dr. roberto frias, 4200-465 porto, portugal 2inesc-tec, faculty of engineering, university of porto, rua dr. roberto frias, 4200-465 porto, portugal abstract introduction: when compared to traditional ticketing systems, mobile ticketing has several advantages, allowing ubiquitous and remote access to payments, avoiding queues and replacing notes and coins. it also allows service providers to reduce their costs and achieve operational and productivity gains. however, while some cities have implemented mobile ticketing solutions on their public transport network, the adoption of such services appears to have limited success. the causes that lead to such a low rate of use of the service are still unknown. objectives: this paper presents an in-depth study of the reasons that lead mobile ticketing customers to adopt or abandon this type of service and establishes a series of strategies to attract and retain customers. methods: it uses the city of porto, portugal, as an illustrative example, where a mobile ticketing solution, called anda, was launched. customer complaints related to 6 months of using anda were analysed and usability tests were carried out with real customers in the context of use. results: this analysis allowed to identify a series of factors that lead people to adopt or abandon this type of services. then, a series of strategies were defined and identified that allow to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers during the various stages of the mobile ticketing lifecycle: user onboarding, user engagement, user retention and user reinstall. for each of the stages of this life cycle, the main concerns to be considered were also listed, a series of tactics were defined to reverse the abandonment trend and a series of kpis were specified to measure the efficiency of the strategies. conclusion: this paper fills an important research gap in the literature, being very useful in shaping future strategies for successful mobile ticketing solutions. keywords: mobile ticketing, urban passenger transport, customer loyalty, customer churn. received on 31 march 2021, accepted on 08 april 2021, published on 09 april 2021 copyright © 2021 marta campos ferreira et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.9-4-2021.169182 1. introduction as the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the adoption of technology is one of the most influential factors in human progress. immediate access to the internet or possession of a smartphone is now taken for granted in many advanced economies. it permeates commerce, social interactions, politics, culture and everyday life [1]. in addition, while high-income economies continue to use more *corresponding author. email: mferreira@fe.up.pt internet and have more high-tech devices, in recent years, there has been a tendency for emerging countries to follow and copy these behaviors. these patterns are now global, regardless of how fast they grow in each type of economy. in 2018, more than 3.5 billion people, 47% of the world's population, were connected to the mobile internet [2]. internet access and innovative services facilitate access to modern public health services, free education services and financial services, including mobile payments. thus, the mobile phone has become a fundamental gateway to the digital economy. the general adoption of mobile devices to eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ marta campos ferreira, catarina ferreira and teresa galvão dias 2 pay for goods and services is a widespread reality [3][4][5]. mobile payments are designed to provide users with a secure, convenient, consistent, efficient and reliable payment experience [6]. however, security and privacy issues, as well as the interaction and reliability of the service, can be some of the concerns that users share [7]. mobile payments can be applied to various sectors, such as public transport. there, mobile payment comprises prepaid options where mobile phones act as a wallet and ticketing itself where passengers buy and authenticate tickets on their mobile phones. the last resort is only possible due to a service based on emerging technology called mobile ticketing. as with mobile payment services, mobile ticketing is a process in which customers can order, pay, obtain and validate tickets only on mobile devices and without requiring a physical ticket. a mobile ticket contains a single ticket check, varying according to the technology used. while some mobile ticketing systems require validation via sms text [8], a qr or barcode [9], others require near field communication (nfc) [10]. mobile ticketing services solutions take advantage of wireless communication and thus aim to free customers from difficult purchasing decisions, allowing easier access to other services. the convenience of this technology makes it fully adequate to deal with the problems of urban congestion and stress in metropolitan areas. as public transport improves passenger mobility, by means that are safe and of high quality, it can be seen as the necessary solution for urban sustainability. however, the complexity of the transport networks and the lack of continuous options reduce the attractiveness of the sector. long waiting times in the queues to purchase and validate tickets make people abandon this solution and choose to use their own vehicle. mobile ticketing in the public transport sector can offer an innovative, ubiquitous and engaging service [11]. although some cities have implemented mobile ticketing solutions on their public transport network, the adoption of such services appears to have limited success [12]. the causes that lead to such a low rate of use of the service are unknown. however, researchers claim that churn factors are somehow related to the acquisition phase or the user experience [13]. others claim that usage rates are still low because mobile payments require customers to change their behavior to deeply entrenched payment habits [14]. in an attempt to understand the phenomenon, the authors [14] studied the failure of three cases of mobile payment in switzerland: the m-maestro project, the european initiative compliant with visa, and mobile payments by postfinance. postfinance initiative, for instance, failed to provide additional value to customers and local merchants. they faced significant difficulties in finding a workable balance between interoperability and the ease of use for customers, resulting in a clumsy solution that suited the physical environment and the behaviors associated with payments at local stores. at the end of the study, the authors acknowledge that more research is needed to formulate a more complete structure, based on the richest process data from the mobile payment diffusion trajectories. on the other hand, despite recognizing that, despite the growing number of mobile payment applications, very few solutions have been successful, [15] selected some of those few successful platforms to study the success factors. the authors conclude that the success of mobile payment platforms lies in the platform’s ability to balance the reach (number of participants) and the range (features and functionality) of the platform. in the city of porto, portugal, a mobile ticketing application, called anda was deployed in june 2018 [16]. an analysis of the level of use of the service allowed us to conclude that there are many customers who have never used the application, although they have downloaded it, and others who, despite having already used it, preferred to give up the application and continue to use the traditional ticketing system. this reality occurs with a series of similar mobile ticketing applications on the market and the literature fails in explaining this phenomenon. therefore, this paper aims to identify and analyze the customer adoption and churn factors of mobile ticketing services and to propose strategies for customer acquisition and retention. this work is based on an in-depth analysis of the case of porto, portugal. half a year of complaints and usage data for anda were analyzed. these are data on the interaction between users and customer support made by phone, email and social networks in addition to data on the history of using the app of those who complain. additionally, usability tests were carried out on the anda application, with real users in the context of use. thus, it is possible to establish the causal relationship between all the extracted data and then to identify the reasons for the adoption and the churn factors. based on this, the life cycle of a mobile ticket customer can be defined from customer onboarding to customer acquisition, customer retention and customer reengagement. for each of those stages, the critical success factors are identified and a set of useful strategies is set to attract and delight customers. in the next sections the paper methodology is described, followed by the results of the analysis of complaints and user validation data. the discussion of the results is presented together with a proposal of service improvement in each of its stages. the final section presents the conclusions. 2. methodology this paper aims to identify customer adoption and churn factors of mobile ticketing services and define customer capture and retention strategies. it uses the city of porto, portugal, as an illustrative example, and follows complementary methodological approaches such as the analysis of complaints and suggestions from customers and usability tests to the application of mobile payments. each of these approaches is detailed below, after a brief overview of public transport in the metropolitan area of porto eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 towards strategies to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers 3 2.1. public transport in the metropolitan area of porto this is the body text with no indent. this is the body text with no indent. this is the body text with no indent. metropolitan area of porto (amp) is composed of seventeen municipalities in an area of 2.040 km2 and has a population of about 1.7 million inhabitants. the public transport system consists of three subsystems: buses, light subways and suburban trains. the three are all integrated into a multimodal public transport ticketing system, called andante. this system was originally designed for the use of a smart card with contactless rfid technology. passengers can load the andante card with occasional trips or with a monthly pass, depending on the number of trips they intend to take during the month. it is an open system, in which the passenger must validate the card at the beginning of a trip and whenever he changes vehicles, touching the travel card in the ticket reader. amp is divided into 124 geographic travel zones and the journey fare depends on the number of zones crossed during a trip. the greater the number of zones travelled, the more expensive the ticket is. andante is also a time-based system because passengers can change their mode of transport as many times as they want during a certain period, but when the time is up, the ticket will no longer be useful. the complexity of the andante system makes it more difficult for passengers to become familiar with the location of zone boundaries and to understand how the crossing system works and what type of tickets they should buy for a given trip. it is in this context that the anda mobile application emerges, whose main purpose is to facilitate access to public transport services. anda is based on a check-in/be-out scheme, requiring an intentional user action when entering the vehicle (tapping the mobile phone on the ticket reader) and the alight station is automatically detected by the system, as well as intermediary stations along the trip. the mobile phone interact with ble beacons installed in metro and train stations and inside buses, through bluetooth connection, to locate the customer along the transport network [16]. the price to be paid by the customer is calculated through a fare optimization algorithm, which minimizes the cost for the passenger, freeing them from difficult purchasing decisions [17]. anda was launched in june 2018, having been widely publicized in the media and accompanied by a massive communication plan. the objective was not only to disseminate the new service, but also to explain how it works. it involved news in tv channels, newspapers and social networks, placing outdoors and stands at stations, decorate vehicles, distribute flyers and informational leaflets, and having promoters presenting the service and helping customers. 2.2. customer complaints and suggestions analysis in order to have a better understanding of how to capture and retain customers, it is crucial to first assess and then become fully informed about the behavior of current users. by identifying usage patterns, as well as their trend, it is easier to see the indicators of customers who are about to churn. customer feedback is a valuable tool to understand how the service has been communicated to current and potential users. complaints analysis allows to understand how users perceive the application and what are their expectations and needs about it. this makes it easier to recognize the vital areas for improving communication with the customer and, therefore, improving the service as well. since its complete implementation, customers using the anda application interact daily with the customer service, through several channels, such as telephone, e-mail, facebook, google play and physical stores. this interaction can serve several purposes, such as asking questions, reporting errors, or making suggestions for improvement [18]. the information from the various channels is collected on a single platform, to be further processed and analyzed. the object of this study is the complaints received by the intermodal transports of porto (tip) during 6 months of using anda from september 2019 to february 2020. the choice of this time interval is related to the fact that it is a normal period of use, only with regular updates of the application, but without major changes that would imply a greater influx of complaints. the analysis included three main aspects: complaints, complainants and the effects of complaints on the use of anda. firstly, the data on complaints includes the date on which the statements were made, the reasons for which they were made, the responsible carriers and the means of communication through which they were made. second, with regard to claimants, information is collected about their social profile whether they belong to a certain age group or benefit from help due to their social status and the type of ticket they use most. information was also collected on the distribution of claimants in the different months. finally, to assess the impact of complaints on usage, the application's validation history data is considered. to perform a descriptive analysis of the data gathered, ms excel and rapid miner software were used. 2.3. usability testing usability testing is a tool designed to determine the extent to which an interface facilitates a user's ability to complete routine tasks [19]. n this case, the main objective was to understand how intuitive the application is for new users who have never had contact with it and, at the same time, to identify problems in the daily interaction of regular users. the test results were expected to generate relevant and valuable suggestions to make the app clearer and accessible to everyone using public transport. it was also expected that the test would result in a list of usability problems that lead consumers to abandon this type of service. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 marta campos ferreira, catarina ferreira and teresa galvão dias 4 the anda usability tests were carried out with eight participants (according to [20], between 5 and 8 users are sufficient to achieve meaningful results). of the chosen customers, four were regular users of anda for over a year and four were people who had never contacted the application. of the regular users, two people from the selected ones were users who presented complaints to the system during the period under analysis. the test administered to users was divided into three parts. the first part consisted of a pre-test questionnaire to characterize the participants. the objective was to collect demographic information and information on the level of experience with the andante and anda system. the second part consisted of asking users to perform 16 tasks in the application. they were asked to think and speak aloud while performing each task, in order to record their experience. during the execution of the task, the time they took to complete was measured. in the end, participants were asked to rate the task in terms of difficulty and usefulness on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 is very easy and useless, and 4 very difficult and very useful. choosing a scale with an even number of options has to do with avoiding neutral responses. the third part consisted of a post-test interview with focused questions and open answers. the objective was to assess the general perception of users in relation to the application and its usability. questions were asked about the features they liked the most and the ones they liked the least. likewise, suggestions were made for improvements and strategies that would have an effect on the acquisition of new users. a question was also asked about the security of the app and whether they would suggest the app to someone who doesn't know it. as the purpose of the test was to assess problems that could arise during normal use of the application, the test was carried out in context. it was carried out with each participant individually. that is, only the user and the tester were presented so that there was no external influence on the participants' behavior. for each participant, a trip was made, whose initial and final stops were chosen by them. the means of transport used was also chosen by users. the tester was responsible for presenting the application to users, explaining the purpose of the test and how it would be performed, reading the tasks and questions on the test form, asking for permission to record audio and video, writing the responses and comments of the participants, timing the completion of each task and taking notes on the behavior observed throughout the test. in addition, in the final part of the test, the tester was responsible for interviewing each user in order to collect their opinion, highlights and insights about the application. 3. results this section presents the results of the analysis performed, with regard to the analysis of complaints and suggestions and to the usability tests. 3.1. customer complaints and suggestion analysis this section starts by presenting the data of the complaints, followed by the presentation of complainers’ characterization. finally, the conclusions resulting from the crossing of data from the history of usage of anda app and the complaints data are presented. the complaints during the period under review, the total number of complaints received by anda app is 1223. of these, only 68% (832 complaints) were submitted by different users, which means that 32% of users completed at least more than once. so far, most of these records (95.5%) are resolved and closed, but those that are still open require action by third parties for example, external technical teams. the problems that can arise in the use of anda are several and can be categorized by the reasons that caused them. the main reasons are related to the validation of the trip, login and registration in the app, the correct filling of the trips, the consultation of personal data, the associated tariff and the disregard of intermediate stops. fig. 1 shows the distribution of the main reasons for complaints. in addition, there are other reasons that can lead to a complaint beacons, payment methods, questions, enrollment, data changes, suggestions for improvement, inspection and account deletion but the total number of records for these reasons is not relevant to considered in this study. porto's intermodal transport consists of 19 public transport operators and anda can be used in all of them. in addition, it is important to mention that 76.3% of complaints are not related to the trip itself and to the operators, but to issues related to the application or billing. complaints to carriers are 23.7% of the total. anda's complaints can be submitted by the most diverse means of communication, but two of them stand out for their great use: the application's crash report (64%) and email (32.5%). among the rest are links (3%), the official facebook page (0.4%) and the google play store (0.2%). figure 1. distribution of complaints by reason eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 towards strategies to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers 5 the complainers the total number of anda users from september 2019 to february 2020 is 5759 and 14% of them are complainers of the service. usage data allows us to know that, on average, about 3,103 people use the app to travel on porto's transport services per month. likewise, it is known that about 203 complaints are filed per month. in fig.2. it appears that, over the period studied, the relationship between the number of users and the total number of complaints received remained practically constant. based on the validation data, it is known what types of tickets were purchased by the claimants. most people who complain purchase single tickets (69.9%), that is, for occasional trips. in addition, tip groups users by social profile according to their age group or social status. by analyzing these data, it can be seen that the majority of complainants belong to the “normal” social profile (49.1%) which means that they are adults who do not benefit from any type of discount. among the remaining profiles are people who have lower rates (social +) (44.9%), university students (3.6%), students under 18 (6.4%), and seniors over 65 (0.7%). the distribution of users by social profile also allows knowing that the users who most complain are the “normal” and “social +”. also, fig. 3 shows that in all groups, the number of complaints is higher than the number of complainers, which, once again, reaffirms that there are users complaining more than once. figure 2. number of complainer vs number of complaints, by social profile. the effects of the complaints finally, to understand the effect of complaints on the use of anda, it is necessary to cross the data of both – complaints and validations. by knowing the complainers, it is noticeable their influence on the use of the application. likewise, it is interesting to find out whether the use-complaint relationship is uni or bilateral. when categorizing by type of users, as seen in fig. 4a, it is possible to see that 78.7% of the complainers are people who use the app to make trips. however, 17.6% of app users complained without ever having used it 9.9% complained before using it and 7.7% complained without ever having used it. in addition, 3.7% of complainers submit their statement at the time of their first trip. to deepen this connection, it was also assessed the use of the app on trips after the last complaint. in fig. 4b it can be seen that the majority (79%) continued to use anda, but 21% did not do it again. 3.2. usability testing in carrying out the usability test, four people who use anda on their usual trips regular users and four people who had never been in contact with the app first-time users were selected. the choice of participants took into account some aspects that were relevant to be analyzed. demographically, people of both genders and all age groups were selected in order to get in what sense the existing problems can result from generational differences. participants with different degrees of knowledge of the intermodal andante system were also chosen. on the one hand, participants were selected who usually know and use this transport network and, on the other hand, participants who use public transport but with less regularity. all regular figure 1. number of users vs. number of complaints, per month a b figure 4. a. types of complainers; b. effect of the last complaint eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 marta campos ferreira, catarina ferreira and teresa galvão dias 6 users chosen are customers who have been using the app for at least a year. another aspect that was considered in the choice of the test participants concerns the complaints made to the application, during the period under analysis september 2019 to february 2020. from the regular users, some were chosen who presented complaints in that period and others who did not. the demographic information of the participants, as well as their level of knowledge of andante, and the complaints presented to anda are detailed in table 1 and table 2 respectively. table 1. test participants demographics . table 2. test participants knowledge of andante system first-time users regular users inexistent 0 0 little 1 0 reasonable 1 0 good 1 1 very good 1 3 through the performance of usability tests, the perception of a significant difference in the behaviour of regular users and first-time users was clear (see fig. 6 and fig. 7). while the experts are very comfortable navigating the app and accessing the various screens available, consumers who had never been in contact with anda felt6060 more lost and insecure during the test. behind this problem is the lack of guidance for users in the first interaction with the app. the need for a feature or screen that explains how to use the app makes the entire user experience based on a long and timeconsuming trial and error approach. the technical problems arising from the interaction with the app – be it the long activation time of payment methods, the inability to end the trip immediately, the difficulty in understanding whether the password has been changed, among other are concerns that must be addressed. the greater the number of usability problems that users encounter, the greater their dissatisfaction with the app will become and consequently, the greater the likelihood that they will churn the service. the fact that users feel that sending a crash report will not be effective is also a problem that must be avoided. complaints to the service aim to understand the problems that arise during the use of anda so that they can be resolved. when customers feel that their statements will not be analysed and that their opinion is not relevant to the service, they can abandon the app. finally, in addition to the problems already mentioned, users said that the lack of exposure to the app is the main cause of little use of anda. regular users have reported that they generally need to present and explain to others who travel with them that it is possible to travel on tip through a mobile ticket application. in this sense, they consider that the realization of advertising campaigns directed to different types of users students, families, the elderly, etc. it would be an asset. first-time users regular users complainers non-complainers age f m f m f m 18-29 2 1 0 0 0 1 30-44 0 0 1 0 0 0 45-59 1 0 0 1 0 0 60 or + 0 0 0 0 1 0 figure 5. perceived difficulty of tasks performed figure 6. perceived usefulness of tasks performed eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 towards strategies to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers 7 4. discussion the analysis of the complaints and usability tests opens the ground for several reflections and sets the path for the future development of the mobile ticketing services. in this sense, customer adoption and churn factors regarding mobile ticketing services are identified, as well as customer capture and retention strategies. 4.1. customer adoption and churn factors the analysis of complaints and usability tests made it possible to identify the factors that lead public transport customers to use mobile ticketing applications and the reasons that motivate the churn, which are presented below. adoption factors accessibility of the mobile applications: not only being able to travel, but also paying for a trip using just a smartphone, is seen as a major trend in the future. users consider it an advantage not to need the smartcard to travel and, instead, to be able to buy the ticket, validate it and even present it for inspection on the mobile phone. flexibility of the mobile applications: the fact that these applications are compatible with different transport operators and make it possible to travel on different means of transport be it buses, subways, trains, among other just using the mobile phone is extremely useful. ubiquity of the service: not having to go to a store or vending machines to purchase tickets is one of the main benefits of using these apps. being able to avoid the queues to buy tickets is extremely convenient for users. sustainability of the service: the fact that these applications are environmentally friendly and, unlike traditional travel methods, do not require physical cards paper or plastic is also a reason why users choose these applications. churn factors bad first-time user experience: the first contact with the application is essential. if at first users feel that the service provided does not meet their expectations, they will stop using it. recurrence of usability and technical problems: there are problems with mobile apps. however, if these problems have become recurring and have not been resolved in a timely manner, this is a reason for users to stop using the application. lack of response to customer feedback: following the usability problems that may arise, if users submit complaints to the service and, therefore, do not obtain a favourable response or resolution, it is possible that they will stop using the application. depreciation of customer value: customers of mobile ticket applications like to feel that using these applications has some advantage over traditional methods. when mobile ticketing customers feel that the application does not benefit them from traditional ticket customers, the first ones will stop using it. negative influence of lost customers: customers may abandon the service for a variety of reasons. if the reasons for abandonment have to do with the bad user experience, these lost users can communicate a wrong image of the application to current and potential customers, causing them to abandon the service as well. the lack of advertising campaigns: the lack of knowledge about the existence of mobile ticketing applications is another problem that must be addressed. the discriminatory factor for people who use this type of app in public transport compared to the majority who use traditional tickets is worrying. social pressure can lead users to abandon the service. the lack of mass and targeted advertising campaigns is at the root of the lack of consumer awareness. 4.2. customer capture and retention strategy after studying the effect of comparing the results of the analysis of complaints and usability tests, as well as the main factors of adoption and abandonment of mobile ticketing applications, it is essential to define a strategy to capture, acquire and retain new clients. in this sense, four fundamental stages were identified in the process of using this type of applications: user onboarding, user engagement, user retention and user reinstall. for each stage of the life cycle, the main aspects to be considered are identified according to the results obtained and a series of tactics are established to increase the value of the service for customers. the different segments of users, as well as the appropriate channels to reach them, are also considered in the proposal presented. user onboarding the data referring to users who complain without having ever used the app are indicators that their first interactions with the service are not meeting their expectations. for technical or usability reasons, some users do not initially find the type of experience they were looking for and give up on the application before actually using it. to counter this trend, table 3 lists a number of tactics that can be put into practice. regardless of the user segment, the application should present a welcome message on first use, encourage users to sign up emphasizing the benefits of the eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 marta campos ferreira, catarina ferreira and teresa galvão dias 8 service and display a brief demonstration of the application and its main features. table 3. strategy to improve user onboarding for different types of user segments. user segment tactics channels installed but not registered • welcome users on the app and introduce the main features of the app. • encourage the register in the first 24 hours. • incentivize registration with rewards on the app (cashback, ticket discount). • in-app notifications • push notifications registered but not activated • welcome app users after the register. incentivize them to complete the payment information. • stimulate users to make their first travel using the app, with rewards (cashback, ticket discount). • in-app notifications • push notifications • sms • email • reminders registered and activated • encourage greater use of the app with rewards (cashback, ticket discount). • in-app notifications • push notifications • sms • email • reminders user engagement once familiar with the service, users need to be converted and start using it consistently and frequently. the data collected shows that 9.9% of the complainants are people who complained before traveling with the app. in addition, 3.7% are users who complained shortly after using the app for the first time. if these values are not taken into account and if these users are not motivated to give the service a new chance, it is very likely that they will churn it. at this stage of the cycle, the service should encourage the consumer to perform actions on the app be it filling out payment information or taking a trip stimulating the commitment already established. notifications with special offers are also useful to promote constant use and encourage repeated interactions for example, trips of the same type or with similar routes. table 4 shows the different strategies to be targeted at different users at the engagement stage. table 4. strategy to improve user engagement for different types of user segments. user segment tactics channels onboarded but non-converted • urge users to make their first travel using the app – push different use cases at different times. • create custom campaigns offering rewards for first users (cashback or travel discount). • in-app notifications • push notifications first-time converted • confirm completion of first travel. thank the choice of service, up to 5 min after it finishes. • encourage users to keep using the app. • push notifications • sms • email repeat converted • encourage continuous use through targeted personalized campaigns based on usage patterns. • promote different services with rewards (cashback or travel discount). • in-app notifications • push notifications • sms • email users not completing actions (abandonment) • notify users 1 hour and 24 hours after they abandon a task. • push notifications • sms • email • reminders no activity • remind users that have no activity in the app in the last 30 days. • push notifications • sms • email user retention mobile ticketing applications services tend to have difficulty retaining users. a consistent and constant customer base is the main basis for the sustainable growth of any service. at this stage, the data on the number of complaints and the number of claimants for each social profile are noteworthy. while in the "normal" profile the number of complaints per claimant is approximately 3/2, in the rest the values increase by approximately two times. this information can become relevant as users dissatisfied with the service tend not only to abandon it, but to negatively influence potential new users. the more complaints a person sends, the greater their dissatisfaction with the service and the greater the likelihood of canceling it. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 towards strategies to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers 9 to optimize retention, users can be motivated to repeat the same interactions with the app in exchange for discounts on regular travel or reimbursement of the amount to be paid at the end of each month. careful and attentive analysis must be carried out to control the retention rates of current and potential users, as well as personalized promotional campaigns and reminder of available offers. table 5 shows some tactics to be implemented. table 5. strategy to improve user retention for different types of user segments. user segment tactics channels engaged but not loyal (hibernating) • communicate with the user and understand what’s their perception of the app. send messages to obtain an assessment of the service. • send customized campaigns with "we miss you” messages. • in-app notifications • push notifications • email engaged and loyal • ensure app rating and reviews. • reward loyalty with travel discounts or cashback. • in-app notifications • push notifications • email user reinstall the reasons for uninstalling a mobile application can be of the most varied types, from problems with interaction with the interface, inefficiency of features, low performance or disastrous user experience. at this stage, it is important to consider the data relating to the effect of the last complaint. in other words, 21% of claimants have stopped using anda since the last complaint. this aspect means that the reasons that motivated the complaint or the resolution obtained in the complaint became the reason for discontinuing the use of the app. thus, the likelihood of uninstalling the application increases the more time that has passed since the last time it was used. to recover inactive or discontinued customers, conducting an analysis of user behavior, as well as requesting feedback from former customers, can be useful to understand the points of friction between them and the application and possibly eliminate them. to recover lost users, targeted promotional offers can be put into action. table 6 presents some strategies to be used. 4. conclusion the success of mobile ticketing applications depends a lot on the service provider's ability to attract and retain customers. this article presents an in-depth study of the reasons that lead mobile ticketing customers to adopt or abandon this type of service and establishes a series of strategies to attract and retain customers. table 6. strategy to improve user reinstall for different types of user segments. user segment tactics channels converted but disengaged • run customized campaigns with the latest offers. • update users’ preferences. suggestion on discounts based on new preferred routes. • send reminding messages about the advantages of the service. • email churned • run personalized email survey seeking feedback to understand the reasons for app uninstall. • run “we miss you” or “check what your missing” campaigns, highlighting new promotions and cashback offers. • run “we’re just a click away” campaigns, following the suspension policy between 43rd to 50th days after uninstalling the app. • email re-acquired • run personalizes “welcome back” campaigns, highlighting new promotions and cashback offers. • in-app notifications • email this study uses the city of porto, portugal, as an illustrative example. in june 2018, a mobile ticketing application called anda was launched to the market. this application allows passengers to pay for the use of public transport in the metropolitan area of porto, without the need to know the fares in force or use physical cards. despite its ease of use, it appears that its use falls short of expectations, which is the case with many services of this kind around the world. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 marta campos ferreira, catarina ferreira and teresa galvão dias 10 thus, customer complaints related to 6 months of using anda were analyzed and usability tests were carried out with real customers in the context of use. this analysis allowed to identify a series of factors that lead people to adopt this type of services such as the accessibility and flexibility of mobile applications and the ubiquity and sustainability of the service. on the other hand, factors that underlie customer churn were identified, such as having a bad first-time user experience, recurrence of usability and technical problems, lack of response to customer feedback, depreciation of customer value, negative influence the lost customers and lack of advertising campaigns. taking into account these factors, a series of strategies were defined and identified that allow to capture and retain mobile ticketing customers, during the various stages of the process of using mobile ticketing applications: user onboarding, user engagement, user retention and user reinstall. for each of the stages of this life cycle, the main concerns to be considered were also listed, a series of tactics were defined to reverse the abandonment trend and a series of kpis were specified to measure the efficiency of the strategies. from the point of view of future work, the methodology used and the results generated open the door to a series of other investigations. applying this method to mobile ticketing applications in other cities or deepening the applicability of the strategy of attracting and retaining customers in a real context makes it possible to carry out other scientific work relevant to the areas of design and service management. acknowledgements. the authors thank transportes intermodais do porto for providing the data necessary for this work. references [1] poushter, j.: smartphone ownership and internet usage continues to climb in emerging economies. pew res. cent. february, (2016). 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[13] cheng, s.k.: exploring mobile ticketing in public transport an analysis of enablers for successful adoption in the netherlands expertise centre for e-ticketing in public transport. (2017). [14] ondrus, j., lyytinen, k., pigneur, y.: why mobile payments fail? towards a dynamic and multi-perspective explanation. proc. 42nd annu. hawaii int. conf. syst. sci. hicss. (2009). https://doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2009.510. [15] staykova, k.s., damsgaard, j.: adoption of mobile payment platforms: managing reach and range. j. theor. appl. electron. commer. res. 11, 65–84 (2016). https://doi.org/10.4067/s0718-18762016000300006. [16] ferreira, m.c., dias, t.g., falcão, j.: is bluetooth low energy feasible for mobile ticketing in urban passenger transport? transp. res. interdiscip. perspect. 5, 100120 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2020.100120. [17] ferreira, m.c., dias, t.g., cunha, j.f. e: codesign of a mobile ticketing service solution based on ble. j. traffic logist. eng. 7, 10–17 (2019). https://doi.org/10.18178/jtle.7.1.10-17. [18] duarte, s.-p., ferreira, m.c., sousa, j.p. de, sousa, j.f. de, galvão, t.: improving mobility services through customer participation. in: advances in mobility-as-a-service systems improving (2021). [19] dumas, j.s., redish, j.c.: a practical guide to usability testing. intellect books, exeter (1999). [20] dumas, j.s., fox, j.e.: usability testing: current practice and future directions. in: the human-computer interaction handbook (2007). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 04 2021 08 2021 | volume 5 | issue 15 | e5 accessibility of the mobile applications: flexibility of the mobile applications: ubiquity of the service: sustainability of the service: bad first-time user experience: recurrence of usability and technical problems: lack of response to customer feedback: depreciation of customer value: negative influence of lost customers: the lack of advertising campaigns: this is a title 1 cycling intellectualization in smart cities i.v. makarova, k.a. shubenkova* and a.d. boyko kazan federal university, pr-t syuyumbike, 10a, naberezhnye chelny, russia abstract intellectualization is the basis for managing smart cities. this involves infrastructure development and design of vehicles equipped with intelligent modules, which provide the control ability. along with it, the transition to “green”, safe and sustainable modes of transport, such as bicycle, should be realized. the widespread use of environmentally friendly bicycles is constrained by a number of reasons. the first is the absence of models designed for physically untrained people and the second is that almost half of all deaths on the world’s roads are among pedestrians and cyclists. we propose to solve these problems in two ways: development of an information system for bicycle infrastructure planning and modelling and creating control system of smart bike with adaptive electric drive that turns on when it’s necessary. functional requirements for the proposed control system, its algorithm and the conceptual scheme of interaction between system’s modules are presented in the article. keywords: smart city, intellectualization, control system, smart bike, sensors, controllers, internet of things, transport system copyright © makarova et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.20-12-2017.153498 1. introduction despite the increasing level of urban mobility worldwide, access to places, activities and services has become increasingly difficult. owing to urban sprawl – the horizontal, low-density growth of cities over vast areas – distances between functional destinations such as workplaces, schools, hospitals, administration offices, or shopping amenities have become longer, leading to a growing dependency on private motorized transport and other car-centered mobility. consequently, widespread congestion and traffic gridlock have now become the norm in many cities, impacting urban life through negative externalities such as pollution, noise stress, and accidents. thereby, the government has now realized the need for cities that can cope with the challenges of urban living and also be magnets for investment. this can be developed through environmental sustainable solutions combined with a full use of the possibilities, which are given by the digitalization of the society. this means enabling the technology to gather data, which can be used by the technology itself in order to adapt to the most sustainable *corresponding author. email:ksenia.shubenkova@gmail.com and smart behaviour. enabling the technology to communicate, to share the gathered data with people or other technologies, to borrow relevant data from elsewhere and to make the technology multifunctional – all of this provides solutions not only to one, but to multiple problems [1]. the smart city concept can be defined as a model of the city development, which creates a surplus of resources through the use of information and communication technologies combined with sustainable and environmentally friendly multiple solutions. it emphasizes the need to improve the level of mobility and connectedness through collaboration and open source knowledge on all levels of the society [2]. one of the main ways to create a smart city is smart transportation systems’ implementation, which is in line with the united nations sustainable development goals and the transition to a green economy. as far as transport starts to be one of the main sources to produce air pollution, emissions of greenhouse gases, noise as well as one of the main reasons of the consumption of nonrestorable resources, household inconveniences caused, for example, by the neighborhood with a highway, etc. [3], the number of adherents of transition to a green economy is growing. they eai endorsed transactions smart cities research article received on 12 august 2017; accepted on 12 november 2017; published on 20 december 2017 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ i. v. makarova, k. a. shubenkova and a. d. boyko 2 initiate the development of strategies and policy documents on sustainable development of the urban transportation systems. transition to a smart transport involves the development of appropriate infrastructure, which will ensure the rational management of transportation system, as well as the intellectualization of vehicles, which can provide a sustainable urban mobility. 2. ensuring sustainable mobility in smart cities 2.1. main ways to increase sustainability of the city transport system there are three main ways cities can innovate to make transport more sustainable without increasing journey times:  better land use planning.  making existing transport modes more efficient.  moving towards sustainable transport. part of measures to ensure the sustainability of transport can be planning for urban and suburban centres in accordance with development, providing for a mixed fleet of vehicles and reasonable growth. such principles of urban development will help to reduce dependence on private vehicles and to ensure widespread use of public and non-motorized transport for short trips and for regular commuting into the city from the suburbs [4]. the unep report [5] states that in order to achieve economic goals and objectives of sustainable transport development and integrated planning of its development and regulation system load, you need to switch to fuels with lower carbon content and to implement a more extensive electrification of transport. safe public transport systems are increasingly viewed as an important tool for safe increase of mobility of the population, especially in urban areas suffering from growing traffic congestion. in many cities with high income the policy of reducing the use of personal motor transport is particularly emphasized through investment in the development of public transport networks. [6]. according to the global status report on road safety 2015 [3], moving towards more sustainable modes of transport (such as cycling and public transport) has positive effects if associated road safety impacts have been well managed. these include increased physical activity, reduced emissions and noise levels, reduced congestion and more pleasant cities. moreover, measures to promote safe public transport and non-motorized means of transport are also in line with other global moves to fight obesity and reduce noncommunicable diseases (such as heart disease, diabetes) [7]. 2.2. benefits of using bicycles as a travel mode and examples of their implementation international experience shows that countries have a choice when it comes to the development of the pattern of motorization. rather than opting for a pattern of high use of private vehicles (as the one in the united states or australia), cities have the possibility of a more balanced approach (as in europe) or select what was labeled by uitp as the most efficient pattern (tokyo, amsterdam, hong kong, madrid). this pattern has the smallest role for private motorized vehicles in meeting demand for transport and the highest share of public transport, walking and biking [8]. considering the fact, that the world community has set an objective to reduce the levels of greenhouse gases (first of all carbon dioxide) by 50 % by 2050 [4], bicycles get an additional advantage, as they do not produce co2 emissions. furthermore, bicycling makes efficient use of roadway capacity and reduces congestion. the advantages of cycling include cheap infrastructure requirements and improvements in public health. bicycle pathways, lanes and parking require less space than their automobile counterparts. cycling has direct health benefits. it is an aerobic exercise that can minimize the risk of muscle and ligament injury, lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart disease) [9]. moreover, in urban areas, cycling can sometimes prove to be faster than other transport modes and also allows cyclists to avoid traffic jams. cycling caters for the mobility needs of considerable numbers of urban dwellers in developing country cities, especially in asia. problem of the environmental pollution is a major issue in china with its notoriously poor air quality in large cities. probably, this was the main reason of china’s bicycle development [10]. in 2014 lanzhou (northwest china) was praised for integration asia's second-largest bus rapid transit system with a bike share system (14,000 docks planned), bike parking, and greenways [11]. bike share system is also implemented in such cities as beijing, zhuzhou, shanghai, wuhan and hangzhou [12], where the popularity of this mode of transport is also provided by the widespread introduction of electric bicycles that help physically untrained people to overcome steep climbs and long distances, that’s why an increasing number of people choose non-motorized transport as a travel mode. in india, household bicycle ownership rates are high in cities such as delhi (38 per cent), ahmedabad (54 per cent) and chandigarh (63 per cent). this is reflected in the relatively higher modal share of cycling in these cities – delhi (12 per cent) and ahmedabad (14 per cent). in some asian countries with relatively higher incomes, however, the modal share of cycling is much lower, such as in singapore (1.6 per cent of work trips), 9 the republic of korea (1.2 per cent) 10 and hong kong sar (0.5 per cent) [7]. in african cities, cycling plays a comparatively limited role, accounting for less than 3 per cent of total trips in capital cities such as bamako (mali), dakar (senegal), harare (zimbabwe), nairobi (kenya) and niamey (niger). to promote bicycling in african city of dar-es-salaam nkurunziza et al. in their study [13] identified the bicycling policies. also, technology can be used not only to make better eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 cycling intellectualization in smart cities 3 cars but also better cycle paths, such as the proposed airconditioned bike path in qatar [14]. such cities of latin america as bogotá, medellín, león, buenos aries, rio de janeiro, são paulo, several chilean cities, etc. have included to their local and national strategies of transportation system’s development such projects as introduction of permanent bike paths and bike lanes, safe parking and transit stations [15]. rio de janeiro launched a bike-sharing program, it has now 600 bicycles and 200 km of bike routes. são paulo launched the establishment of bicycle lanes more than 120 km long. after the general street protests that occurred in brazil in june 2013, triggered by the high cost and low quality of public transport, the municipality of são paulo announced a further 310 km of bike routes, which are actually signaled lanes shared with cars [16]. in car dependent countries such as australia, canada and the usa the proportion of non-motorized trips up less than an eighth of daily trips. however, it is shown in [9] that investment in well-designed bicycle facilities (pathways, lanes and roadways) in the largest canadian cities (for example, calgary) has resulted in modest shifts in the commuting patterns to work in favor of cycling. bicycle ownership in western europe, especially in the netherlands, germany and denmark, is very high and if cycling in the us is mostly for recreational and fitness purposes, in europe it is a key means of movement for utilitarian purposes. today, in some european cities – such as amsterdam or copenhagen – two-thirds of all road users are cyclists. in other words, it is perfectly feasible for a majority in a metropolis to ride a bike and not travel by car. not everybody can ride a bike every day, however, which is why the bike should not be seen as a competitor, but rather as complementary to public transport. especially on the way to and from work, there is a lot of potential: in london around 2.5 percent of all commutes to work are by bike, in berlin 13 percent, in munich 15 percent and in copenhagen and amsterdam a whopping 36 and 37 percent respectively. such a high percentage of number of trips to work or education by bicycles in copenhagen is provided by the fact that the priority strategy of politicians is development of bicycles infrastructure as a way to create more friendly city living condition [17]. for example, there are currently several programmes in europe testing the introduction of cargo bikes, including the eu-funded project cyclelogistics. while the main focus of the project has been on urban freight and courier services, it has also included shop-by-bike campaigns. indeed, private cargo bike use is a reality in cities like copenhagen [14, 18]. the so-called “carbon footprint” of copenhagen is one of the smallest in the world (it is less than two tonnes per capita). but there is even more ambitious goal to become neutral on emissions has been set in its development strategy. to do this there have been set very strict targets in order to follow energy efficiency standards, “green” construction and “green” energy. the city government approved the project of equipping bicycles with special sensors that report on the level of pollution and traffic congestion in real time [19]. in portugal as inductor of desired modal shifts (changing behavior from using cars to other modes such as cycling) local administration of the city lagoa conducted an experiment. each employee of the city council travelling from home to work (and vice versa) and able to shift their usual mode of transport (car) to other options (walking, cycling with public bicycles, electric bicycles, car sharing) could be offered “money vouchers” (equivalent carbon credits to their reduced co2 emissions). these vouchers were redeemable in several public facilities and cultural events [20]. there is an effective bike sharing system in london, barcelona and paris. to use such a system you need to register and receive a personalized card. in barcelona, you can rent a bike and leave it at any convenient point of the city, because there are bicycle parkings all over the major streets. an extensive network of bicycle paths and cycling facilities and services are also contributes to the development of this system. essential infrastructure in a city with the size and traffic volume of moscow includes a strategy for secure parking lots and allowing for alternative ownership structures through a bike share system. moscow decided to introduce various parking facilities appropriate for short-term and longterm parking and to introduce a bike sharing system similar to schemes in london, barcelona and paris [21]. thus, in the last decade non-motorized transport has become a symbol of sustainable urban transport all over the world. 2.3. factors that prevent bicycle transport usage and the ways to increase its attractiveness cycling is a low-polluting and a low-cost transportation alternative and can be an important mean for getting to destinations that are not serviced by transit [22]. however, a considerable proportion of commuters choose to use other means of transport. even in the netherlands, which has a bicycle-friendly infrastructure and where cycling has a positive image, many people choose not to cycle in situations when cycling would be a highly appropriate transport mode. the impediments to bicycling include factors like long trip distances of commuters, harsh weather conditions, greater physical effort, the difficulty of carrying loads while cycling, infrastructure unavailability, a lack of health and environment consciousness among people, extreme traffic conditions that lead to the risk of an accident [23] and, outside urban areas, travelling more slowly than motorized transport. factors such as physical effort and speed also limit the distance that a cyclist can travel [24]. one of the most popular counter-argument about cycling are adverse climatic and natural conditions. however, it is a matter of attitude and priority for cycle paths when clearing snow. this is confirmed by the example of oulu, where a substantial proportion of people commute by bicycle, even when the temperature is below zero in deepest winter. this is ensured by 845 km of routes (4.3m per inhabitant), 98 % of which are maintained throughout winter because main route maintenance priorised over driveways. routes parallel to driveways are separated with a green lane, which also serves as snow build-up space. there are underpasses in most busy eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 i. v. makarova, k. a. shubenkova and a. d. boyko 4 crossings and you can reach every place by bike using cycling routes [25]. introducing bicycle lanes is not enough to make a city attuned to cyclists’ needs. thus, despite the investments in london’s cycling infrastructure of about 4 billion dollars over the last 10 years, the proportion of commuting by bicycle has increased from 1.2% to 2.5%. a similar situation is observed in the united states, where more than 15 billion dollars over the last 10 years were invested in development of cycling infrastructure and where commuting by bicycle has increased only from 0.3% to 0.6% during this period. in new york, despite the 300 miles built safe bicycle lanes (which are separated from vehicles and pedestrians) over the last 10 years, commuting by bicycle has increased from 0.6% to 1.1%. a radical change in modal split in favor to bicycle transport is often hampered by considerable distances from centers to the points of passengers’ attraction in metropolitan areas. the diagram below confirms this conclusion (fig. 1). the research of the ways to increase the sustainability of urban transportation system was based on the assumption that population will prefer the cycling as a mode of transport in a case if there is a considerable advantage of its using. figure 1. relation between the number of cycling commutes and the city size one of the most objective methods to study the transport preferences of the population is a questionnaire survey that allows predicting the most likely options of the transportation system development. survey was held in naberezhnye chelny – one of the most young russian cities. linear structure open type with the “classic” functional zoning was laid in the basis of planning organization of the city with a parallel location of industrial and residential areas, suburban recreation zones. in connection with these peculiarities of urban planning, in the case when the destination point is situated on the longitudinal avenue that is parallel to the point of departure) and there is the lack of the lateral routes of public transport in the city, the “last mile” problem exists in naberezhnye chelny [26]. the questionnaire to find out what transport modes are the most popular among population has been developed. 953 respondents, constituting the various target groups, took part in the current survey (table 1) [27]. results of the research show that one of the deterrent constraints of cycling development are psychological factors. they, in turn, may be due to various reasons: from the incertitude of ability to overcome the route due to the individual physical characteristics, to the lack of information about the route characteristics. therefore, the number of people who choose bicycle as a mode of transport can be increased by the expansion of nonmotorized model line-up and the integration of its infrastructure to the city road network system. what is more, cycling facilities and services should be developed. these steps, on the one hand, will help to enhance the attractiveness of bicycles for different groups of population and, on the other hand, will make roads safer and more secure particularly for non-motorized road users who are the most vulnerable. in simplified form, ways to increase the attractiveness of non-motorized transport are shown on the fig. 2. table 1. the results of the sampling survey of population indicator s tu d e n ts w o rk e rs r e ti re e o th e r c a te g o ry t o t a l number of respondents 624 299 16 14 953 number of trips to work or education by public transport 313 109 422 number of trips to work or education by bicycles 50 7 57 number of trips to work or education by cars 163 133 296 number of trips to work or education by foot 98 50 148 number of bikes in the personal property 313 86 2 6 407 the number of drivers who are ready to transfer to bicycles, if there are: bikeways 127 56 0 0 183 bicycles parkings 129 46 0 0 175 bike hire system 75 28 0 0 103 the possibility to take the bike in buses or trams 76 21 0 0 97 e-bikes 78 22 0 0 100 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 5 figure 2. measures to implement for moving towards non-motorized modes of transport thus, as the experience shows, one of the deterrent constraints of cycling development are psychological factors. they, in turn, may be due to various reasons: from the incertitude of ability to overcome the route due to the individual physical characteristics, to the lack of information about the route characteristics. the case of copenhagen proved that the attractiveness of cycling may be increased by the expansion of bicycles model line-up for different population groups and different use cases. in copenhagen you can rent not only conventional bikes, but also such models as [28]: (i) the velomobile. it protects against wind, rain and drizzle and it is best suited for long distances over 20 km and runs well on wide bicycle lanes outside the city and that several users would cycle more in the rain if they had a similar cycle. (ii) the cargobike. it is good to transport children and to carry things and products and it is best suited for short distances below 10 km. (iii) the recumbent. it is comfortable and good to ride on, especially in headwind and it lends itself well to long distances over 20 km. (iv) the electric-assist long john. it is good to carry cargo and children and it motivates to cycle more and drive less. it is fast, practical, fun and effortless to get around within the city. (v) the electric bicycle. it is fun and different to drive on. the electric slide is a good help, especially uphill and against wind. bicycle infrastructure planning should include the creation of bike parkings, bike sheds and bikeways as well as it should be taken into account the terrain and the structure of population, who want to use the bike to get around the city. despite a fast growing literature on the bike lanes design [29], the problem of terrain identification and topographic conditions modelling is still actual. the most common method of bicycle wayfinding is the shortest path method. as far as bicycle routing is not always possible to avoid hilly terrain, bike-lifts and electric drives creation can solve the problem of overcoming steep climbs. in contrast to the electric scooter or motorcycle, e-bike may be driven by pedals. at this time electric drive is off and accumulator is charging. e-bikes are generally different from ordinary bicycle because of three additional components presence such as an electric motor, a storage battery and a battery controller. despite of electric drive presence electric bike is used approximately the same as an ordinary bicycle and in most countries does not require the driving license or license plate presence. electric bicycle is suitable as a vehicle for a wide range of people with the different level of abilities, as it is easy to dose physical training. there is a number of disadvantages of electric bicycle that, makes it difficult to use. they are: significant weight (from 20 to 50 kg or more) and the corresponding inertia; lack of power reserve on the drive (rarely more than 25-50 km); long battery charging (usually at least 2-6 hours); short service life of lead-acid and lithium-ion storage batteries; the high cost of the final product and its use compared with an ordinary bicycle cost and use (from 2 to 10 times). one of the ways to ensure sustainable mobility in smart cities is the combination the possibilities of bicycles and electric transport. when using the electric transport, movement parameters are set by the motor and the cyclist determines the trajectory, e.g. performs control. bicycle movement is provided by the cyclist who sets the driving speed and the movement direction. this means that cyclist manages the process of cycling. but at the same time cycling parameters depend on environmental conditions (including the terrain characteristics), natural conditions, time of day and the physical condition of cyclist. in short, cycling parameters depend on everything that affects the possibility of bicycle movement. if we consider the “bicycle” system, its functioning is provided by the interaction of such subsystems as “external environment” – “infrastructure” – “bicycle” – “cyclist”. to ensure the traffic safety it is necessary to eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 cycling intellectualization in smart cities i. v. makarova, k. a. shubenkova and a. d. boyko 6 establish a control system that implements the interaction of subsystems for rational functioning of the system. the most common variant of the bicycle’s electric drive is the one that is based on commutatorless dc motor. the engine is build in the wheel instead of the hub. any of the wheels can be the motor-wheel, as well as the both on them at the same time. motor-wheel is often sold in assembled form. the power of the motor is determined for the fully loaded electric bicycles, with a maximum speed and without traction of the cyclist. the pattern of the forces acting on the bike when it moves is used for this purpose. thus, to ensure the maximum speed of movement up to 50 km/h, for a person weighing 70 kg the motor wheel of 1000w would be enough. to simplify installation, the wheel designed for the bicycle’s front fork weighing 6,5kg has been selected. this wheel can withstand loads of up to 135kg. an example of such bicycle with the dc motor can be the copenhagen wheel, that is a rear bicycle that has an in-built electric motor, battery, and in-built computer. 3. cycling intellectualization: our proposed solution 3.1. smart bike control system idea of the smart bike control realization electric bicycles are controlled by cycling computer (controller), which is supposed to: supply amperage from the battery to the electric motor in accordance with the user’s settings; show residual battery charge on the indicator; determine the rotation / stop of pedals; limit the maximum speed of the bicycle movement in order to save energy; keep constant speed (cruise control); charge the battery while braking. at the same time there is a variety of velosimulators that are belong to the group of cardiovascular machines which are equipped to control the physical condition of a user. at the same time the main indicator to diagnose critical state is a pulse rate. as far as the parameters of the bicycle motion are influenced by both condition of the cyclist and the parameters of the environment, the rational management should be based on monitoring, analysis and on taking into account all these factors. today there are two types of systems that are used to analyse bicycle’s characteristics and motion parameters. they are:  cycling computers – electronic devices to measure the speed and daily run of bicycle as well as such additional parameters as average speed, travel time, full speed, transmission (for multi-speed bikes), running time, temperature, atmosphere pressure, cadence (pedal rotation frequency), etc.  smart phones applications – applications that duplicate functionality of cycling computer, except the ability to monitor the transmission and cadence, use built-in phone sensors such as gps, accelerometer, barometer. figure 3. the elements that are included in the developed module to implement the smart bike control idea it is necessary to design a system that combines cycling computer, motorized wheel (it is the type of a driving wheel, complicated mechanism, that combines the wheel itself, electric motor, power gear and braking system) and velosimulator that control the physical condition of a user. sensors readings are transmitted into the controller for the further analysis. in critical cases (when the physical cyclist’s condition is bad) the system sends the request to turn on the electric drive and after receiving the confirmation from user electric drive control is transferred to the controller. thus, if to equip the bicycle with the universal module, which includes a pulse sensor, a controller and other components that are shown in fig. 3, and to manage it in accordance with the selected program installed on smartphone it will help to increase the attractiveness of cycling among untrained population. functional requirements for the proposed control system existed sensors and controllers can be used to implement the concept of smart bike. to determine the condition of the cyclist and monitoring travel times are required:  means of identification of a cyclist – to set his physical characteristics in the rest condition;  pulse sensor – to determine heart rate;  timer – to determine the travel time, setting training modes. to measure the parameters of the bicycle will be required:  gyroscope/accelerometer – to determine the position of the bicycle in the area;  speedometer – to determine the travel speed;  sensor of used chain sprockets;  gps sensor – for positioning, location and route setting. module which determines the weather conditions on the route and transmits it to a smart phone is required to determine the parameters of the environment. while designing bicycle control system it should be taken into account that the control system is completely autonomous, and the interference from the cyclist is impossible so it may be unsafe for the rider. that’s why the principle of feedback between control system and a person should be implemented with the help of notifications. in this eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 7 way, the possibility of accidents in electric drive of bicycle false alarm cases will be excluded. smart bike control system algorithm bicycle movement is provided by the cyclist who sets the driving speed and the movement direction. this means that cyclist manages the process of cycling. but at the same time cycling parameters depend on environmental conditions (including the terrain characteristics), natural conditions, time of day and the physical condition of cyclist. in short, cycling parameters depend on everything that affects the possibility of bicycle movement. if we consider the “bicycle” system, its functioning is provided by the interaction of such subsystems as “external environment” – “infrastructure” – “bicycle” – “cyclist”. to ensure the traffic safety it is necessary to establish a control system that implements the interaction of subsystems for rational functioning of the system. while designing bicycle control system the list of monitored events and the system’s responses was made (table 2). there is a smart bike control system’s data analysis algorithm in fig. 4. table 2. list of the bicycle control system’s events № event response 1 cyclist’s pulse > otp display of overcoming the training threshold, offer to turn on the electric drive 2 road gradient > 15° (uphill) display of the warning of an uphill, offer to turn on the electric drive 3 cyclist’s pulse > otp + 50 display of excessive overcoming the training threshold, offer to stop for the rest or to continue motion completely on electric drive 4 road gradient < – 15° (downhill) display of the warning of a downhill, electric drive's switching-off, accumulator charging 5 non-stop travelling during more than 1 hour display of the need to have a rest, offer to stop for the rest or to turn on the electric drive 6 non-stop travelling during more than 2 hours display of excessive overcoming the training threshold, offer to stop for the rest or to continue motion completely on electric drive 7 travel speed < 15km/h during 15 seconds display of the offer to turn on the electric drive figure 4. data analysis algorithm eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 cycling intellectualization in smart cities 8 table 3 shows one of the system’s operation scripts. if cyclist’s pulse value is higher than otp and the movement speed is less than average speed that is usual for this person, the screen displays an offer to turn on the electric drive. when the pulse value and the speed become normal, the electric drive switches off. to determine the cyclist’s optimal heart rate the formula (1) may be used: otp = (220 – a – prc) ∙ k + prc , (1) where otp – optimal training pulse; prc – pulse in the rest condition; a – cyclist’s age; k – coefficient which varies depending on the cyclist's preparation level: k = 0.6 for the freshman, k = 0.65 for a man of medium-level training, k = 0.7 for well-trained person. thus, the developed system analyses sensors’ readings and if the cyclist, bicycle and the environment parameters’ values are not normal, it warns the cyclist about the critical case, as well as offers problems’ solutions. implementation of the system and test results conceptual scheme of interaction between modules of the developed system is shown in fig. 5. primary data collection is realized using mpu6050 digital sensors and pulse sensor (plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for arduino). these sensors being located on the steering wheel, on the frame and wheels, as well as on cyclist, are connected to the arduino board via the i2c protocol. the motor-wheel mxus xf39-30h is controlled by arduino board. connection to the smartphone is realized via the bluetooth wireless connection. sensors’ readings are transmitted to the smartphone and then they come into the microsoft sql server database for storage and processing. the application for smartphones, which was developed with the help of android studio in java, allows to manage the sensor system according to the above-described algorithm and taking into account the state of the external environment as well as the cyclist itself. the prototype of the developed system was tested in laboratory conditions. the results of tests confirmed that even physically weak category of people can use a bike equipped with the developed system as a mode of transport. moreover, the widespread introduction of bicycles with such system allows to improve the road safety by avoiding accidents, which are related to fatigue or to a sharp deterioration of cyclists’ physical appearance. an example of the control realization scheme is shown in fig. 6. table 3. an example of the script «turn on the electric drive» step event action user’s condition data collecting (pulse, weight, height, location tracking, etc.) 1 the value of the pulse exceeded otp, movement speed is less than 15 km/h comparison of these indicators with the “reference” values for a particular cyclist. display of overcoming the training threshold. offer to turn on the electric drive. 2 heart rate decrease electric drive's switching-off, resetting the display of overcoming the training threshold figure 5. conceptual model of interaction between system’s modules eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 i. v. makarova, k. a. shubenkova and a. d. boyko 9 figure 6. control realization scheme the uniqueness of our smart bike because of the wheel is build in the bicycle’s front fork, it is still possible to use this system for multi-speed bicycles. high power offers to go up the hill keeping the same movement speed as well as to use such a system if the cyclist is carrying heavy cargo. since the system monitors user’s physical condition, the battery consumption is considerably reduced. the help by turning on the motor operates only in the case of cyclist fatigue. this allows increasing the maximum distance that untrained person can cycle with this system. the principal difference between our smart bike and copenhagen wheel (tab. 4) [30]:  a bicycle equipped with a copenhagen wheel in effect becomes a pedelec, i.e. a bicycle in which the electric motor assists the rider when necessary but only when they are actively pedalling.  in our smart bike engine helps the driver only in critical conditions. 3.2. software solution for the choice of the optimal route we offer a software solution for the choice of the optimal route. route rating should be made from the standpoint of safety, convenience and comfort of passage. to compare the routes the multi-criteria evaluation that considers particular qualities of cyclist and his preferences is used. the user can set the start and finish points, evaluation criteria and preferences. for the calculation it is also necessary to know such cyclist’s parameters as age of cyclist, height, weight and level of physical abilities. possible routes are evaluated on the base of this information. to do this a matrix of the given route options is constructed and then the overall routes’ performance indicators are calculated. the value of the route safety indicator is calculated with provision for correction factors that depend on the physical condition and characteristics of the cyclist. the user receives information about the best possible option. the total length of the route serves to bring the settings (fig. 7). to implement the proposed idea an application for smartphones integrated with gis system was developed (fig. 8). to verify a route the user enters or indicates on the map his location and the destination point. table 4. comparison of the copenhagen wheel and our smart bike p o w e r (w ) s p e e d , m a x ( k m / h ) d is ta n s , m a x (k m ) b a tt e ry c a p a c it y (v ) w h e e l d ia m e te r (i n .) w e ig h t, k g copenhagen wheel 350 32 50 48 26 6 our smart bike 1000 50 48 26 6,5 the command “find a path” displays a list of routes, sorted by the travel time. after that user can proceed to the route’s safety checking. after checking and calculating the overall safety performance indicators, the user can perform the route preview. when scaling up or selecting the particular area on the route map, routes are highlighted in different colours: the dangerous areas are marked in red and yellow. these are such areas as non-signalized pedestrian crossings, lack of bike lanes, etc. safe areas are marked in green. thus, the colour of the route depends on the total points of safety, from the green (that is the safest) to red (that is the most dangerous). the application provides the ability to assess the route by the user. he can leave a feedback and indicate problems on the route by attaching photos or text description. such feedbacks will help to respond quickly to problems. city authorities and road services, getting information on the state of the infrastructure, may take appropriate action to solve the identified problems. the application has been tested on the site of the road network of naberezhnye chelny city. for the correct work of the application it is necessary to administrate database with actual information (such as the state and characteristics of the road network, infrastructure parameters, etc.) that should be updated when changes occur. using the mobile application to find the safest route will not only plan the trip, but also will reduce the possibility of accidents. besides, such an application would be useful for the bicycle infrastructure development as it will help to assess how the appearance of new attraction points influence to the cyclists’ travel demand and which of the routes are need to be improved. moreover, data analysis on the accidents with cyclists will help to identify problem areas and inform cyclists about the need of increased attention to unsafe areas when they are planning trips. implementation of the intelligent active cyclist assistance systems, the design of correct and safe bicycle paths, their timely maintenance and repair will help to reduce accidents with cyclists. however, even when implementing intelligent system for the choice of the optimal route it is not always possible to avoid hilly terrain. bike-lifts and electric drives creation can solve the problem of overcoming steep climbs. in contrast to the electric scooter or motorcycle, e-bike may be driven by pedals. at this time, electric drive is off and accumulator is charging. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 cycling intellectualization in smart cities 10 figure 7. algorithm for the choice of the optimal route according to safety criteria a) b) c) figure 8. a) selecting the destination point; b) route options; c) route previewing smart bikes with adaptive electric drive that is turns on when it is necessary, can help even physically untrained people to overcome steep climbs and long distances without overload. accumulator charges from the household electric system. bicycles provide comparable speeds in urban environments and at the same time energy and economic costs of the one person relocation by bicycle are much more lower than by any other mode of transport, including public transport. 4. conclusions despite the obvious advantages of using bicycles for short distances there are still a lot of obstacles to the widespread use of the bicycles as an alternative travel mode. some of these problems can be solved by two ways: choosing the most secure cycle route’s option in developing bicycle infrastructure and creating smart bike with adaptive electric drive that is turns on when it is necessary. this cannot be realized without cycling intellectualization. we propose the concept of an information system for bicycle infrastructure planning and modeling and the concept of the smart bike control system developed to help the cyclist in situations when the values of his physical condition as well as parameters of environment are critical. to control the cyclist’s condition in real time is proposed to use a set of sensors, information transmitting means and the data processing program. successful development of smart city need complex solutions. implementation of the intelligent active cyclist assistance system, the software solution for the bicycle infrastructure planning, the smart bike control system, development of bicycles infrastructure and its integration into the public transport system will contribute to use of bicycle and public transport, as well as will help to increase the road safety, especially for the cyclists. this will create for citizens a comfortable urban environment, as well as obtain a synergistic effect that will contribute to the sustainable development of smart city. moreover, the experience of developed countries shows that this clean and efficient kind of transportation also contributes to the economy's development. besides, the health and longevity also benefits from cycling. as it is seen in denmark, the cycling benefits are seven times greater than the cost of accidents, in money value the total health impact is worth 230 million euro. references [1] green capacity, http://greencapacity.ru/ru/ information/smart-cities [2] smart cities preliminary report 2014, http://www.iso.org/iso/smart_cities_report-jtc1.pdf eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 i. v. makarova, k. a. shubenkova and a. d. boyko 11 [3] global status report on road safety 2015, http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_sa fety_status/2015/gsrrs2015_summary_en_final.pdf [4] share the road: investment in walking and cycling road infrastructure, http://www.unep.org/transport/ sharetheroad/pdf/str_globalreport2010.pdf [5] global “green” new deal. policy brief, http://www.unep.org/pdf/ggnd_final_report.pdf [6] makarova, i., shubenkova, 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(2017): ways to increase sustainibility of the transportation system. journal of applied engineering science 15(1): 89-98. [7] united nations human settlements programme (un-habitat) (2013) planning and design for sustainable urban mobility: global report on human settlements (stoodleigh: florence production ltd.), http://unhabitat.org/books/planning-and-design-forsustainable-urban-mobility-global-report-on-humansettlements-2013/ [8] medeiros, r. and duarte, f. (2014) policy to promote bicycle use or bicycle to promote politicians? bicycles in the imagery of urban mobility in brazil. urban, planning and transport research: an open access journal, 1(1): 28-39. [9] tsenkova, s. and mahalek, d. (2014) the impact of planning policies on bicycle-transit integration in calgary. urban, planning and transport research: an open access journal 2: 126-146. [10] appenzeller, m. (2014) cycling – past, present and future. in roethig, m., efimenko, d. [ed.], changing urban traffic and the role of bicycles: russian and international experiences. (moscow: friedrich-ebertstiftung), 11-18. [11] cities developing the world’s best sustainable transport systems, http://www.fastcoexist. com/3025399/4-cities-developing-the-worlds-bestsustainable-transport-systems [12] zhang, l., zhang, j., duan, z., et al. (2015) sustainable bike-sharing systems: characteristics and commonalities across cases in urban china. journal of cleaner production 97: 124-133. [13] nkurunziza, a., zuidgeest, m., maarseveen, m.v. (2012) identifying potential cycling market segments in dar-es-salaam, tanzania. habitat int. 36: 78-84. [14] hidalgo, d. and huizenga, c. (2013) implementation of sustainable urban transport in latin america. research in transportation economics 40: 66-77. [15] medeiros, r. and duarte, f. (2014) policy to promote bicycle use or bicycle to promote politicians? bicycles in the imagery of urban mobility in brazil. urban, planning and transport research: an open access journal, 1(1): 28-39. [16] bredal, f. (2014) the case of copenhagen. in roethig, m., efimenko, d. [ed.], changing urban traffic and the role of bicycles: russian and international experiences. (moscow: friedrich-ebertstiftung), 24-28. [17] lenz, b. and riehle, e. (2013) bikes for urban freight? experience in europe. transp. res. rec.: j. transp. res. board, 39–45. [18] wrighton, s. (2012) d3.6 campaign scheme shopby-bike. cyclelogistics – moving europe forward, http://one.cyclelogistics.eu/docs/114/d3_6_campaign _scheme_shop_by_bike_08042014_final.pdf [19] smart city, http://city-smart.ru/info/125.html [20] arsenio, e., martens, k. and di ciommo, f. (2016) sustainable urban mobility plans: bridging climate change and equity targets? research in transportation economics 55: 30-39. [21] mityaev, a. (2014) the case of moscow. in roethig, m., efimenko, d. [ed.], changing urban traffic and the role of bicycles: russian and int. experiences. (moscow: friedrich-ebert-stiftung), 72-79. [22] handy, s. and xing, y. (2011) factors correlated with bicycle commuting: a study in six small us cities. international journal of sustainable transportation 5: 91-110. [23] verma, m., rahul, t., reddy, p. et al. (2016) the factors influencing bicycling in the bangalore city. transportation research, part a, 89: 29-40. [24] heinen, e., wee, b. and maat, k. (2010) commuting by bicycle: an overview of the literature. transport reviews 30: 59-96. [25] tahkola, p. (2014) the case of oulu. in roethig, m., efimenko, d. [ed.], changing urban traffic and the role of bicycles: russian and int. experiences. (moscow: friedrich-ebert-stiftung), 29-43. [26] makarova, i., shubenkova, k. and gabsalikhova, l. (2017) analysis of the city transport system's development strategy design principles with account of risks and specific features of spatial development. transport problems 12(1): 125-138. [27] makarova, i., shubenkova, k., pashkevich, a. et al. (2017) smart-bike as one of the ways to ensure sustainable mobility in smart cities. lecture notes of the institute for computer sciences, social-informatics and telecommunications engineering, lnicst 205:187198. [28] bicycle innovation lab, http://www.bicycleinno vationlab.dk/activities/data-popular-bikes?show=lgg [29] makarova, i., khabibullin r., shubenkova, k. et al. (2016) ensuring sustainability of the city transportation system: problems and solutions (icsc). e3s web of conferences 6: 02004. [30] makarova, i., shubenkova, k., mavrin, v. et al. (2017) development of sustainable transport in smart cities. in proceedings of 3rd ieee int. forum on research and technologies for society and industry, rtsi 2017, modena, italy, september 2017, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber= 8065922 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 6 | e5 cycling intellectualization in smart cities http://city-smart.ru/info/125.html this is a title 1 issues of hazardous materials transport and possibilities of safety measures in the concept of smart cities vladimír adamec 1 , barbora schüllerová 1, * vojtěch adam 3 marek semela 1 1 vladimir adamec, brno university of technology, institute of forensic engineering, purkyňova 464/118, 612 00 brno, czech republic 2 vojtěch adam, mendel university in brno, department of chemistry and biochemistry, zemědělská 1, 613 00 brno, czech republic abstract the transportation of goods and supplies is an essential part of maintaining a functioning urban infrastructure. it also involves the transport of dangerous goods. this type of transportation may especially in the urban areas signify a high risk that may significantly damage the critical infrastructure of the city if there is an accident and leakage of dangerous chemical substances. the aim is, therefore, to minimize the risk and its consequences. the effective instruments are through the identification, analysis and assessment of these risks, searching for critical areas in cities and ensuring the application of prevention and safety measures. application of risk analysis methods helps to identify the expected and probable risks that can significantly influence the safety of the critical infrastructure. on the other hand, risk analysis methods which can also identify unknown risks with low probability of occurrence are currently being developed. the paper introduces a methodology of assessment of transport risk in cities focusing on reducing the impact of hazard in cities. the risk analysis methods and approaches are subsequently proposed as the initial stage of implementing the selected safety measures. this paper aims to introduce the issue of risks associated with transportation of hazardous substances in cities and to propose measures that are in accordance with the concept of smart cities, in order to contribute to the creation of a functional communication network, traffic flow in cities and increasing the security of critical infrastructure. keywords: road accident, hazardous substances, risk, human health, environment, impact, smart measure. received on 17 december 2015, accepted on 5 may 2016, published on 20 july 2016 copyright © 2016 v. adamec et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.18-7-2016.151628 * corresponding author. email:barbora.schullerovar@usi.vutbr.cz 1. introduction one of the aims of ensuring a functional critical infrastructure is its safety. however, it can be endangered by a range of risk factors (disruption to the traffic, to electricity supply etc.). one of the key components of infrastructure is traffic, whose disruption may have an impact on the functioning of the entire society. therefore, it is necessary to be aware of the threats and risks, their assessment, the proposal and implementation of the preventive measures leading to the minimization of these negative phenomena. on the other hand, these measures also help to enhance the ability to respond to undesirable events in time, before the research article eaeai endorsed transactions on smart cities eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ v. adamec, b. schüllerová, v. adam, m.semela 2 occurrence of serious damage. the paper introduces the issue of risks arising from traffic focusing on the transportation of hazardous objects in cities, the possibilities of their identification, and analyses including the proposal of measures in accordance with the concept of smart cities. currently, the issue of smart cities is the area that requires the attention of many developed countries and in particular their cities. with respect to the mission of smart cities the emphasis is on creating an environment that uses different flows and interactions in cities (finance, energy, materials, services, etc.). these processes are becoming smart by the strategic use of information and communication infrastructures and services in the process of the transparent land use planning and management, responsive to the social and economic needs [1]. implementing the concept of smart cities should thus be based on strategic planning. one of the current areas is intelligent, ecological, safe and integrated transport. there are currently many projects that are focused on, for example, reducing transport emissions that are in particular associated with the transit traffic in cities [3]. the most serious problem of transport is the contamination of air by the emissions, mainly due to their significant risk to human health, in particular in large cities with a high density of automobile traffic [5]. in recent years, the share of transport in air pollution has been significantly increasing, which leads to the increase in health risks associated with the exposure of humans to these pollutants [6, 7]. one of the completely new groups of substances flowing in this way into the environment is the platinum group of metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium and ruthenium less commonly iridium), which are part of automotive catalysts [8]. in addition to these negative phenomena, there may also be potential risks posed by the transportation of hazardous substances, which is not an isolated case in cities. this risk is only solved marginally within the smart cities. considering the possible risk it deserves more attention, especially in relation to the protection of critical infrastructure, population and the ability to respond faster and more effectively to the resulting undesirable event. 2. transport of hazardous substances hazardous chemical substances and mixtures are substances which exhibit one or more dangerous properties in terms of possible damage to people’s health or lives, to the environment etc. road transport of dangerous things, which also includes transport of hcs, is dealt with in the european agreement concerning the international carriage of dangerous goods by road (adr) [17]. transportation of hazardous substances comprises about 4 8% of the total goods transportation in eu countries. more than 50% of the contents transported are flammable liquids, mostly in the form of propellant fuel. the second most frequently transported substances are condensed gases under pressure. in some of the european countries the amount of the volume transported in 2013 increased by nearly 100% (estonia, luxemburg, great britain) [9]. the risk of the occurrence of a serious road accident is real in spite of the application of safety and preventive measures, which should aim to minimize this risk. one of the reasons is the increasing variety of the transported hazardous substances [10, 11]. hazardous chemicals are not only important for their negative properties but also their other properties, which are used for various activities within the functions of cities, which makes their supply so essential. relevant examples are fuels, gaseous and liquid substances used for disinfection or cooling. currently, the only available summary is the statistics of accidents with leakage of hazardous substances in each country and their regions. these statistics, however, do not contain separate data about accidents of the adr vehicle or vehicles carrying sub-limit volumes in cities. the absence of monitoring the activity of these vehicles in cities becomes a risk which may have a significant influence and impact on urban critical infrastructure and its functionality if it occurs. the importance of the need to reduce the risk of this type of transportation is demonstrated by the experience of the past years (see tab. 1), where there have been accidents of vehicles carrying dangerous substances in cities or urban track, which caused serious damage. in this context it should be noted that these failures have had more serious consequences in urban areas than in rural areas. the evacuation of people can significantly impair the function of the affected cities and disrupt the infrastructure. the accidents may occur particularly in the mobile phase or during loading tasks. in both cases, the level of risk increases with regard to the venue and nature of the event (a dangerous substance was initiated an explosion, fire, toxicity) [10]. table 1 overview of significant hazardous chemical substances accidents [11, 12, 13, 14, 15] event scenario damages 11. 7. 1978, l os alfaques, spain the explosion of a truck with propylene near the camp los alfaques in the village of san carlos de la rápita 216 dead, 200 injuries 10. 11. 1979, mississauga, canada the train explosion and leakage of chlorine in populated areas evacuation of 200 000 inhabitants 4. 8. 1981, montanas, mexico the chlorine leak after truck accident 28 dead, 1000 intoxicated, 5000 evacuated 2. 5. 2011, pilsen, czech republic the fire and explosion pressure cylinders after the accident of 2086 kg of acetylene gas, 50 kg of co2, 240 kg of r-404a, 132 kg of r-407c, 144 kg of r-437a 66 kg r 417a 66 kg of r-422d 72 kg r 134a no injuries. serious property damage. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 issues of hazardous materials transport and possibilities of safety measures in the concept of smart cities 3 event scenario damages 7. 5. 2013, mexico city a city of pachua, mexico the explosion of a tank with methane 22 dead, 36 injured, property damage: 30 houses, 20 vehicles 6. 7. 2013, lac-mégantic, canada the explosion of a freight train with crude oil 42 dead, property damage hazardous chemicals have become part of our lives to the extent that it is impossible to imagine a modern society where they are not used. increasing their number as well as the amount of the chemicals transported and used combined with stricter safety requirements leads to the study of the risks arising from the use of these substances, and to the emergence of a series of measures to increase security. this is then reflected for example in legislation or the requirements for emergency preparedness. most of the legislative instruments are focused on static sources, which are for example the production and storage of fuel. the emergency plans for the stationary installations are prepared as part of an integrated emergency system, they are under regular review and the situation is constantly monitored. but there is an absence of such measures in connection with the transportation of dangerous goods. 3. risk of dangerous goods transport in cities risk identification, analysis and assessment are significant stages in the attempt to eliminate it. in general, risk is defined as the probability of an undesirable event occurrence together with often negative consequences [47]. in more detail, risk is described using three main components, which is the probability of an undesirable event occurrence, the vulnerability of the environment in relation to the impact of the undesirable event and finally also the hazard impact itself, whose extent is variable [29]. urban housing estates not only differ in terms of architecture but also in terms of population density, buildings using hazardous chemical substances etc. that is why the level of risk is also variable in this respect and it stresses the significance of risk analysis application, on which preventive, repressive and corrective measures are based. 3.1 critical areas in cities especially vulnerable are the urban areas where there are high numbers of people, whether permanently (city centres, businesses, transfer station hubs, hospitals, schools, etc.) or temporarily (e.g. traffic congestion on the centre circuits and in the city centres). critical places of transport networks can be based on criteria such as: the importance of the road section and the possibility to replace it, the demand for returning the section back into operation, the importance of the section linking a significant portion of urban agglomerations or strategic places, traffic intensity, capacity segment, other risks which threaten the segment [16]. the following are the most frequent causes of road accidents of vehicles transporting goods in the adr mode according to [1,2]:  not keeping safe distance,  not giving way and breaking the traffic rules,  an obstacle on the road,  not respecting safety barriers,  an accident caused by another vehicle,  not adapting the driving style to the situation (traffic density, meteorological conditions etc.). the above mentioned causes of adr road accidents are also the most frequent causes of accidents of common personal vehicles and lorries. this increases the risk of accident occurrence which may involve a vehicle transporting hcs. currently, the movement of dangerous goods by road is coordinated in czech republic only through safety signs (b18, b19) according to the european agreement concerning the international carriage of dangerous goods by road (adr) [17]. each country implements the adr agreement into its national legislation. an example is the regulation on the national and international transport of dangerous goods by road, railroad and inland waters (ggvseb) in germany [43]. this regulation especially concerns motorway transport. outside built-up areas, roads with more lanes and the shortest routes must be used. in a built-up area, a bypass should always be used. in germany and austria, there are also legal measures ensuring the restriction of hazardous chemical substances transport through road tunnels [44]. in the czech republic the movement of these vehicles is limited by prohibition traffic signs especially before some road tunnels where the risk is especially high if an accident occurs. critical points are particularly important transportation constructions, such as bridges, tunnels, intersections. by early identification of these critical points the level of risk can be reduced by using prevention and safety measures. such measures could be, for example, cctv monitoring sites, prohibiting signs for vehicles carrying dangerous substances or providing short arrival times of rescue. one of the effective tools is the application of risk analysis methods and support software tools that can identify, analyse and evaluate the risk, including the modelling of dangerous scenarios development of the situation [10]. 3.2 approaches to assessing the risks of dangerous goods transportation the identification and assessment of the risks of damage requires a comprehensive system approach, both in terms of acute and chronic risk. while the acute risk effects show immediately, especially at the accident location, identification of the chronic risk effects is a complex and time-consuming process [10]. these risks can manifest eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 v. adamec, b. schüllerová, v. adam, m.semela 4 themselves, for example in the form of chronic disease on the affected population in the form of respiratory diseases, for example, or the deterioration of environmental quality [5]. first it is necessary to define the area to be evaluated as well as the problem situation and the phase during which the leak occurred:  mobile phase (transportation by road, compulsory safety breaks, checks by state authorities),  loading tasks (loading, unloading, cleaning the shipping containers etc.). in road accidents involving vehicles transporting hcs, there is not only a risk of leakage of a large amount of the transported substance but also a risk of fuel leakage. the volume of fuel in fuel tanks ranges from 200 to 1.200 litres depending on the size and the current condition of the vehicle. although this is an under limit amount of hcs, which is not included in transport according to the adr international agreement, it may also have a significant impact [2]. besides the hazardous substances, the extent of an accident is also significantly influenced by external and internal factors [38] whose character varies with each transport phase (climatic conditions, technical condition of the vehicle, the vulnerability of the environment, health and mental condition of the driver etc.) as shown in figure 1. the example shows the basic factors which can cause an accident either separately or together. with regard to the individual scenario of each road accident or an accident involving leakage of hazardous chemical substances, the probability data are not given for each factor. it is necessary to mention the fact that, with regard to the causes of road accidents mentioned above, it is the human factor which has a significant impact and it is not only the driver of the vehicle transporting hazardous chemical substances but also other road users. it must also be noted that the selection of logic gates may vary regarding the specific hazard scenario. the fault tree (fta) shown below in fig. 1 is therefore illustrative and demonstrates one of the possible scenarios. it is, therefore, necessary to define all the aspects of the transport of dangerous chemicals that may be significant risks for the examined process. a significant part is also the definition of the critical infrastructure vulnerability, which plays a very important role in risk analysis and damage prediction. vulnerability is an important element in the issue of critical infrastructure and its protection, which is also related to transport of hcs. vulnerability expresses the extent to which a system is able to resist adverse effects and, on the contrary, when the ongoing processes and their full functionality are disrupted. according to [29, 30, 31], it is important to distinguish between risk and vulnerability, which is related to loss potential in connection with an accident, destroying, damaging or disrupting a system and its processes. on the contrary, risk is expressed by the degree of probability of an undesirable event occurrence and by the consequences which may be expected within this event. the risk of an accident occurrence involving leakage of hcs significantly lowers the limit to which the whole system (town or village) is able to resist adverse effects. the reason is a high number of residents found in one place at the same time, also the absence of identifying and monitoring the activity of dangerous mobile units in cities, numerous built-up areas, one way streets, heavy traffic without the possibility of providing proper detours when a dangerous event occurs etc. this is also related to the common problem of the time interval of rescue units, which operate in difficult conditions especially in traffic congestions in the morning and afternoon hours. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 issues of hazardous materials transport and possibilities of safety measures in the concept of smart cities 5 leakage of hazardous substances during the transport accident technical defect oror roadways natural phenomena human factor failure of the valves breach of tank surface vehicle faults or oror road defect and or natural disasters weather ignoring the safety instructions inattentio n and tiredness impaired health condition material defect mechanical damage material fatigue corosionleakage technical damage (defect) or road obstructi on driver and other factors inattention and tiredness of the other drivers participant of accident wrong road signs traffic situation changes addictive substances figure 1 fta diagram of hazardous materials release during road transport [10] 3.3 application of risk analysis methods to identify risks in urban areas in risk analysis, decisions are made based on the probability estimation (p) of an undesirable event occurrence and its consequences (c) [18, 47]. deciding about the risk means estimating the probability of its occurrence and the probability of the hazard scenario happening [19]. risk analysis of transportation of hazardous substances by road, not only in cities, is a very complex problem as for the selection of a suitable methodology. the aim of the analysis is to obtain relevant information describing the identified risks and their importance for the given area. therefore, it is important to use a combination of methods based on a qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative approach. in the first phase of a qualitative approach the process assessed is defined including its components which are related and influence each other. applying this approach can even detect so-called hidden processes, which may occur in connection with the transport of dangerous substances [9]. the application of methods which are based on a semiquantitative approach using a numerical scale helps to determine the level of risk. it becomes an intermediate stage of risk assessment and their categorization and the assessment of events related to each other [19]. the quantitative approach allows modelling of the consequences of hazardous substance leakage in specified areas using precise numerical data. in the case of hazardous substance transportation, the scenarios may include fluid leak followed by evaporation, gas leak with immediate dispersion into the atmosphere, flammable liquids with immediate or subsequent initiation. in general, quantitative approaches numerically evaluate the frequency of undesirable manifestation of the risk sources and their consequences. since the risk analysis methods cannot be used individually for all the transportation phases, the particularly suitable methods are those that are based on a multi-criteria approach using map data and information on where the incident occurred or may occur. some analytical instruments may have a software form and can be connected to an electronic database of chemicals [18, 19]. risk identification should never be underestimated and the occurrence of phenomena which lie beyond the boundary of common expectations (so called black swans) should also be considered. these events are often considered highly improbable as such events have not eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 6 occurred before, for example in connection with a particular subject and it is therefore not possible to deduce that this situation will occur. it is the current situation, in which the activity of dangerous substances in a city is not monitored, which means a hidden threat with very serious consequences. these threats do not include only accidents of vehicles transporting hcs. it is also necessary to realize the risk of a possible abuse by terrorist or other radical groups. in transport of hcs, it might be about a deliberate disregard of risk considering the low frequency of these accidents. it could also be a kind of a black swan, the so called unknown known, when the risk significance and its possible fatal impact are realized especially by a group intending to abuse these adr vehicles. although it is not easy to predict precisely the occurrence and extent of the impact of events (e.g. black swan), it is important to ensure that sufficient functional background work is undertaken, which is based on the creation of a communication network and on the preparedness to respond immediately with primary and secondary measures with regard to the safety of the human society. it should also include an adequate analysis and assessment of undesirable events with the objective approach, which includes external experiences and the assessment [20, 21]. within risk analysis and identification, a solution area has been proposed in accordance with the above mentioned procedure. in this case, it is the cities or particularly the urban roads which can be used by vehicles transporting hcs. regarding the high number of various municipality features, the general character of a city with vulnerable elements of critical infrastructure such as bridges, tunnels, roads and the related places like public transport hubs, built-up areas etc. has been considered. 4. proposal for the introduction of smart risk minimization measures currently, there are camera systems monitoring the traffic in most towns. some of them are able to identify a vehicle based on its licence plate. it is especially carriers who use other smart systems – locators – which are linked to an electronic logbook. these locators are equipped with a device based on the global position system (gps) and they can provide information about the current location of a vehicle including a real time display in a map with the update interval of approx. 30 seconds. daily ride overviews allowing for displaying routs in 3d maps are recorded in logbooks. however, these locators are mainly used by private companies and organizations and therefore it is not possible to obtain this data easily and use it for processing statistical data and for marking dangerous routes. with regard to the possible use of safety measures in cities, it is necessary to introduce smart systems that identify the moving city traffic unit, warn drivers of adr vehicles about the route for transportation, communicate with the emergency services and warn other drivers and residents in time in the event of an accident. monitoring of vehicles transporting hazardous chemical substances has been implemented for example in germany, where it is a voluntary measure though especially for private carriers. what is widely used here is for example the rfid system from 2011 [39] or the tracking and tracing application for private transportation companies, whose data are not publicly available. in 2011, the savenav project was also launched, which works with smart warning signs called orangebox. these signs automatically detect a road accident of a vehicle carrying dangerous material and they automatically report the location and some other important information to an emergency center [40, 4]. other projects focusing on monitoring the movement of dangerous material include the bluebox project with the display in map data. the situation in austria is very similar to that in other eu countries. even here there is no legal obligation to monitor the movement of vehicles carrying dangerous material. what is working here, however, is the monitoring of vehicles in the adr mode in tunnels, which uses telematic systems. in the alpine regions, it is also germany and italy who cooperate in the monitoring [44]. the czech republic is also considering the monitoring of vehicles in the adr mode. however, the carriers are afraid of losing sensitive data [45]. some projects concerning the monitoring and identification of vehicles carrying dangerous material were created for the purposes of emergency services which can prevent some other serious consequences of accidents by an early intervention. one of these in europe is the mitra project [46]. in the czech republic there are also companies in the chemical industry cooperating with the integrated rescue system and the carriers using the trins system [47]. the above mentioned examples of project results focus on an overall monitoring of vehicles in the adr mode following their routes, which also means outside cities, and using the gps signals. unfortunately, these measures are not legally obligatory and that is why we cannot rely on the carriers to use them also due to their mistrust in the safety of sensitive data mentioned. however, for the purposes of increasing the safety of critical infrastructure in cities, it is also possible to use the existing systems which have been implemented to monitor regular traffic. one of the measures proposed is the identification and monitoring of the adr vehicles that are arriving in the city or moving around the city. what can be used is the existing cctv system, which is already widely used in most cities. given that these types of vehicles in cities are moving mostly in order to supply, the carrier or the recipient could report the planned entry of vehicles into the city and their predicted route. the integrated rescue system should be able to monitor vehicle movement and communicate with it in order to prevent undesirable events (e.g. the information about the closures, traffic congestion). another option is automatic vehicle identification by the adr marking, which is already used for license plates of vehicles [22]. the necessary need for eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 v. adamec, b. schüllerová, v. adam, m.semela 7 the monitoring of the movement of vehicles transporting hazardous substances has been proved by research projects carried out in europe and worldwide [23, 24, 25]. applying these measures may be important not only in the area of prevention. in cases where there is a leakage of dangerous substances, it is necessary to avoid movement in the socalled danger zone in which the substance is spread. in this case, it is necessary to transfer early information to drivers through dynamic information panels informing about the incident in the danger zone and allow other drivers to choose alternative routes. these measures are already often used for example in road tunnels, where the drivers must be informed immediately about the situation if a dangerous event occurs and a safe evacuation of persons present in the tunnel must be ensured. [27]. the timely information through visual communication mediated by these panels can prevent the traffic collapse and enables the rescue services to get to the crash site and to the injured persons. dynamic information panels would be appropriate to supplement a warning light signalling for the cases of an undesirable situation. as study [26] shows, implementing these signs is important for increasing safety not only in the case of an accident but also for prevention and in informing the driver about a possible risk. when these measures are implemented, it is possible to monitor the average activity of hcs in cities, their intensity and possibly also the kind of substance. based on this data it is possible to produce statistics and their evaluation allowing for identification of areas in cities where there is the highest incidence of these mobile sources of risk. as a consequence, safety measures can be adjusted in accordance with the requirements. 4.1 swot analysis of the proposed measures considering the complexity of some operations needed for the possible implementation of these measures into the smart cities system, a swot analysis was carried out (see table 2, 3). the aim of the swat analysis was to identify the individual aspects of the measure from the point of view of internal and external aspects, which may have a significant influence on the decision concerning their integration. within the method, classification and evaluation were divided into 4 basic groups where the mutual interactions of strong factors (s) and weak factors (w) with opportunities (o) and threats (t) were compared. the qualitative information obtained helped to define and evaluate the level of their mutual clash. defining the individual factors in the groups was preceded by an analysis of the current state, which was briefly introduced in the chapters above. it was necessary to define the areas which these measures would apply to. the first part dealt with the legislative and legal form so that the monitoring could be implemented in cities as the measures are currently not enforced on the national, regional or local level. in this case, it is important to formulate a proposal for the measure implementation so that it is in accordance with the current legislation on all levels. therefore, it is not only about cooperation between the state, the regional offices and the municipalities but also cooperation with carriers. these legislative measures should consider the ability to ensure prevention and safety from the point of view of mobile sources, which is currently not dealt with properly except for the adr regulation. it is a complicated step, which may, nevertheless, significantly contribute to the protection of critical infrastructure from the perspective of legal tools. another discussed area is the assessment of technical equipment using the technical elements that have already been implemented or the need for new equipment. the assessment has been based on the obtained data on the technical possibilities of passing on dynamic information and early warning of drivers. the financial demands have also been considered in the case of implementing a completely new system in towns. the ability of the proposed measures to increase effective communication in the case of an accident has been assessed. the measures have also been assessed from the perspective of the integrated rescue system. the first measure assessed by the swat analysis is shown in table 2, which focuses on monitoring vehicles transporting hcs and thus also its ability to identify and analyse a potential source of danger. table 3 specifies the key factors for the provision of dynamic information panels and signs in cities aiming to make communication easier not only with the drivers. table 2 swot analysis of the adr vehicles monitoring in cities strenghts weaknesses  automatic adr vehicles identification  awareness of adr vehicles movement  ability to respond rapidly to adverse situation  use of existing camera systems (cctv) location and communication with the drivers of the adr vehicles  exact location of potentially dangerous goods  obsolete camera systems (cctv)  small cctv coverage  cctv coverage without automatic identification of the adr signs  the new system price  absence of the equipment for communication with the driver of the adr vehicle  absence of solutions in the current legislation opportunities threats  increase of safety and security  improvement of the drivers (adr vehicles) and the integrated rescue system communication  providing better traffic flow  improvement of prevention measures  the annual statistical  adr vehicles without signs  deliberately poorly labelled adr vehicles  illegible signs for vehicles  unreported transport in the city  poor communication by the carrier and recipient  disagreement with the eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 issues of hazardous materials transport and possibilities of safety measures in the concept of smart cities 8 reports for the evaluation of the critical points  introductions of these measures into legislation czech and european union legislation then, five or six key points of the internal and external factors were selected based on the swot analysis. monitoring adr vehicles in cities is one of the measures for which the existing cctv systems, implemented mainly in big cities, can be used. the strong point in this case is the possibility of automatic identification, which warns about the activity of moving mobile sources of risk in towns. what is also an advantage is the possibility of communication with the driver of an adr vehicle and allowing him to change the rout if there is an obstacle such as an accident etc. the main advantage could be the possibility of a quick response to the occurrence of an undesirable event. what could become the weak point in this case is an obsolete camera system which is not capable of automatic identification. another weak point of these measures could be a considerable financial burden on towns when implementing these new camera systems. on the other hand, it is an important safety measure allowing for a significant reduction in losses in accidents or other unfavourable events. what is a threat are vehicles that are not marked because of transport of a very small amount or an intentional substitution of the marking, which happens mainly due to the conditions of transport requirements. if there is an accident involving unmarked or badly marked hcs, the risk considerably increases. an especially important opportunity in this case is to improve communication among carriers in adr and rescue services in order to increase safety and security, and to prevent accidents with spills of hazardous substances and ensuring traffic flow. table 3 swot analysis of the dynamic information panels in cities strenghts weaknesses  rapid transfer of the information  ability of the rescue services and drivers to respond rapidly to the undesirable situation  communication with drivers and persons around  using and supplementation of the current dynamic information panels  ensuring the traffic continuity in the case of an accident and information about alternative routes  the new system price  the choice of a uniform style of information for drivers and other persons  obsolete system that does not allow connections to gsm emergency services  selection of specific locations for the placement  depending upon a source of energy opportunities threats  increase of safety and security and accident  accident in location without information prevention  improvement of the drivers (adr vehicles) and the rescue services communication  ensuring a better traffic flow not only in the case of an accident  utilization of the information panels not only after the accident cases  the renewable energy use (alternative or additional source of energy for information panels) panels  unreadable information  failure of energy resources  broken communication system  delay of the information transmission another analysed measure is the use of the dynamic information panels, which are now commonly used for highways or city circuits. that is why this system has also been chosen as a suitable device for communication with drivers. a strong point of this measure is the possibility of a rapid transfer of information on an undesirable situation. this is especially true if the dynamic traffic panels are placed where the vulnerable elements are and they can therefore become an effective information and communication device. these measures can also serve as suitable measures for ensuring the traffic fluency if there is a major accident involving a leakage of hcs and for preventing the movement of persons in a dangerous zone. the weak point is the difficulty in selecting suitable locations for the placement of these information panels. that is why it is important to identify the high-risk areas first and to assess the necessary amount and layout along roads. to ensure fast communication with drivers, a suitable marking of an alternative route is necessary as well as its comprehensible presentation, the choice of language etc. that is why an inappropriate choice of information and its formulation may become a weak point. although these types of panels are equipped with light signs with a relatively long lifetime period, it is necessary to appoint a person who will be responsible and to set the dates of regular checks on the functionality of the dynamic panels to prevent non-functionality of the information or its part. the threat is therefore in this context particularly an accident in an area without the information panels and movement of people in the danger zone. like the previous measure, this one also provides an increase in safety and prevention ensuring the traffic flow and a reduction or complete averting of the undesirable impact in the case of an accident. the possibility of ensuring substitute or additional power sources to prevent any malfunction of the system due to power failure is also important. currently, the variable information panels and traffic signs are equipped with led diodes as they do not require a lot of power supply. this measure could become effective in this case, especially if there is a loss of energy resources. the variable information panels could support eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 v. adamec, b. schüllerová, v. adam, m.semela 9 the weakening of the power supply or possibly become an alternative energy source for a certain period of time discussion the risk related to hazardous chemical substances depends on the type and the dangerous properties of these substances such as toxicity, explosiveness, flammability etc. there are also other factors that have a significant influence such as the amount of the leaked substance, the presence of initiation sources, the character of the surroundings where the leakage occurred, the number of persons present in the vicinity of the accident etc. [10]. while the toxicity of the leaking hazardous substances has a significant impact on the residents and on the environment, both acute and chronic, it is especially the explosive and flammable substances that are significant for the overall functionality of the critical infrastructure in cities [13]. these may have, after their initiation, destructive effects not only on a human being but also on property and public urban facilities [12]. therefore, there is an important question of whether vehicles in the adr mode can pass through cities without limitation and whether there is a need for special safety measures for some vehicles with regard to the level of risk and the environment vulnerability. currently, there are more options of monitoring vehicles including the projects mentioned above [39 – 42, 46], which deal with the monitoring of vehicles using the gps signal. however, these are often devices intended for private carriers and in some cases the information is not provided to the emergency services, which may influence the development and seriousness of an accident. what can be used are the monitoring systems that are a common part of the technical equipment in cities and towns such as the cctv. this is a vehicle monitoring system based on identification of signs such as the licence plate or the adr vehicles marking (the un code and the kemler code) [32, 33] and it works on the principle of converting digital images into electronic text [34, 35]. the reasons of an insufficient identification of a vehicle marking are bad lighting conditions, illegible marking due to staining or because there is another object or vehicle covering it [36 38]. identification by the licence plate is suitable for vehicles transporting a sub-limit amount of hazardous substances. considering the number of vehicles in the adr mode and the number of haulage and similar companies, it seems more suitable to identify vehicles by their special marking, which some software is already able to identify [34, 35]. as there are camera systems widely used in cities and towns, the costs are not expected to be as high as for a completely new monitoring system. what remains a problem is the absence of a legal obligation to monitor vehicles transporting hazardous material not only in cities but in all of the eu territory and other places in the world [41, 42]. making this a legal obligation is a matter of a long-term process and it is necessary to notify the state and governing bodies not only in individual countries of the threats posed by insufficient monitoring of hazardous material. the need for legal securing of the other measure (dynamic information panels) is not such a significant problem. applying these measures is a common safety and preventive element in road traffic. its adjustment to accidents involving adr vehicles does not require complicated modification to be functional and implementable. the important thing here is their placement in pre-selected critical locations in cities, where the level of risk is particularly high and an accident may have serious negative consequences. that is why it is important to apply a detailed risk analysis including assessment and determination of the seriousness of various hazard scenarios and the risks arising from them as the paper explains. applying risk analysis and using the proposed measures based on its results should lead to a reduction in hazard thus eliminating the risk. they are especially preventive measures offering alternative uses of the existing safety features to ensure a correct functionality of the infrastructure required by the smart cities standards. conclusion the possibilities of implementing the smart cities concept are very wide and it is a long process. the paper points out the issue of the hazardous substances transport in cities which is currently not dealt with enough. it is an essential part of maintaining their functional infrastructure. despite the low probability of a traffic accident and leakage of hazardous substances the significance of their impact is very high. to ensure prevention and improvement of safety the important part of communication is not only with carriers in adr, but also with other drivers and people who are moving at the place of an accident. therefore, a good knowledge of the transport infrastructure in cities including critical locations is necessary. this paper, therefore, introduces the basic methodology approach to risk identification and analysis. it proposes measures that can be incorporated into the already functional systems in cities and can be used not only for the purpose of transporting hazardous substances in cities which have been assessed by the elementary swot analysis. in the analysis 5 6 key factors were selected that can positively or negatively affect the whole process. the important opportunity is not only to improve the communication network between drivers and emergency services but also the possibilities of using so-called green energy, which can be used in both of the proposed measures. the aim of this paper was mainly to highlight the current situation and the need to ensure the activities in this area. detailed procedures for removing the weaknesses and threats will be the subject of further solutions and research. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 issues of hazardous materials transport and possibilities of safety measures in the concept of smart cities 10 references [1] european commission (2015). digital agenda for europe, smart cities, avaliable o the internet: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/smart-cities [2] matějka, p.; jizba, t.; tvrdý, k. 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(2009) risk analysis and management. basic concept and principles. r&rata, 2 1(12), pp. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e4 issues of hazardous materials transport and possibilities of safety measures in the concept of smart cities smart grids and load profiles in the gcc region i̇slam şafak bayram12 1qatar environment and energy research institute, hamad bin khalifa university, education city, doha, qatar 2college of science and engineering, hamad bin khalifa university, education city, doha, qatar abstract the members of the gulf cooperation council (gcc), namely qatar, bahrain, saudi arabia, kuwait, oman, and united arab emirates (uae), are facing challenges to meet the growing electricity demand and reduce the associated hydrocarbon emissions. recently, there has been a pressing need for a shift towards smart power grids, as smart grids can reduce the stress on the grid, defer the investments for upgrades, improve the power system efficiency, and reduce emissions. accordingly, the goal of this paper is to delineate an overview of current smart grid efforts in the gcc region. first, we present a detailed overview of the current state of the power grids. then, we classify the efforts into three broad categories: (i) energy trading and exchange through gcc interconnection; (ii) integration of renewable resources; and (iii) demand side management technologies for shaping the demand profile. furthermore, we provide the details of our api object level real-time gcc power demand automated program that creates the database for the load profiles of the gcc members. accessing such information for research and development purposes is a critical step in the region, because due the conservative structure of the governing institutes, there is no publicly available dataset. therefore, the data provided in this paper is critical and will serve as a main reference for the future research efforts. received on 14 november 2016; accepted on 07 september 2017; published on 19 december 2017 keywords: smart grids, gcc region, load profiles copyright © 2017 islam safak bayram, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eai.19-12-2017.153476 1. introduction over the last few years, the fast-growing energy needs in the gcc region has intensified a central challenge: how to reduce the cost power systems operations and minimize the hydrocarbon emissions. as the significant portion of the gcc economies relies on oil and gas reserves, the gcc governments show growing amount of interest to diversify their economies for the postcarbon era. moreover, the drastically decreasing oil prices have pressed the need for investigation of smart grid technologies and efficient usage of resources. overall, there are three primary group of interest: (1) energy exchange among neighboring states to improve power system stability; (2) integration of renewable resources to reduce carbon emissions; and (3) demand response programs to shape the load profile and lessen the cost of system operations. one essential element of such efforts is the gcc interconnection grid that connects the power systems of six member countries. ∗corresponding author. email: ibayram@qf.org.qa the integration is expected to transform the region into a significant energy hub, and the network is envisioned to expand to other parts of the world, e.g., sell electricity to north african countries and southern europe. the six gcc members are endowed with a significant portion of the world’s hydrocarbon resources: 33.9% of the proven crude oil and 22.3% of the proven natural gas resources reside in the region. owning such rich and abundant resources have boosted the economies and transformed the region within a mere of two decades into the world’s wealthiest nations (in term of gdp per capita as depicted in figure 1a). in addition to the economic boom, high fertility rates, increasing population of expats, and the desire for a better standard of living have lead to a steady rise in electricity demand. the population growth respect to year 1995 is shown in figure 1b. the results show that the population of qatar is almost tripled within the last two decades and there are similar patterns in the other nations. moreover, the trajectory depicted in figure2a shows the enormous energy demand in each country. moreover, gross domestic product per capita 1 eai endorsed transactions smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ mailto:<ibayram@qf.org.qa> islamsafak bayram 1995 2000 2005 2010 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 years (1995−2013) g d p p e r c a p it a ( in 1 0 0 0 u s d ) real gdp per capita in the gcc region qatar bahrain saudi arabia kuwait oman uae usa uk (a) gross domestic product growth over the years. 1995 2000 2005 2010 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 years (1995−2013) p o p u la ti o n ( % ) r e sp e c t to 1 9 9 5 population growth of gcc members qatar bahrain saudi arabia kuwait oman uae (b) populationgrowthoverthe years. 1995 2000 2005 2010 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 years (1995−2010) c o 2 p e r c a p it a e m is si o n s (m e tr ic t o n n e s) co2 per capita emissions in the gcc region qatar bahrain saudi arabia kuwait oman uae usa uk (c) carbonemissions 1995-2010 [22]. figure 1. key indicatorsforenergy consumption. 1995 2000 2005 2010 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 years (1995−2013) e le c tr ic a l e n e rg y ( t w h ) electrical energy generation in gcc qatar bahrain saudi arabia kuwait oman uae (a) aggregatedenergy generation. 1995 2000 2005 2010 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 years (1995−2013) in st a ll e d c a p a c it y ( g w ) installed electricity generation capacity in gcc qatar bahrain saudi arabia kuwait oman uae (b) installedgenerationcapacities. 1995 2000 2005 2010 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 years (1995−2013) p e a k e le c tr ic it y d e m a n d ( g w ) peak electricity demand in gcc qatar bahrain saudi arabia kuwait oman uae (c) peak powergeneration 1995 − 2013. figure 2. increasingenergy demandin the gcc is an important determinant of energy usage. the gdp growth, not only increase the energy demand, but also rendered the region among the most carbon-intensive countries in the world. according to 2010 world bank data, qatar, kuwait, oman, and uae are the top four nations with the highest emissions per capita [22] and an overview of carbon emissions is depicted in figure1c. another primary driver behind the rise in energy consumption is that gcc governments provide substantial subsidies both in electricity and oil tariffs. this policy serves as a means to redistribute the wealth among the citizens. however, reduced tariffs have lead to several adverse impacts. first, low prices translated into overconsumption of energy resources. the majority of the residential energy is consumed for air-conditioning and potable water, the bulk of which comes from energyintensive desalination of sea water. second, the gcc governments are facing a fiscal pressure as the volatility in the international markets combined with the foregone export revenues due to over-consumption fuels represent a sizable portion of the national budgets [10]. third, the increasing levels of carbon emissions due to high consumption raises economic concerns. the aforementioned issues have pressed the gcc members to reform the power systems through smart grids. in order to provide the motivation for smart grids, in section 2 we give an overview of the current power grids. then, in the next three sections we present a systematic the overview of gcc interconnection grid, renewable energy integration efforts, and current demand side management programs in the region. 2. current power grid operations 2.1. overview the first gcc power grids were built in the early 50s when there was a need for electricity for oil drilling. with the incline of the oil prices, the region gained significant financial wealth, and the modern power grids were built in the 80s. compared to western grids, the gcc grids are younger and equipped with modern components. on the other hand, the region often experiences excessively hot days during summers. in such periods, the demand for cooling raises tremendously thus leading to regional blackouts and threatens the security of the supply. hence, system operators are continuously seeking ways to expand the system capacity to secure the supply. 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 smart gridsand load profile in the gcc region table 1. percentageof generationmixin the gcc. natural gas (ng)and oil are considered. qatar bahrain saudi arabia kuwait oman uae ng(%) ng(%) ng(%) oil(%) ng(%) oil(%) ng(%) oil(%) ng(%) oil(%) 1996 100 100 44.15 55.85 62.43 37.57 82.55 17.45 96.63 3.37 2000 100 100 46.03 53.97 32.92 67.08 82.83 17.17 96.91 3.09 2004 100 100 56.95 43.05 27.68 72.32 82.00 18.00 97.66 2.34 2008 100 100 48.83 51.17 35.65 64.35 97.83 2.17 98.29 1.71 2012 100 100 44.69 55.31 36.22 63.78 97.58 2.42 98.62 1.38 even though the region was served by vertically integrated utilities, typically owned by the governments, the gcc members are reforming the sector by unbundling the power generation, transmission, and the distribution segments. this will encourage private sector investments, which will allow the private sector to generate and sell electricity to the customers [6]. the primary drivers of this transformation are the need for improved operational efficiency and the fact that the private sector can quickly respond to economic and technological changes. the sultanate of oman is leading the privatization process. oman is the first member country that allows independent system operators to generate and sell electricity to government authority, which handles transmission and distribution lines. currently, in all members except kuwait, the generation sector is operated by private sector and independent power producers. in kuwait, the generation side is still operated by the government. the electricity dispatch curve is also an important parameter for the smart grid operations. since, the oil and natural gas reserves are abundant in the region, the power generation depends entirely on these two sources. in table 1, we present the generation mixture of the member countries over the years. the table reveals an interesting fact that the cost of producing electricity is quite different among the members. for instance, qatar and bahrain have plenty of natural gas resources, hence hundred percent of the electricity is generated by fossil fuels. however, relying entirely on natural gas reduces the ramping capabilities of the generation, therefore, these countries have to waste a sizable portion of their resources on not necessary lighting of skyscrapers. on the other hand, countries like saudi arabia and kuwait produce a significant portion of the electricity through diesel generators. considering the cost and negative environmental impacts of such generators, the interconnection of power grids would provide a good level of savings. for instance, kuwait and saudi arabia could purchase electricity from qatar and eliminate the need for running diesel generators. moreover, the gcc members are seeking ways to accommodate the growing demand in through diversifying their generation portfolio. united arabic emirates is building nuclear power plants to be operated by 2017 [23] in order to meet the 7% annual demand growth. according to dubai integrated energy strategy 2030, the utility of dubai is aiming to meet 71% of the demand from natural gas, 12% from nuclear power, 12% from clean coal, and 5% from renewables. also, qatar, saudi arabia, and uae have put goals to integrate gigawatt level solar farms. the details will be given in the next section. 2.2. pricing& customertypes the electricity tariffs are the primary control mechanisms to shape the customer demand profile. in the business of electric utilities, the unit electricity cost is calculated through locational marginal prices (lmp) that takes into account various factors such as generator type and cost, distances to load, etc. lmp reflects the marginal cost of supplying an increment of load at each node. lmp are determined in the wholesale market via a bidding structure and details can be found in [12]. the pricing in the gcc region, however, is lower than the marginal prices as the governments provide subsidies to redistribute the wealth to the citizens. for instance, according to [10] the total subsidies in 2011 for electricity exceeded 29 billion dollars in the gcc region. by considering the populations across the nations, the yearly subsidy per capita can be found as 556.5, 1510.1, 166.9, 1206, 522.28, and 770.81 us dollars for bahrain, kuwait, oman, qatar, saudi arabia, and uae, respectively. the current electricity prices are publicly available on the utility of each country, and we present an overview of the prices in figure3. in the case of saudi arabia, for example, the electricity cost is one-fifth of the average us prices. also, in the state of qatar, the power consumption of the local citizens are entirely subsidized by the government. in 2013 the subsidies for the energy (oil, gas, and electricity) accounted for 60 − 80% of the original cost. however, the decreasing oil prices in the last two years forced policy-makers to take drastic measures. for instance, uae removed the subsidies in transport fuel in late 2015 and other gcc members are expected to follow this new policy and introduce taxes. subsidized energy can, however, lead to a range of unintended adverse impacts, as 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 islamsafak bayram 0 2 4 6 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 energy demand (mwh) e le c tr ic it y p ri c e ( $ /k w h ) electricity tariffs in qatar residential commercial industrial 0 2 4 6 0 0.02 0.04 0.06 energy demand (mwh) e le c tr ic it y p ri c e ( $ /k w h ) electricity tariffs in bahrain residential commercial industrial 0 2 4 6 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 energy demand (mwh) e le c tr ic it y p ri c e ( $ /k w h ) electricity tariffs in saudi arabia residential/commercial industrial 0 2 4 6 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 energy demand (mwh) e le c tr ic it y p ri c e ( $ /k w h ) electricity tariffs in kuwait residential/commercial industrial 0 2 4 6 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 energy demand (mwh) e le c tr ic it y p ri c e ( $ /k w h ) electricity tariffs in oman residential industrial−summer industrial−winter 0 2 4 6 0.075 0.08 0.085 0.09 0.095 0.1 energy demand (mwh) e le c tr ic it y p ri c e ( $ /k w h ) electricity tariffs in uae residential/commercial industrial figure 3. electricitytari˙s obtainedfromqatar [15], bahrain[16]. saudi arabia [17], kuwait[18], oman[20], uae [19]. weight of subsidies on fiscal balances % of gdp % of fiscal expenditures bahrain ksa uae qatar kuwait oman source: international monetary fund 5 10 15 get the data created with datawrapper figure 4. the e˙ects of energy subsidies on fisca balances in year 2015. it distorts price signals for consumers, with serious consequences for energy efficiency and the optimal allocation of resources. low tariffs have lead to overconsumption of energy resources. the majority of the residential energy is consumed for air-conditioning and potable water, the bulk of which comes from energy-intensive desalination of sea water. moreover, the gcc governments are facing a fiscal pressure as the volatility in the international markets combined with the opportunity cost incurred of exporting overconsumption fuels represent a sizable portion of the national budgets [10]. figure 4 depicts that subsidies in the energy sector have started to represented sizable portion of the fiscal balances. traditionally electric utilities serve three different customer types namely, residential, commercial, and industrial. the customer types are differentiated by the amount of energy/power requirements and demand curves. at each member country, residential customers constitute the vast majority of the meters and we provide this is mainly because the industry is limited to oil and gas and severe weather and limited water resources restrict the agricultural activities. unlike industrial and commercial customers, the energy demand of residential customers has high variability. this behavior increases the power system operating cost and reduce system utilization. hence, this state of affairs contain an enormous potential for demand response programs for peak shaving. 2.3. qatar powergrid the national grid in qatar is operated by the qatar general electricity and water corporation (kahramaa) since year 2000. kahramaa manages more than 12000 substations, 2700 km transmission lines and 2000 overhead lines. the rating of the transmission and distribution network is 400/220/132/66/11 kv. over the last decade, kahramaa has taken bold actions to upgrade the transmission and the generation components to provide a quality performance to its customers. from the generation sector standpoint, even though the peak demand has been steadily increasing, e.g., from 5 gw in 2010 to 7 gw in 2015, the spare capacity is still in the order of 2 − 3 gw. moreover, the transmission network performance indicators are 4 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 smart gridsand load profile in the gcc region domestic (22.2twh) 57% bulk industrial (11.5twh) 30% transmission losses (2.3twh) 6% auxiliary (2.5twh) 7% qatar sectoral energy consumption in 2014 (a) energyconsumptionby sector in qatar (2014). 05/14 07/14 09/14 11/14 01/15 03/15 05/15 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 dates (mm/yy) q a ta r p e a k s y st e m d e m a n d ( m w ) qatar yearly load profile system demand installed capacity (2013) (b) qatar demandprofil in year 2014. qatar maximum and minimum demand (mw) in 2014 max day (7-sept-14) min day (12-feb-14) 0 :3 0 1 :0 0 1 :3 0 2 :0 0 2 :3 0 3 :0 0 3 :3 0 4 :0 0 4 :3 0 5 :0 0 5 :3 0 6 :0 0 6 :3 0 7 :0 0 7 :3 0 8 :0 0 8 :3 0 9 :0 0 9 :3 0 1 0 :0 0 1 0 :3 0 1 1 :0 0 1 1 :3 0 1 2 :0 0 1 2 :3 0 1 3 :0 0 1 3 :3 0 1 4 :0 0 1 4 :3 0 1 5 :0 0 1 5 :3 0 1 6 :0 0 1 6 :3 0 1 7 :0 0 1 7 :3 0 1 8 :0 0 1 8 :3 0 1 9 :0 0 1 9 :3 0 2 0 :0 0 2 0 :3 0 2 1 :0 0 2 1 :3 0 2 2 :0 0 2 2 :3 0 2 3 :0 0 2 3 :3 0 0 :0 0 2,000 4,000 6,000 get the data created with datawrapper (c) qatar hourlyload profile formaxand minusage days in 2012. figure 5. increasingenergy demandin the gcc maximum and minimum system load in qatar max min 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 kahramaa statistics report 2014 2,000 4,000 6,000 (a) maximumandminimumenergyconsumptionin qatar. qatar energy consumption in 2014 (mwh) m o n th 2,056 j a n u a ry 1,882 f e b ru a ry 2,411 m a rc h 2,901 a p ri l 3,685 m a y 3,928 j u n e 4,419 j u ly 4,431 a u g u s t 4,179 s e p te m b e r 3,783 o c to b e r 2,725 n o v e m b e r 2,287 d e c e m b e r kahramaa statistics report 2014 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 (b) qatar energy consumptionper monthin year 2014. qatar key statistics 2014 system domestic industrial demand growth (%) from 2013 load factor (%) 20 40 60 80 (c) demandgrowthand load factor. figure 6. statistics of qatari nationalgridin 2014 bahrain electricity consumption per sector (mwh) source: kingdom of bahrain central informatics organization 113 2,000 4,000 6,426 2002 ’04 ’06 ’08 ’10 2012 domestic commercial industrial (a) energy consumptionby sector in bahrain. bahrain energy consumption in 2013 (mwh) 745 j a n u a ry 688 f e b ru a ry 859 m a rc h 1,102 a p ri l 1,396 m a y 1,533 j u n e 1,786 j u ly 1,784 a u g u s t 1,688 s e p te m b e r 1,295 o c to b e r 990 n o v e m b e r 836 d e c e m b e r 500 1,000 1,500 (b) electricityconsumptionper monthin bahrain. bahrain peak load in 2012 (mwh) 1,360 j a n u a ry 1,492 f e b ru a ry 1,786 m a rc h 2,193 a p ri l 2,988 m a y 3,040 j u n e 3,034 j u ly 3,152 a u g u s t 3,106 s e p te m b e r 2,674 o c to b e r 2,074 n o v e m b e r 1,509 d e c e m b e r 1,000 2,000 3,000 (c) peak load per monthin bahrain. figure 7. bahrain powergridstatistics also very positive. in 2013 and 2014, the cumulative number of minutes that the transmission system was compromised due to failures was less than 20 seconds at each month. next, we present the key statistics for qatar. in figure 5a, we show the energy consumption by sector. it can be seen that majority of the electricity is consumed by domestic customers due to high demand for cooling. the country load profiles, daily, monthly, or yearly contain valuable information on the applicability of the potential smart grid applications. in the case of gcc members, the load profiles reveal how much energy can be exchanged and determine the possible integration renewables and demand response technologies. currently, there is no publicly available load profile data in any of the member states. however, the electric utility of qatar regularly shares the peak system usage on their social media page. hence, we developed a simple data scraping software to collect the data for the last twelve months. we present the yearly load profile of qatar in figure 5b. it can be seen that the peak demand occurs in august when the school season 5 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 islamsafak bayram dubai power grid statistics installed capacity (mw) peak demand (mw) 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 source: www.dewa.gov.ae 2,000 4,000 6,000 8,000 (a) dubaipowergridstatistics. domestic (10.8twh) 27% bulk industrial (3.6twh) 9% commercial (18.4twh) 47% auxiliary (3.2twh) 8% others *3.2twh)8% (b) energy consumptionby sector in dubai(2014). peak monthly demand in united arabic emirates (2014) peak demand (mw) available generation (mw) j a n f e b m a r a p r m a y j u n j u l a u g s e p o c t n o v d e c 5,000 10,000 (c) uae peak demandstatistics (2014). figure 8. unitedarabic emirates powergridstatistics starts and there is a high demand for air conditioning. moreover, the work in [24] states that there is a linear correlation between the daily peak temperature and the daily peak consumption for days that are warmer than 22 celsius. moreover, the seasonal gap between the winter and the summer demand leads to unused system capacity that can be used trade electricity between neighboring countries. this is better depicted in figure 5c, where we show the half-hourly demand profile of two sample days from 2014: the first one is the day with the peak system demand (september 7, 2014) and the second is the day with the lowest customer demand (february 12, 2014). the results show that there is a high potential to employ demand response techniques to control electricity consumption, in particular for the air conditioning load. figures 6a, 6b and 6c depicts the further statistics for qatar, namely maximum and minimum system load over the years, energy consumption per month and load factor for each sector. it can be seen that the grid operations are mainly shaped by the human activities. 2.4. bahrain powergrid the power grid in the kingdom of bahrain is operated by the electricity and water authority. bahrain is physically the smallest (770 km2 of the six gcc members and contains the lowest number of inhabitants as well. according to 2012 statistics, the number of transmission substations and their ratings are as follows: there are 10 substations with 33 kv, 114 substations with 66 kv, and 21 substations with 220 kv. the physical length of the transmission lines are 775, 300, and 44 km for 66 kv, 220 kv, and 33 kv, respectively. the statistics of bahrain national grid is similar to qatar. the energy consumption is dominated by the domestic usage (depicted in figure 7a).the peak and the aggregated energy consumption is high at summer seasons as well. the related grid profiles are shown in figures 7b and 7c, respectively. 2.5. unitedarabic emirates powergrids the power grids in united arabic emirates is operated by five authorities, namely abu dhabi water and electricity authority (adwea), dubai electricity and water authority (dewa), sharjah electricity and water authority (sewa), and federal electricity and water authority (fewa) for northern emirates. uae is the second largest member of the gcc and the first member to deploy nuclear power plant in the region. in order to gain more insights, we provide details for the dewa because it is the largest utility in uae. according to 2014 statistics, the number of transmission and distribution substations for the 400/132/33/11 kv are 19, 201, 123, and 28874 respectively. the physical length of the corresponding overhead (ohc) and underground cables (uc) are 1142, 2075, 2487, and 26876 km, respectively. the number of customers in 2014 was 677751. the customer portfolio has also similarities with bahrain and qatar, as 73% of the customers are residential. 24.87% constitutes the commercial customers, just 0.37% is the industrial customers, and the rest is the non-commercial government buildings (e.g., hospitals, schools, etc.). as depicted in figure 8a, dewa has been expanding its generation capacity to keep up with the increasing peak demand. the performance of the dewa grid is also remarkable solid: the customer minutes lost was 5.62 minutes in 2013 and the power losses were 3.46%. the customer portfolio is presented in figure 8b for dubai and the peak generation (mw) is given in figure 8c. 2.6. kingdomof saudi arabia powergrid the kingdom of saudi arabia is the largest member of the gcc in terms of population, economy, and 6 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 smart gridsand load profile in the gcc region energy production by plant type 2013 (gwh) 2014 (gwh) diesel combined-cycle gas steam 0,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 (a) electricitygenerationby type (2013-2014). domestic (135.9twh) 50% bulk industrial (51.5twh) 19% commercial (42.2twh) 15% govermental (35.6 (twh)13% other (9.2twh)3% (b) energy consumptionby sector in ksa (2014). ksa peak demand (isolated & interconnected networks) interconnected (2013) interconnected (2014) isolated (2013) isolated (2014) total peak (2013) total peak (2014) peak demand (mw) 20,000 40,000 (c) ksa peak demandstatistics (2014). figure 9. nationalgridof kingdomof saudi arabia (ksa)statistics oman maximum and minimum demand peak load (mw) minimum load (mw) 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 (a) minimumandmaximumdemandinoman(2005-2013). domestic (4.2twh) 48% commercial (2.3twh) 27% govermental (1.6 (twh) 19% other (0.5twh) 6% (b) energy consumptionby sector in muscot region (2014). system availability in oman (%) 97.7 2005 98.23 2006 95.99 2007 98.49 2008 97.76 2009 98.46 2010 99.33 2011 99.65 2012 99.23 2013 20 40 60 80 (c) omanpowergrid availabilitystatistics. figure 10. omannationalgridstatistics the power grids. the power grids are operated by the saudi electric company which is a government owned monopoly. in 2014, the generation capacity of ksa was 65 gw delivering power through 554 254 km transmission and distribution lines to more than 7.6 million customers residing in 13 thousand cities and settlements. the changes from 2013 to 2014 suggests that the power grids in ksa are significantly growing: the generation capacity is expanded by 5.9%, the 6.4% increase in the number of customers has lead to 8.0% increase in the peak load. moreover, transmission and distribution networks are grown by 10.1% and 7.1%, respectively and the network losses (both distribution and transmission) added up to 7.5%. the power grid in ksa, more formally named as the national grid sa, is divided into four regions: central region, eastern region, western region, and southern region. figures 9a, 9b, and 9c provides more insights for the national grid sa. figure 9a shows the percentage of different power plant types in ksa. figure 9b shows the electricity consumption by sector, which is similar to other gcc members: the majority of the electricity is consumed by residential customers mostly for cooling needs. moreover, figure 9c shows the peak demand for domestic 60% industrial 20% commercial 14% govermental 5% agriculture 1% figure 11. kuwaitcustomerprofil in 2009. interconnected grid and isolated networks. as given in the next section, ksa contains a considerable amount of scattered and remote settlements, which are not connected to the main grid. the peak demand for such electrified region reaches up to 2.4 gw, which puts additional financial burden on the utility operator. 7 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 islamsafak bayram 2.7. omanpowergrid the omani power grid serves 754 000 three distribution regions served by muscat, mazoon, and majan electricity companies. the transmission grid (220/132kv) is owned and operated by the oman electricity transmission co. and the 400kv connection to gccia grid is yet to be operational, as of january 2016 [1]. the performance figures for the transmission system in 2013 is as follows. the system availability was 99.23%, the average interruption time was 34 minutes, and the unsupplied energy accounted for 1418 mwh [2]. the statistics given in figures 10a, 10b, and 10c provides more insights. the minimum and the maximum demand between 2005 and 2013 is depicted in figure 10a, which shows the huge gap due to hot summer seasons. similar to other members, the majority of the electricity is consumed by residential customers. in muscat region, the biggest distribution grid operator, almost 50% of the electricity is consumed domestically. moreover, figure 10c shows the system availability of the entire power grid. 2.8. kuwaitpowergrid the power grids in kuwait are vertically integrated and they are owned and operated by a the ministry of electricity and water (mew). the grid is entirely dependent on two sources: oil and gas. the stateowned organization, kuwait petroleum corporation is the main supplier of these two fuels and the primary planning driver for the generation and network development are residential housing and commercial projects. the power grid is composed of five voltage levels 400, 275, 132, 33, and 11 kv. 3. gcc interconnected power grid 3.1. overview the interconnection of gcc power grids can be viewed as the first major smart grid activity. the main drivers of the interconnection grid are: (1) cost efficiency; (2) shared spinning reserves; (3) deferred and reduced capacity investments; (4) lower carbon emissions; and (5) development of power markets. the growing energy demand (almost 10% annually) and the sudden demand surges frequently threaten the supply thus requiring costly investments. for example, in figure 2b we present the steady increase in generation capacity expansion for each country. consequently, as shown in figure 2c the peak electricity demand increases and leads to higher operation cost. furthermore, according to the study conducted in [6], there would be a need to invest one hundred billion dollars to meet the growing demand of gcc over the next decade. on the other hand sharing generation and transmission resources can alleviate the upgrade requirements. hence, the interconnection is of paramount importance. the architecture of the gcc interconnected grid presented in figure 12a and the milestones of the project is given in figure 12b. currently, member states are in the phase of creating a power market for energy trading. the real challenge in developing this platform is to find right pricing schemes as the subsidies vary significantly across the region. the benefits of the interconnection grid summarized next. 3.2. benefit the benefits of the gcc interconnection grid is multifaceted. from an economic standpoint, the benefits include improved supply security, higher energy efficiency and savings through sharing spinning reserves. also, the interconnection will reduce additional investments, and operational and maintenance cost. for instance, if saudi arabia can reduce total installed capacity by 2gw, the total savings could be more than $309 million [6]. also, it is estimated that there will be a $180 million us dollars of savings in fuel operating costs from the entire region. moreover, in the case of emergencies the interconnection can provide energy supply. in fact, the security of power supply is one of the primary motivations behind the interconnection grid. according to [9], the gcc power network has prevented 250 sudden power loss incidents among the various member states. the gcc grid can also help to reduce the carbon emissions caused by the using crude oil. countries such as kuwait and saudi arabia can purchase electricity produced from natural gas, nuclear power, or solar from other countries. also, with the help of the proper regulations, independent power producers already started to generate profit through energy exchange. moreover, the member states are considering to create an energy market that can trade electricity with countries like egypt, jordan, iraq, lebanon, syria, and turkey. 3.3. currentstatus since 2009, the gcc members invested around $1.2 billion us dollars to build 900 km long 400kv transmission lines and 7 400 kv substations, and a 1800 mw three-pole back-to-back high voltage direct current (hvdc) converter stations. the connection with bahrain is made with a submarine cable [31]. the hvdc stations are being use to synchronize the 60 hz saudi arabia grid with the rest of the members who are using 50 hz. off note, the hvdc stations located in the gccia is the biggest back-to-back substation in the world that allows sharing of spinning reserves between 60 and 50 hz systems. since 2009, the gcc interconnection grid has been operational and it has improved the security and reliability of the network. according to gcc 8 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 smart gridsand load profile in the gcc region energy exchange in gccia export (gwh) import (gwh) qatar bahrain ksa kuwait uae 50 100 150 (a) energy exchangeforsystemsupport during2014. number of mutual support instances 35 2009 208 2010 178 2011 254 2012 197 2013 226 2014 50 100 150 200 250 (b) numberof mutualsupport instancesamongfiv members. figure 13. the operationof gcc interconnectiongrid forpowersystemstability. saudi arabia kuwait bahrain qatar omanuae 100km 90km 53km 3 1 0 k m 1 1 2 k m 2 9 0 k m 1 5 0 k m 1200mw 600mw 750mw 400mw 9 0 0 m w 1 2 0 0 m w 2 0 0 k v 2 0 0 k v 200kv 400kv 400kv 400kv 400kv 400kv 400kv (a) electricitymapof the gcc grid[21] gccia formation by royal decree2001 phase 1: initial contracts awarded2005 uae own reinforcement2005 gccia became operational2009 first energy exchange2010 phase 3: uae grid synch.2011 phase 3: oman grid synch.2011 power market establishment2015 (b) gcciamilestones. figure 12. gcc interconnectiongrid overview interconnection authority 2014 annual report, more than 1000 incidents occurred between 2009 and 2014. in figure13b, we present the number of mutual support instances among the member states. notice that oman is excluded from the lists as oman was not connected to the network until 2014. mainly, the interconnected grid ensured that the system operates at the right frequency and voltage standards. moreover, it prevented the system from demand disconnections. for this reason, member states exchange energy through high transmission lines. for instance in 2011, 680 gwh of energy was exchanged between the members and figure 13a shows the amount of energy exports and imports of each gcc member. 4. renewable energy integration the gcc region is endowed with one of the world’s most abundant solar resources and the integration of renewable energy has attracted systematic interest by the governments. the main drivers behind the solar energy are to minimize the electricity generation and reduce the carbon emissions. for end-users, solar generation is expected to have two applications. in the first one, consumers can install pv panels to their rooftops and generate electricity for domestic usage and sell the excess power back to the grid. recently, uae became the first gcc member to allow customers to employ solar rooftops. one key issue is that the region demographics include a significant number of remote scatters farms and villages. typically these locations operate off-grid and burn diesel generators, as the integration of the main grid is not economically viable. hence, the second application would be to run solar panels in off-grid mode that will eliminate the need for burning crude oil. 4.1. goals & potentialanalysis the global horizontal irradiance (ghi) defines the average electricity generated from photovoltaic systems. the measured ghi for the gcc members are 2140, 2160, 2130, 1900, 2050, and 2120 kwh/m2/year for qatar, bahrain, saudi arabia, kuwait, oman, and uae respectively. concentrating solar thermal power (csp) systems are also widely used for solar energy 9 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 islamsafak bayram generation. for csp technology, direct normal irradiance (dni) is used to define the average electricity generation. the measured dni is 2000, 2050, 2000, 1900, 2200, and 2200 kwh/m2/year for qatar, bahrain, saudi arabia, kuwait, oman, and uae respectively. the gcc governments have set solar penetration goals for solar integration. for instance, qatar has a goal of putting 1gw solar panels by 2020 using photovoltaic systems. kingdom of saudi arabia, on the other hand, is aiming to build 41 gw csp by 2032. according to international renewable energy agency, kuwait seeks to create 10 mw photovoltaic and 50mw csp. similarly, oman aims to put 700mw solar capacity by 2020. uae, on the other hand, seeks to generate 15% of the total demand from solar generation by 2020. 4.2. barriers even though the region has a high potential for solar integration, the aforementioned goals cannot be achieved without addressing the following issues. the first problem is with the materials of the pv panels. the efficiency of the crystalline silicon-based photovoltaic solar cells degrade with high temperature and the current technology does not perform well in the region. hence, there has been a growing research and development interests in the region to develop new materials for pv panels for in high-temperature conditions which will also improve solar economics in the region. another barrier to solar integration is the soiling of pv panels due to dust deposition. this is a significant factor as the region frequently experiences sand storms and the performance of the solar systems degrade significantly. for instance according to a study conducted at qatar foundation (qf) [25], the power loss is around 10 − 15% per month on average. similarly, research activities in qf include developing anti-dust technologies such as hydrophobic coatings, robotic cleaners, and electrical shields. currently, renewable energy integration is very limited in the region because the cost of renewable energy systems compared to conventional electricity generation methods is still very costly. hence, there is pressing need to create new policies and incentives to push the solar generation into mainstream acceptance. also, utilities need to create a common standards and regulations and need to consider the effects of solar integration once the gcc grid is fully operational. 5. demand side management demand side management (dsm) refers to a set of rules and policies that aim to optimize the energy consumption at the end-user side. the most popular dsm programs that have been used in practice include energy efficiency, differential tariffs (e.g., timebased tariffs, dynamic pricing), and demand response programs. such programs are also becoming popular in the gcc region, as dsm programs can shave the peak demand and reduce the cost of system operations. the aforementioned subsidies provided by the governments have been discouraging the investments to efficient infrastructures. nevertheless, the gcc members recently started to invest in energy efficiency programs in buildings and transportation systems. for instance, qatar has launched a new energy conservation program called tarsheed, aiming to improve the energy consumption in residential and commercial buildings. similarly, in 2012 saudi arabia launched the saudi energy efficiency program in order to enhance the consumption. similar efforts are carried out in uae: dubai initiated a demand-side management committee to reduce energy demand by 30% by 2030. similarly, sharjah of uae has started a peak load reduction program that enforces citizens to turn off non-essential appliances during peak hours. the gcc members are gradually transforming their transportation systems from oil-based to electric-based [27, 28]. dubai is installing 100 charging stations. qatar is considering to employ electric vehicles for public transportation for the fifa 2022 world cup. smart meters and advanced metering infrastructures are critical enablers of demand side management. qatar utility company kahramaa already started to deploy 17000 smart meters in doha teamed up with siemens for the smart meters [5]. for the case of oman, the work presented in [26] shows that the long-term benefits of load management outweighs the required investments. one essential characteristic of the region is that the vast majority of the energy is consumed at residential units, mostly for air-conditioning. hence, with the help of the communication and sensor technologies, utilities can employ direct load control mechanisms to adjust the load while providing a good level of comfort. also, the integration of social sciences could help to reduce the peak usage. peer pressure is one of the most effective methods of reducing electricity consumption. for instance, a social study in california tries to motivate customers to reduce their consumption by comparing the individual bills with the average consumption of their neighbors. this method enables customers to reduce their consumption by 1.5 to 3.5 percent. our final recommendation is for coupling the solar generation with energy-intensive water desalination process. 5.1. load profile the important part of the demand side management is to analyze the load profiles and assess the potential of demand reductions. one of the major roadblocks that refrains scientist to conduct deeper research on demand side management and smart grids is the lack 10 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 smart gridsand load profile in the gcc region qeeri database web service qeeri server gccia website qatar ksa uae kuwait bahrain figure 14. the real-time gcc power demand automated program. of available datasets for load profiles. the main reason for this is the fact that most of the grids are operated by government agencies which follow conservative policies on data sharing. nevertheless, in this section we provide an overview of efforts on creating the first data repository of load profiles in the gcc region. to the best of our knowledge this is first effort that makes such data publicly available. as shown in figure 14, the load profiles of the five countries are stored at the gccia website. our automated program collects nation-wide information at every minute and stores it to sql database. in figures 15a, 15b, 16a, 16b, 17a, 17b, we present the average load profiles for june, july, and august 2015 for qatar, bahrain, saudi arabia, kuwait, uae, and aggregated gcc, respectively. notice that oman is not in the list because the omani grid is not connected to the gccia yet. the results reveal several important information. first of all, the demand for electricity follows the average temperatures, therefore, demand increases from june to august. another point is that the summer peak occurs once a day in the afternoon around 3 pm and the lowest demand occurs around 5 am before the sun rises due to cooler desert climate. moreover, the load curves prove that there is a great potential to use solar generation, because there is a correlation between the solar generation and the customer peak demand. 6. conclusion in this paper, we provided an overview of the gcc power grid and smart grid efforts. we showed that the interconnection of the grid would improve grid stability, lead to efficient resource usage, and reduce the operation cost. the integration of abundant solar resources and the implementation of dsm programs can be very useful to substitute diesel generators at remote farms and villages. references [1] oman power and water procurement co. (2015) opwps 7-year statement (2015-2021). [2] oman power and water procurement co. (2013) transmission performance report. [3] oman power and water procurement co. (2013) transmission performance report. [4] el-katiri, l., husain, m: prospects for renewable energy in gcc states-opportunities and the need for reform. oxford institute for energy studies. (2014) [5] abdalla, g..: the deployment of advanced metering infrastructure, ieee first workshop on smart grid and renewable energy, doha, qatar (2015) [6] al-asaad, h.: electricity power sector reform in the gcc region, the electricity journal, vol. 22, issue 9, pp. 58 -64, nov, 2009 [7] shaahid, s.m., el-amin, i.: techno-economic evaluation of off-grid hybrid photovoltaic?diesel?battery power systems for rural electrification in saudi arabia a way forward for sustainable development, renewable and sustainable energy reviews, vol 13, issue 3, 2009 [8] may, p., ehrlich, h.c., steinke, t.: zib structure prediction pipeline: composing a complex biological workflow through web services. in: nagel, w.e., walter, w.v., lehner, w. (eds.) euro-par 2006. lncs, vol. 4128, pp. 1148–1158. springer, heidelberg (2006) [9] al-ebrahim, a.: super grid increases system stability. in transmission and distribution world (2012) [10] charles, c., moerenhout, t., bridle, r., the context of fossil-fuel subsidies in the gcc region and their impacts on renewable energy development, international institute for sustainable development (2014) [11] foster, i., kesselman, c.: the grid: blueprint for a new computing infrastructure. morgan kaufmann, san francisco (1999) [12] kassakian, j., schmalensee, r., the future of the electric grid: an interdisciplinary mit study, 2012 [13] czajkowski, k., fitzgerald, s., foster, i., kesselman, c.: grid information services for distributed resource sharing. in: 10th ieee international symposium on high performance distributed computing, pp. 181–184. ieee press, new york (2001) [14] foster, i., kesselman, c., nick, j., tuecke, s.: the physiology of the grid: an open grid services architecture for distributed systems integration. technical report, global grid forum (2002) [15] qatar general electricity and water corporation, http://www.km.com.qa/ [16] electricity and water authority of bahrain, http://www.mew.gov.bh/ [17] saudi electricity company, http://www.se.com.sa/ [18] ministry of electricity and water of kuwait, http://www.mew.gov.kw/ [19] abu dhabi water and electricity company, http://www.adwec.ae/ 11 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 islamsafak bayram 0 5 10 15 20 4.5 5 5.5 6 6.5 7 hour of the day (0−23) q a ta r h o u rl y l o a d p ro fi le ( g w ) june 2015 july 2015 august 2015 (a) qatar load profile 0 5 10 15 20 2.2 2.4 2.6 2.8 3 3.2 hour of the day (0−23) b a h ra in h o u rl y l o a d p ro fi le ( g w ) june 2015 july 2015 august 2015 (b) bahrain load profile figure 15. the operationof gcc interconnectiongrid forpowersystemstability. 0 5 10 15 20 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 hour of the day (0−23) k s a h o u rl y l o a d p ro fi le ( g w ) june 2015 july 2015 august 2015 (a) kingdomof saudi arabia load profile 0 5 10 15 20 8.5 9 9.5 10 10.5 11 11.5 12 12.5 hour of the day (0−23) k u w a it h o u rl y l o a d p ro fi le ( g w ) june 2015 july 2015 august 2015 (b) kuwaitload profile figure 16. the operationof gcc interconnectiongrid forpowersystemstability. 0 5 10 15 20 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 hour of the day (0−23) u a e h o u rl y l o a d p ro fi le ( g w ) june 2015 july 2015 august 2015 (a) unitedarabic emirates load profile 0 5 10 15 20 75 80 85 90 95 100 hour of the day (0−23) g c c ( e x c e p t o m a n ) h o u rl y l o a d p ro fi le ( g w ) june 2015 july 2015 august 2015 (b) aggregatedgcc load profile figure 17. the operationof gcc interconnectiongrid forpowersystemstability. [20] electricity holding company , http://www.electricity.com.om/ [21] gulf cooperation council interconnection authority, http://www.gccia.com.sa/ [22] the world bank, data.worldbank.org/indicator/en. atm.co2e.pc [23] emirates nuclear energy cooperation, http://www.enec.gov.ae/ 12 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.co2e.pc data.worldbank.org/indicator/en.atm.co2e.pc smart gridsand load profile in the gcc region [24] gastli, a., charabi, y., alammari, r., al-ali, a.: correlation between climate data and maximum electricity demand in qatar. in: ieee gcc conference and exhibition, doha, qatar (2013) [25] guo, b., javed, w., figgis, w., mirza, t.: effect of dust and weather conditions on photovoltaic performance in doha, qatar, in: ieee first workshop on smart grid and renewable energy, doha, qatar, (2015) [26] malik, a., bouzguenda, m.: effects of smart grid technologies on capacity and energy savings e a case study of oman, energy, vol.54, pp.365-371 (2013) [27] bayram, i.s., michailidis, g., devetsikiotis, m.: unsplittable load balancing in a network of charging stations under qos guarantees, ieee transactions on smart grid, vol.6, issue 3, pp. 1292-1302 (2015) [28] bayram, i.s., tajer a., abadllah, m., qaraqe, k.: capacity planning frameworks for electric vehicle charging stations with multiclass customers, ieee transactions on smart grid, vol.6, issue 4, pp. 1934-1943 (2015) [29] mohsenian-rad, m. : optimal demand bidding for time-shiftable loads, ieee transactions on power systems, vol. 30, issue 2, 939-951 (2015) [30] california iso, http://www.caiso.com/1c78/ 1c788230719c0.pdf [31] aljohani, tawfiq m., and abdullah m. alzahrani. "the operation of the gccia hvdc project and its potential impacts on the electric power systems of the region." (2014). 13 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e1 http://www.caiso.com/1c78/1c788230719c0.pdf http://www.caiso.com/1c78/1c788230719c0.pdf 1 introduction 2 current power grid operations 2.1 overview 2.2 pricing & customer types 2.3 qatar power grid 2.4 bahrain power grid 2.5 united arabic emirates power grids 2.6 kingdom of saudi arabia power grid 2.7 oman power grid 2.8 kuwait power grid 3 gcc interconnected power grid 3.1 overview 3.2 benefits 3.3 current status 4 renewable energy integration 4.1 goals & potential analysis 4.2 barriers 5 demand side management 5.1 load profiles 6 conclusion an event-driven health service bus despina t. meridou school of electrical and computer engineering, ntua, heroon polytechniou 9, 15773, athens, greece dmeridou@icbnet.ece.ntua.gr charalampos z. patrikakis department of electronics engineering, tei of piraeus, petrou ralli & thivon 250, 12244, egaleo, greece bpatr@teipir.gr andreas p. kapsalis school of electrical and computer engineering, ntua, heroon polytechniou 9, 15773, athens, greece akapsalis@icbnet.ece.ntua.gr iakovos s. venieris school of electrical and computer engineering, ntua, heroon polytechniou 9, 15773, athens, greece venieris@cs.ntua.gr panagiotis kasnesis school of electrical and computer engineering, ntua, heroon polytechniou 9, 15773, athens, greece pkasnesis@yahoo.gr dimitra-theodora i. kaklamani school of electrical and computer engineering, ntua, heroon polytechniou 9, 15773, athens, greece dkaklam@mail.ntua.gr abstract the enormous set of health and wellbeing data sources, as well as the diversity of the data, calls for an effective, time-aware integration paradigm that aids at the manipulation of the information by experts as a whole and not as individual pieces of knowledge. in this paper, we present the health service bus, a service-based platform built on top of the enterprise service bus architecture. treating new information, either humangenerated (e.g., doctors, dieticians, etc.) or device-generated (i.e., smart wristbands or connected scales) as events allows for in-time action and treatment. platform interoperability is ensured both on service level, since any service irrespective of its specification can be plugged into the health service bus seamlessly, and on data level, since health standards, such as hl7 fhir and loinc, are leveraged. categories and subject descriptors i.2.1 [artificial intelligence]: applications and expert systems – medicine and science; i.2.4 [artificial intelligence]: knowledge representation formalisms and methods – semantic networks; j.3 [computer applications]: life and medical sciences – medical information systems general terms management, performance, design, standardization. keywords health service bus; enterprise service bus; quad store; health and lifelogging data ontology. 1. introduction the increasingly vast number of health-related connected devices and applications has led to the emerging need for a data integration paradigm, enabling the overall processing of health and well-being data on the basis of remote healthcare and home recovery. at the same time, in order to ensure the completeness of the patient’s profile, the medical history, maintained by hospitals and medical centers, needs to be incorporated. in this paper, we present an enterprise service bus based platform, named “health service bus”, which is able to aggregate health data for a particular user/patient and maintain them in a semantic format, ensuring seamless homogeneity and interoperability. new data entering the platform are ultimately treated as events, achieving on-the-fly access by any interested application, service or medical center. we assume that data are transferred by applying the hl7 fhir standard and that they arrive at the platform expressed using the loinc standard and then they are transformed in rdf based on a target vocabulary. any interested party can take advantage of the initial and the transformed data by sending a request to the appropriate service of the health service bus. the rest of the paper is organized as follows: in section ii, work related to the health service bus is discussed. section iii presents the architecture of the platform, whereas in section iv the data storage and management techniques adopted in the health service bus are described. section v presents the client functionality offered by the platform and, finally, in section vi, we summarize the conclusions and remarks of our work, as well as issues for future study. 2. related work in this paper, our view is to examine the use of an intelligent enterprise service bus (iesb) [1] in the field of healthcare. the iesb used as a basis for the design of the proposed platform has been based on the service bus developed within the fp7 european project arum [2], focusing in production management. the iesb of arum is a service-based, multiagent platform for managing the production of highlycustomized products, such as aircrafts and ships, especially in the ramp-up and small-lot modes. the service bus is implemented on top of jbossesb, an open-source enterprise mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261684 service bus in java programming language. the services that are deployed in the iesb provide scheduling and planning functionality, as well as functions of ontological data management and security. while in arum data are coming from the legacy systems of companies (e.g., mes and erp systems), we are arguing that the same architecture could be used to serve the needs of a healthcare management system based on the collection of data from wearable and other smart devices. the idea of using a service bus for healthcare management is not new: ibm has proposed in the past the use of ibm healthcare service bus [3], a platform for enabling the integration of multiple healthcare-related services. the deployed services may belong to the category of consumers, such as applications that request a service, or to the category of providers, such as applications that provide a requested service. each consumer or provider is assigned to a binding component, which collects all requests, transforms them to an internal format, understood by all the binding components of the system and then forwards it to a normalized message router, through which the message eventually arrives to the appropriate producer or consumer. the integration of heterogeneous services is accomplished with the use of the wsdl, soap, and hl7 standards. in [4], a health service bus, based on the mule open source esb, is presented. each application or service connected to the service bus is considered an abstract endpoint. the physical implementation of each abstract endpoint is called a service container and provides the interface of the service to the service bus. a translation service is responsible for transforming all health-related data in xml format. during the transformation process, from and to hl7 v2, hl7 v3 and openehr, an ontology-based mapping tool, named owlmt, is used. while the above described healthcare-related platforms are service-based and aim at the interoperability of heterogeneous health services, they do not leverage the major advantages of the semantic languages owl and rdf, which play a key role in the seamless integration of disparate data. even though ryan and eklund [5] make use of ontologies, their use is limited to the data transformation process. above all, in our approach, we can take advantage of the inference mechanisms supported by semantic languages and reason over the transformed healthcare and well-being data. 3. general description of the health service bus platform the health service bus platform has been designed having in mind three directives: (a) the idea of treating new data related to the health and well-being of a user of the platform as events arriving at a publish/subscribe endpoint, easing their effective handling and sharing within services deployed in the platform as well as within services and tools external to the platform, such as custom mobile applications, healthcare systems, etc., (b) the ability to easily connect and integrate with existing and future personal health monitoring systems and tools, including both single device solutions such as wearable devices that monitor specific living conditions and parameters such as calories burned, and middleware solutions capable of providing comprehensive personal health records and (c) the capability of easily extending the connectivity of the presented platform, and linking it to similar platforms, taking advantage of the capabilities of existing decision support systems for health, and allowing professionals and practitioners to connect and make use of it, through the development of the necessary tools and interfaces. the above have been reflected in a service-oriented platform, named “health service bus”, as depicted in figure 1. as described in the following sections, health and well-being data are collected for each platform user from wearable devices, such as smart watches, bluetooth-enabled toothbrushes, smart pills with edible microchips, etc. we assume that data collected from external to the platform devices are formatted on the basis of the universal code system defined by loinc. once the loinc data have entered the platform, they are semantically annotated on the basis of a well-defined knowledge base, namely the hld ontology described in section iv. data produced by the hsb services, such as alerts on elevated blood pressure, on the basis of the received data are treated as events and sent to a dedicated topic of the health service bus. all services are subscribed to this topic, named “health and well-being data events (hwde)” topic, this way receiving immediately and being able to process newly fetched information. the hsb services are able to communicate with each other with respect to internal issues in two ways. for point-to-point communication, a jms queue is defined for each service. for example, when the query service wants to send a sparql request to the semantic service, it has to “place” the appropriate message to the queue of the latter. for the services to be able to communicate in a publish/subscribe fashion, a second topic has been defined, namely the health service bus (hsb) topic. in this course, when new loinc data arrive at the platform, the loinc data handler, which acts as the entry point for the loinc data, sends a message to the hsb topic through the events manager service, notifying all the subscribed services. 4. data storage and management data storage in the platform consists of the loinc data warehouse (ldw), the quad store and the rules repository. as described below, the loinc data handler is handling the ldw, while the semantic service, the events manager service and the data analysis service have direct access and update rights with respect to the quad store data. finally, the rules repository is a jena-based data structure of semantic rules, which are exploited by the data analysis service for inference purposes. we assume that data arriving at the platform have the form of fhir messages, thus ensuring platform interoperability. even in the cases, where the data collected by devices or connected figure 1. the hsb architecture middleware do not comply with the fhir and loinc standards, translator modules from the proprietary format to fhir and loinc compliant formats will be used, making use of the device vendor’s api. these translator modules are implemented as part of the loinc data handler. the loinc data handler is the main entry point of the platform regarding new data. new data are collected directly from wearable and environmental devices and are assumed to be fully fhir and loinc compliant. the loinc data handler component stores the data in their initial form in a documenttype database. the motivation behind the selection of nosql databases was primarily performance and the semi-structured form of the data. once newly arrived data are stored in the database, the loinc data handler pushes a new event in the hsb topic of the health service bus via the events manager service. at the same time, it sends a message to the queue of the semantic service in order to inform the service of the new batch of data that is available for transformation. after the loinc data have been stored in the nosql database, they are sent to the queue of the semantic service by the loinc data handler. the role of the semantic service is twofold. on the one hand, once it receives the data in their initial format, it has to semantically annotate them by exploiting predefined mappings between the fields that a message may contain and the schema of the hld ontology. in this way, we are moving from raw to meaningful data. at the same time, ubiquitous and seamless integration of data coming from multiple devices of different vendors is achieved. this processing stage includes transforming the loinc data into rdf quads, this way organizing the rdf dataset in useroriented graphs. thereby, processing and querying the data for a specific user becomes faster and more effective. on the other hand, the semantic service is responsible for providing access to the semantic data, since not all hsb services have direct access rights to the data store (e.g., query service). once the transformation is completed, the semantic service stores the meaningful data in a jena-based quad store. access to the quad store is realized by means of an api, enabling the application of generic queries expressed in sparql, the query language for semantic data, as well as of more user-specific queries by leveraging predefined functions (e.g., api methods for acquiring a user’s medical history). finally, the semantic data are linked to the respective records of the loinc data warehouse, enabling, this way, to access and process the data in their initial form, when necessary (e.g., in case a third-party entity, such as a hospital, wants to get access to the health data of a patient). the target schema, according to which the semantic data are produced, is entitled “health and lifelogging data hld” ontology and is depicted in figure 2. the hld ontology defines concepts relevant to health and lifelogging data aggregated for a person by a specific device. in this respect, each individual piece of information arriving at the loinc data handler is represented by an individual of the observation class and is linked to the appropriate individual of the person class, denoting the data owner. each observation instance is linked to an observationtype, defining this way the semantic type of the observation (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, etc.). an individual of the observationtype class is associated with up to three values, reflecting the defined lower, normal and higher value. the observation class is also linked to the collected value through the hasobservationvalue property, as well as the unit accompanying the value through the hasobservationunit property, a timestamp through the hastimestamp property and the alert class, which is instantiated in case of the need of an alert through the hwde topic. an observation is linked to the deviceagent that generates it and may happen while the data owner is occupied with an activity, such as running or sleeping. finally, the information captured for a given person includes any recorded symptoms through the symptom class and the hassymptom property, medical conditions (e.g., hearing impairment) that he may suffer from, the data owner’s age, sex and body measurements, as well as any goals they may have set, such as loss of weight, body fat or the total number of calories burned during a day. as far as the body measurement of a person is concerned, a value and a unit are recorded through the bodymeasurementvalue and bodymeasurementunit, respectively, and the semantic type of the body measurement, such as waist or hip measurement, through the bodymeasurementtype class. next in the conceptual flow of data within the hsb is the data analysis service, a service responsible for extracting additional information based on the transformed semantic data. the data analysis service takes advantage of a rules repository, filled with health and well-being-related rules. these rules have been extracted from recommendations of the american heart association [5] and other similar health-related organizations. by applying the semantic rules to the quad store data, the data analysis service can infer whether the blood pressure of a user figure 2. the health and lifelogging data (hld) ontology is low or high, if the amount of food and vegetables consumed within the day conforms to the ideal daily quantity based on the experts’ recommendations, if the amount of time spent on an activity qualifies them as “active”, etc. for instance, some experts’ recommendations that led to the formulation of the hsb semantic rules are the following:  the normal blood pressure values for an adult over 20 years old are 120/80 mm hg (less than 120 systolic and less than 80 diastolic). [6]  a user should take up at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity at least 5 days per week for a total of at least 150 minutes of activity. [7]  a user should be involved in an activity for more than 10 minutes in order for this activity to be considered as exercise to boost their well-being. [8] overall, the data analysis service enriches the quad store with information about the condition, actions and habits of the data owner and publishes this information to the hsb in the form of events via the events manager service. events generated within the platform are sent to the queue of the events manager service, which ultimately publishes them to the appropriate topic after verifying their validity. in particular, the events manager service has to first parse the event and check whether the contained data do exist in the quad store, for example, in order to avoid references to wrong or obsolete object uris. then, the service has to make sure that such an event can originate from the sender of the event message based on internal security rules and logic. if all checks are successful, the event is forwarded to the appropriate topic, apart from this, the event is stored in the quad store for future reference. 5. client functionality of the platform the functionality of the platform is exposed to third-party applications by means of several apis. in this respect, three hsb services have been defined, namely the loinc data warehouse endpoint, the client service and the query service. the loinc data warehouse endpoint provides wellbeing data in their original form. its practical usefulness lies in the fact that third party apis of different organizations (hospitals or medical institutions) many times need data in raw format in order to process them according to their own needs. in a similar way, professionals that are authorized to access specific user data may need to access the medical history with respect to a particular metric so that they can perform a more thorough diagnosis. the data are retrieved directly from the nosql database, which is ideal for allowing the retrieval of big chunks of data. the client service provides client applications of the platform with updates. notifications and updates regarding user activity are retrieved by the client service. events from the hwde topic of the health service bus are constantly being pushed to any client application that uses the client service. client applications can range from specialized uis for professionals that are authorized to track the progress of a specific platform user to dashboards that can be used from users to control their data, devices and profiles. in any case, the client service is meant to provide data that correspond to progress updates, notifications (alerts) or combined knowledge that is extracted from the analysis of semantic data. overall, it acts as the “connection point” between the hsb and any other service or application that is not jbossesb-based. the hsb platform offers the capability of feeding external, custom-made applications with the loinc data in their semantically enriched and reasoned-over format. mobile application developers are able to send requests to the query service in the form of a sparql query, which is then forwarded to the queue of the semantic service. this way, developers are able to avoid the task of wearables data integration and homogenization and take advantage of the semantic data in the scope of building the functionality of their application. 6. conclusion and future work the enterprise service bus architectural paradigm provides an efficient way of integrating heterogeneous services and tools. in this paper, we examined the idea of adjusting a productionoriented esb to the needs of healthcare. in hsb, homogenization is achieved by means of ontologies and access to integrated health data is given via services having welldefined functionality. the health service bus can be exploited by a plethora of medical professionals as well as mobile application developers, facilitating this way tasks involved in the trending field of remote healthcare. 7. references [1] c. a. marín, l. mönch, l. liu, n. mehandjiev, g. v. lioudakis, d. kazanskaia, v. chepegin, “application of intelligent service bus in a ramp-up production context” in proceedings of the industrial track of the conference on advanced information systems engineering 2013 (caise'13), caise-it 2013: international conference on advanced information systems engineering (caise) industrial track; valencia, spain. ceur workshop proceedings; 2013. p. 33-40. [2] arum, adaptive production management. [online]. available from: http://arum-project.eu/. last accessed: 30/04/2015. [3] ibm, integrating healthcare services, part 1: using an enterprise service bus for healthcare. [online]. available from: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-hsb1/. last accessed: 16/05/2015. [4] a. ryan and p. eklund, “the health service bus: an architecture and case study in achieving interoperability in healthcare”. studies in health technology and informatics 160: pp. 922-926. [5] american heart association. [online]. available from: http://www.heart.org/heartorg/. last accessed 26/05/2015. [6] american heart association, “understanding blood pressure readings”. [online]. available from: www.heart.org/heartorg/conditions/highbloodpressu re/abouthighbloodpressure/understanding-bloodpressure-readings_ucm_301764_article.jsp. last accessed 26/05/2015. [7] american heart association, “american heart association recommendations for physical activity in adults”. [online]. available from: http://www.heart.org/heartorg/gettinghealthy/physica lactivity/fitnessbasics/american-heart-associationrecommendations-for-physical-activity-inadults_ucm_307976_article.jsp. last accessed 26/05/2015. [8] mobihealthnews, “fitbit changes the way it tracks active minutes”. [online]. available from: http://mobihealthnews.com/42241/fitbit-extends-minimumtime-frame-for-active-minutes/. last accessed 26/05/2015. flexible access to patient data through e-consent haridimos kondylakis forth-ics n. plastira 100, vassilika vouton, crete, greece kondylak@ics.forth.gr giorgos flouris forth-ics n. plastira 100, vassilika vouton, crete, greece fgeo@ics.forth.gr irini fundulaki forth-ics n. plastira 100, vassilika vouton, crete, greece fundul@ics.forth.gr vassilis papakonstantinou forth-ics n. plastira 100, vassilika vouton, crete, greece papv@ics.forth.gr manolis tsiknakis forth-ics n. plastira 100, vassilika vouton, crete, greece tsiknaki@ics.forth.gr abstract the advances in healthcare and information technology are shifting more and more the ownership of data from medical institutions and doctors to individual citizens. however, since the medical information of an individual is confidential, the only basis for sharing it, is through prior informed consent which will regulate access to his private healthcare data. this paper highlights challenges investigated in three eu research projects and presents a solution utilizing novel access control mechanisms to ensure the selective exposure of the patients’ sensitive information thereby empowering them. our solution can efficiently support the entire lifecycle of consent such as withdrawal, activation, deletion or update. moreover it responds to complex and different scenarios in which the patient can define complicated and dynamic access control policies at different granularity levels. in this paper we propose a personal health record (phr) system, accessible through desktop and mobile devices, that explores the efficient access regulation to information according to the consent forms provided by the patients. 1. introduction a recent report by the ehealth task force entitled “redesigning health in europe for 2020”1 focuses on how to achieve a vision of affordable, less intrusive and more personalized care, ultimately, increasing the quality of life as well as lowering mortality. such a vision depends on the application of ict, the use of data and requires a radical redesign of health to meet these challenges. the starting point for such a redesign, as identified by the report, is enacting individual ownership of personal health data. the adopted theme is “my data, my decisions”. individuals are 1 http://goo.gl/wyizho the owners and controllers of their own health data, they can manage their data with their personal devices, and have the right to make decisions on who can access the data and to be informed about how it will be used. this principle is outlined in eu law but is rarely fully implemented in health systems. in parallel, a second main driver for change is currently taking place under the term “liberate the data”. the secondary use of care data for research, quality assurance and patient safety is still rarely supported and the main barriers to this are the lack of interoperability, common standards and terminologies. large amounts of data are currently stored in different silos within health and social care systems. if this data is released in an appropriate manner respecting the patients’ privacy and used effectively it could transform the way that care is provided. this paper focuses on current research activities within three eu research projects ( imanagecancer2, eureca3, p-medicine4) which are currently trying to enable individuals who are the owners and controllers of their own health data, with the right to make decisions over access to their data and to be informed about how it will be used by third parties. more specifically, the scenario that we envisage is that the patients’ data are stored in some repository, upon which several data consumers (such as doctors, nurses, funding organizations, insurance companies etc.) would require access for different purposes. in such a setting, we explore how to enforce appropriate access control to the patients’ data, given the electronic consent forms that are provided by the patients. at the same time a key requirement is to support the release of the data from different silos throughout the healthcare system and to connect them to the vibrant digital environment for health information which is expected to transform the landscape of healthcare. our approach relies on the rdf data model [3] that promotes the interoperability among e-health systems among others and has the following benefits: 2 http://imanagecancer.eu/ 3 http://eurecaproject.eu/ 4 http://p-medicine.eu/ mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261673 • it provides an appropriate access control enforcement mechanism, that essentially filters the data shown to a data consumer, depending on who the consumer is, his current role, the purpose of access, and the access rights imposed by the consent form(s) for the patient’s data as specified by the patient herself. • it allows partial release of personal health information at different granularity levels. the patient can avoid the low-level detail but is also capable of defining fine grained access control to his/her information. • instead of defining explicitly the roles that may have (or not) access to the information, access privilege to entire hierarchies of roles can be used. • it manages the entire lifecycle of consent such as consent withdrawal, activation, and deletion. it handles updates on information efficiently and effectively without requiring each time e-consent redefinition. in addition, it can handle emergency situations and provides an auditing mechanism to ensure proper system usage. providing patients with consent management offers a dual benefit: first of all there is the direct empowerment aspect of controlling one’s own data; and second, it facilitates interaction with patients in order to ask for new consent for a different purpose, both increasing efficiency and involving the patient actively. the rest of this paper is structured as follows: in section 2 we give example healthcare scenarios that show the complexity of the problem. section 3 focuses on the access control approach that we propose for implementing the patient consent forms. in section 4 we present other approaches that try to resolve similar problems and finally section 5 concludes the paper and presents directions for future work. 2. scenarios, challenges and requirements in this section, we give some example scenarios that highlight the complexity of providing selective access to patients’ health record and analyze the challenges that must be addressed. section 3 presents in detail our approach for addressing these challenges. let us consider a patient, named alice, who moves to another city, or decides to visit a new general practitioner (gp). the gp would require access to alice’s medical history, which consists of several medical tests and reports by various healthcare professionals. all required information is stored in alice’s phr account and the gp would greatly benefit if he could have direct access to alice’s data. to perform this, alice must give permission to the doctor to access her medical record through a consent form. according to the eu data protection directive [6] the data subject’s consent shall mean any freely given specific and informed indication of his wishes by which a data subject signifies his agreement to personal data relating to him being processed. furthermore, according to the same directive, the patient’s personal data may only be accessed if she has given her consent for a well-defined access purpose (”least privilege”); data subjects may withdraw their consent at any time (”right to be forgotten”). in addition, the phr system should offer a simple web-based interface that allows her to access her personal records from everywhere, using her computer, or her smartphone, requiring no special software or hardware. this web interface should provide basic functionality for alice to easily create and manage e-consent forms. such consent forms would allow her to give or withdraw (”right to be forgotten”) consent for specific part(s) of the dataset to specific data consumers (users/roles) and for a specific purpose. moreover, alice should be able to monitor the access requests by different data consumers (in this case, the gp), allowing her to review who is requesting the access, the purpose of the request, and which data is requested and accessed and when. this will allow her to easily decide whether access should be granted, and fill in the corresponding e-consent form. management functionalities for the consent forms would be useful in this respect; for example, alice may decide to change a consent form or she may want to withdraw or delete saved consent forms and to re-activate withdrawn consents. in addition, an auditing mechanism should record each access to one’s medical information to ensure that only authorized accesses are actually realized. assume now that alice is updating her phr. new entries should be checked against existing consent forms so that alice can review whether these forms address in a satisfying manner the newly added information. note that an update could cause other items to be accessible due to correlations in the data. for example, assume that alice has created a consent form through which she accepts to release to a research trial her tumor type if and only if the stage of her tumor is greater or equal to t3. after a future treatment, if the cancer is in recession (cancer stage different than t3), the information that was previously accessible for the specified role and purpose should not be accessible anymore. on the other hand, irrelevant data and consent forms should not be affected by a change in the data. the phr system should ensure that the identification of relevant and non-relevant consent forms and data, as well as the access control enforcement should be efficient. now, suppose that, alice has a car accident and sustains minor injuries. the emergency response team reaches the accident location and starts treating alice. for the treatment, the paramedic requires alice’s consent to access her medical history to get information about her allergies and any serious conditions that she already may have and could interfere with the provided emergency treatment. however, alice is unconscious, and cannot provide the required consent. to support this case, alice’s phr should provide a basic medical data set which can be accessed only in emergency situations. so, the necessary access control mechanisms should be in place specifying not only the user or role that should have access to the information, but also the purpose and the situation in which they apply. auditing will be a measure to prevent data misuse in this case. besides defining explicitly that specific roles have access or not to information, hierarchies of roles could also be used. for example, alice could decide that all emergency medical responders (emrs) have access to her information. since a paramedic is a specialization of an emr all paramedics have also access to her information. from the aforementioned examples, it becomes obvious that specifying a set of authorization policies which capture all the details required to enforce correctly an individual’s decisions about consent is a very complex task and should also adhere to the existing legislations. although work has been done to address the problem of automatically resolving conflicts [11], it is not possible to completely automate the decision since in the specific case of the healthcare scenarios humans are also involved. to complicate matters further, contextual information needs to be captured to identify the purpose of the access being requested. serious consequences might arise if the security administrator does not record correctly all these details in the policy specification. and although the social workflows of the scenarios described in this section are not yet fully in place and some aspects require further exploration, we expect that the situation will soon change. to this direction, in this paper, we explore the technological mechanisms that should be fully in place when this happens. 3. access control mechanism annotation models are simple and straightforward, but cause efficiency problems when dealing with dynamic information, because any change in the dataset would affect some of the implicit annotations, but there is no way to know which ones (or how). thus, a change in the dataset would require the re-computation of all annotation labels to make sure that the access labels of all triples are correct. the same is true if a change in the access control policy happens (which could be as simple as the introduction/ withdrawal of a consent form in our scenario, or as complex as a legislation change that causes massive changes in the accessibility rights of medical data). in our setting, both the data itself and the related accessibility information are dynamic, especially given the fact that any patient can at any given time submit (or withdraw) a consent form that changes the access rights to her information. thus, we chose an abstract access control model, described in [9], which has better computational properties in the presence of dynamic information. in this subsection we give a brief introduction to this model, without entering into too many technical details, as the focus of this paper is on the application of the model in a patient-managed medical data repository; further details on the technical aspects can be found in [9]. unlike standard annotation models, abstract access control models are based on the idea that the accessibility of each data item (triple) is not pre-computed; instead, each data item is associated with an access label, which is essentially an abstract algebraic expression that encodes how the label should be computed (rather than the result of this computation). thus, in abstract access control models, the access control annotation is an algebraic expression, rather than a simple access label (value). these algebraic expressions are constructed using abstract tokens and abstract operators. abstract tokens are explicitly assigned to the data items by the knowledge curator, and determine the ”chunks” of data that need protection: two data items with the same token are necessarily protected under the same access control scheme. all triples associated with the same abstract token are assumed to be of the same ”nature”, as far as accessibility is concerned. abstract operators are applied in cases where the accessibility of a triple is somehow related to the accessibility of other triples, e.g., in the case of inference described above. essentially, abstract operators ”compose” access tokens into more complex algebraic expressions [9]. to identify the accessibility of a given triple, we first compute its abstract label using the abstract token(s) explicitly assigned by the curator (if any) along with any implicit labels (resulting from inference). the final algebraic expression does not, in itself, tell us whether a triple is accessible or not for a given user/role and purpose; to determine that, we need to associate each token with a specific (concrete) value, and each abstract operator with a specific (concrete) algebraic operator. this is the done via the concrete policy, which is a set of definitions determining how abstract tokens and operators should be interpreted (i.e., translated into concrete ones), and allows the computation of the actual accessibility of the triple under question. to allow different accessibility schemes, a different concrete policy per user/role and purpose is defined. in our example scenario, when alice submits an e-consent form (either an explicit one, or a default one), behind the scenes, a new concrete policy is defined for the specified user/role and purpose. moreover, alice can also specify the granularity of the information she is sharing; for example, she can allow only the tumor type to be accessed but not more specific details about it. this is done by specifying the appropriate condition under which an algebraic expression is evaluated to an accessible or inaccessible value. when a patient wants to refine the granularity of data access this is handled by simply defining correctly the concrete policy and more specifically the condition under which an algebraic expression is evaluated to an accessible or inaccessible value. this happens without involving the patient in the definition of low-level algebraic expressions. these are automatically generated as the patient selects the necessary information level from the hierarchy of the data currently available. if alice later decides to change or withdraw her consent, such an update would normally result in the costly recomputation of access control annotations for all triples in standard access control enforcement approaches. however, our technique avoids that by using abstract access control models which persist; the only thing that changes is the way that the algebraic expression is interpreted (when the accessibility of the corresponding triple is computed which is done at query time). similarly, when alice adds new data or updates her existing data, there is no need to re-compute the access labels of all triples and recheck all applicable consents; algebraic expressions allows us to determine which triples are affected by the change, and how, essentially limiting re-computation to the part of the data that is indeed affected. 4. related work in the literature, there have been proposed several approaches for regulating access to data. there are role-based, team-based, attribute-based, content-based, scenario-based, situation-aware, context-aware, and context sensitive access control methods (see [14] and [4] for an overview). however, only some of these approaches have been implemented for healthcare scenarios [4]-[15], a few of them consider the problem in distributed and dynamic scenarios [7] whereas a small number of approaches propose models adherent to healthcare standards [14], [2], [5], [8]. in all these systems the notion of e-consent is integrated with the policy decision mechanism. other approaches focus on the notion of e-consent. for instance, russello et al. [12] propose to capture the notion of consent through the use of medical workflows and to integrate it with ponder2 authorization policies. however, there is no automatic mechanism for managing the lifecycle of consent, such as consent withdrawal, activation or deletion. in another work, asghar and russello [1] suggest a mechanism for managing the consent lifecycle. they introduce a notion of very expressive consent represented as a consent policy. however, they assume that a data subject defines solely his/her consent policies; unfortunately, such a solution may not be acceptable because data subjects may not be able to understand low-level policy details. the same limitations with complicated preferences can be also found in the encore (http://www.encore-project.info) uk research project. in a follow-up work of asghar and russello, called actors [10], a goal-driven approach is presented to glue together and manage authorization policies that aim at handling user consent in a specific context. the authors simplify the specification of authorization policies when these are treated as a program sequence towards a specific goal. by using such teleo-reactive programs a security administrator can capture more naturally the security requirements. however, we believe that both administrator and usual user preferences should be considered when dealing with patient data. wuyts et al. [13] use the xaxml policy language. however, the attributes defined a priori may not be sufficient to capture consent since the latter might involve multiple different conditions and exceptions. other approaches [1] try to overcome this issue, by considering consent as an authorization policy; however, other problems appear in these cases. for example, these approaches require users to specify low-level details, a normal user may not be aware of at the time of policy creation. second, there is no automatic mechanism for managing the consent life-cycle. given the fact that patient information is distributed across different sources, it is required that she should manage her different consent forms in a unified and consistent manner. our approach succeeds in collecting all patient data in a phr and then managing his/her consents in a unified consistent manner. 5. conclusions this paper presents an approach for e-consent implemented on top of a phr system. our approach promotes interoperability among different e-health systems and allows partial release of personal health information at different levels of granularity. the rules generated continue to work when new knowledge is entered in the system or to knowledge inferred by existing data. the system efficiently supports different and complex scenarios in which the user can define complicated and dynamic access control policies. for future work we plan to optimize the system implementation and to evaluate its usability with real patients. in addition, we expect more complex use-cases to appear, which might dictate changes in the approach. it becomes obvious that informed consent is an important topic and several challenging issues remain to be investigated in the near future. 6. acknowledgments this work was partially supported by the imanagecancer (h2020-643529), the p-medicine (fp7-270089) and the eureca (fp7-288048) eu projects 7. references [1] r. g. asghar, m.r. flexible and dynamic consent capturing. in inetsec, 2011. [2] b. blobel. trustworthiness in distributed electronic healthcare records basis of shared care. computer security applications conference, 17, 2001. [3] d. booth, c. dowling, e. fry, s. huff, and j. mandel. rdf as a universal healthcare exchange language. semtech panel, 2013. [4] a. ferreira, r. cruz-correia, l. antunes, and d. chadwick. access control: how can it improve patients’ healthcare? studies in health techn. and informatics, 127, 2007. [5] p. hung. towards a privacy access control model for e-healthcare services. in pst, 2005. [6] n. iheanyi. legal and ethical issues in integrating and sharing databases for translational medical research within the eu. in bibe, 2012. [7] j. j. hu and a. weaver. a dynamic, context-aware security infrastructure for distributed healthcare applications. in workshop on pervasive privacy security, privacy, and trust, 2004. [8] w. jih, s. cheng, y. hsu, and t. tsai. context-aware access control on pervasive healthcare. in mam, 2005. [9] v. papakonstantinou, m. michou, i. fundulaki, g. flouris, and g. antoniou. access control for rdf graphs using abstract models. in sacmat, 2012. [10] a. m. rizwan. actors: a goal-driven approach for capturing and managing consent in e-health systems. in policy, 2012. [11] g. russello, c. dong, and n. dulay. authorisation and conflict resolution for hierarchical domains. in policy, 2007. [12] g. russello, c. dong, and n. dulay. consent-based workflows for healthcare management. in policy, 2008. [13] k. wuyts, r. scandariato, g. verhenneman, and w. joosen. integrating patient consent in e-health access control. ijsse, 2(2):1–24, 2011. [14] m. h. yarmand, k. sartipi, and d. g. down. behavior-based access control for distributed healthcare systems. journal of computer security, 21(1):1–39, 2013. [15] l. zhang, g. j. ahn, and b. chu. a role-based delegation framework for healthcare information systems. in sacmat, 2002. design and development of a rendering system for vehicle riding 1 design and development of a rendering system for vehicle riding n. sreeram charan1,*, k. maheshwar reddy1, e. rakesh reddy1, and n. malarvizhi2 1ug student, department of computer science and engineering, school of computing, vel tech rangarajan dr. sagunthala r&d institute of science and technology, avadi, chennai-600062, tamilnadu, india 2professor, department of computer science and engineering, school of computing, vel tech rangarajan dr. sagunthala r&d institute of science and technology, avadi, chennai-600062, tamilnadu, india abstract this paper propounds the design and development of a web-based system for a car rental company. it enables admin to rent a car that can be used by a customer on a payment basis. the car information can be added to the system or existing car information can be edited or deleted too by the administrator. the gsm/gps based content alert for car rental system making the car available for every common man with a minimum cost and effective use of time, therefore, this application helps the customers to be comfortable and to have the privacy ride as traveling became the part of life. this system makes processing tasks easier and eliminates the traditional record-keeping process. hence this system enhances the car and customer management and provides customer satisfaction thereby maintaining customer retention. keywords: gsm/gps module, customer relationship management, tracking, software as a service. received on 29 june 2020, accepted on 30 january 2021, published on 29 march 2022 copyright © 2022 n. sreeram charan et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i17.161 1. introduction recently, online car rental system facilitates the business owners in handling the business situations smoothly with the development of various built-in models added to the existing car system in addition to their component details, vehicle check-in and check-out details, vehicle history details, expiration details, insurance registration details, and the vehicle availability timings with the date. generally, the user should create a profile when they are ready to take a car by paying the rent and the system will provide with the necessary payment mode. once the registration process had been completed, the user will have a unique id along with their login password provided from the admin side. customers have their rights to pick the car of their own choice specified with the brand names. customers, while selecting a particular type of car could be able to receive the entire details of the vehicle including mileage details (km/hr), rent of the particular car type, cost of the car etc. users should *corresponding author. email: vtu9891@veltechuniv.edu.in offer the system with sufficient information such as the name, address, location of travel, total members accompanying the car, total number of service days etc. the authentic person could be able to receive significant information whenever necessary. customers should provide the system with significant details regarding their particular travel location every time so that the admin could track their cars very easily. they could also cancel their booking status anytime and also select the car types based on the particular members they take on-board. they also have the total authority of changing their travel places. admin system is enabled with the automatic reminder feature through which the customers license, insurance, service and replaced components details could be received based on the particular vehicle. 2. literature survey eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e4 mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:vtu9891@veltechuniv.edu.in n. sreeram charan et al. 2 in today's market, rental options for cars are flooded for the customers to choose the best based on their preferences. customers are provided with plenty of choices in making their own innovative services and products based on the rental opinion [1]. online car rental system serves the best in serving several families and working professionals to get to a place. over the past few years, many shoppers gained advantage from the car rental system in india. this rental business had made an emerging opportunity for the novice customers as previously the locations were limited only to certain physical distances [2]. though the remote locations have not been exterminated; the nature of achieving all these possible function is due to the power of internet. at the present situation, users can register their car online by paying the required rent and once the registered customers reach their car at their doorstep they are free to go anywhere. this serves as a major advantage for both the car rental company as well as the customers in managing their business efficiently. the web-based car rental management information system [3] helps in improving the efficiency of rental history data transmission. comparing to the other manual systems, this system promotes shorter time delivery. data stored in the cloud environment will simplify the process of obtaining data and generating reports. the rental vehicle's web system [4] is a system created using javascript. this application promotes the complete functionality of call center for the web-based car rental broker companies. this process will simplify the problems faced by the travel agencies and the tourists in making reservations online, making payment and comparing the price of the vehicles through which they travel. the administrator could also manage the data in a very short duration. as the system keeps records of the customers, an administrator can manage the customers easily. in this twenty-first-century user-friendly web-based vehicle rental system is popular in tourism[5]. the web-based system uses server components of distributed applications with http protocol for exchanging data between servers and clients. the administrator can easily manage a secure webbased system. the several features of this system are: customers can enter their details, customers can do vehicle booking with date and time, customers can view all types of vehicles and customers can view the total amount to pay. both the car rental company and the customer get a huge benefit with the online rental system that also helps in managing the system effectively by promoting a complete satisfaction to the customers' requirements. this also offers huge advantage to the company owners, business organization sand the customers in getting excellent services. the authors in [7] proposed an anonymous car rental protocol based on nfc technology. all the personal data regarding the users will be send to the trusted third party (ttp). through this system, the car hire providers will not receive any information regarding the users (anonymity) and the rental companies will not assume any link among the users' identity and rental records with the rental history (unlinkability). also if there are consumer disputes or accidents, the rental company can request that ttp reveal users' identity (traceability) and provides users free choice of their preferred vehicle (flexibility). 3. proposed system 3.1 modules description the three important modules are: 1. registered user 2. guest user 3. administrator authorized users are said to be the one who had registered their personal details in the registration page of the system. after the successful registration, user can login to their account with the valid email id and the password. if the user forgot their registered email id and password then with the help of their personal information they could be able to get access to their account. following things could be done by the user after the successful login: • car booking • know details of car booking • upload their own profile information • update password • post testimonial • view testimonial • log out guest users can see the website and check out the information about rental cars. guest users can enquire about the system through contact us page. the administrator is the superuser of a system that can manage everything on the system. the several features are: • create vehicle brands • post vehicle • manage vehicle brands( edit, delete) • control vdehicle booking • upload testimonials • query to contact the service • manage customers • admin dashboard(admin can view the count of registration users, total booking, total customers, total queries, etc) • logout 3.2 proposed system architecture the web-based car rental system interfaced with the sms technique serves as a very user-friendly purpose. customers can be able to make their payments, bookings, sms and provide their vehicle issues to the employees, which they monitor through the specified system. administrators can add the new data or edit or delete the existing data. thus, there will be no delay in the availability of any information. for security enhancement, the customers are asked to create their eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e4 design and development of a rendering system for vehicle riding 3 own user account prior to their booking. the notifications will be sent to the customers regarding their car reservation through sms thereby making the customers, administrator and employees effort easier. the architecture of the proposed system is given in figure 1. figure 1. system architecture 3.3 uml diagrams figure 2. use case diagram figure 3. customer details figure 4. vehicle details 4. system testing system testing cannot be carried out as a monolithic unit; rather the testing procedure is carried out at several stages with the implementation. any sort of errors determined in the program components will be identified during the testing procedure. the information from the later process will be fed back to the earlier stages and therefore holds to be repetitive. the level in which testing process is carried out involves a unit with the smallest testable part of the software. it consists of one output with single or many inputs. white box system testing strategy is mainly carried out that involves with the developers considering the internal system mechanism, component or application to check the expected working of source code. this testing strategy involves with the written codes, statements, internal code logic, paths branches etc. on the other hand, black box testing strategy involves by testing the software functionality without any internal design reference, algorithm, or program code. the main focus of this testing strategy is to obtain an output for the given input and execution conditions ignoring all the system mechanism and the internal components. to develop our system we have used the xampp server, php as front end, html css and javascript for user interface design and mysql for database design. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e4 this is the title 4 4.1 screenshots figure 5. home page figure 6. customer registration figure 7. admin login figure 8. admin homepage figure 9. login page eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e4 design and development of a rendering system for vehicle riding 5 figure 10. my bookings 5. conclusion in this paper, we have presented an online rental system which is beneficial to both the customers and the rental company to manage the business efficiently and effectively and satisfy the needs of the customers at the click of a button. using this system saves time for the customer and sorts out the billing problem also. this system is more convenient than bearing the cost of owning and maintaining the vehicle. references [1] swati y. dhengre, snehlata r. golam, asmita b. lokhande, devyani n. kandalkar, “cloud computing customer relationship management for online rental system”, international research journal of engineering and technology" e-issn: 2395 -0056 volume: 04 issue: 02,2017. [2] mohd nizam osman, nurzaid md. zain, zulfikri paidi, khairul anwar sedek, mohamad najmuddinyusoff, “online car rental system using web-based and sms technology”, crinn, vol 2, isbn: 978-1-387-00704-2 277,2017. [3] gaurav patel, amol koli, rakesh kadam, rahul bhat, prachi kshirsagar, “on hire: car rental system”, international journal of engineering research in computer science and engineering, vol 5, issue 3, 2018. [4] bayu waspodo, qurrotul aini and syamsuri nur,” development of car rental management information system”, international conference on information systems for business competitiveness, 2011. [5] sasikala and deepti, “real-time services for cloud computing enabled vehicle networks,” journal of real-time services for cloud computing enabled vehicle networks, volume 11, issue 1, 2013. [6] sari, “building application system car rental reservation and payment online web-based. [7] chennupati yogender sai, d.saravanan, yanamadala varun tej, tubati hari vineesha, "smart renting of vehicles using iot" international journal of innovative technology and exploring engineering, issn: 2278-3075, volume-8 issue-6, 2019. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e4 securing data using audio steganography for the internet of things eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 securing data using audio steganography for the internet of things anju gera1,* and vaibhav vyas2 1banasthali university, glbitm, greater noida, india. 2banasthali university, jaipur, india. abstract the internet of things (iot) is prevalent in today's world and is part of our everyday life. while the residential district gains in several respects, numerous problems are developed, such as data confidentiality and privacy. the community is worried, in reality, about what information might leak through iot. therefore, the need for a protected environment is necessary if data transmission from devices across the network is to be protected. as a consequence, this paper proposes a secure scheme for using audio steganography to secure data from laptop, which is distributed as an iot device to other devices, or on lan or wan networks, as an alternative protection strategy along with a home server. the outcome of the developed system shows that the amount of distortion exposed by the signal to noise ratio (snr) is low. keywords: iot, iot protection, disclosure of details, audio steganography. received on 04 july 2022, accepted on 14 november 2022, published on 04 january 2023 copyright © 2023 anju gera et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i4.1775 *corresponding author. email: anju.gera@gmail.com 1. introduction the internet of things (iot) is one of the most emerging innovations to transform the modern world. iot has traditional computing machines but of household devices and several other sensors for data collection. also, hackers could be targets primarily on iot devices with a weak protection level and computing capacities, such as ip cameras, smart tvs and other home appliances with little secrecy. for example, attackers are more likely to intercept continuous data transmission among iot devices because it involves extensive network delivery, typically involving the internet. the intruder can enter or manipulate such iot devices by using the knowledge that he has been obtained for further use by accessing authentication information or by intercepting the link [3, 4]. to solve the confidentiality problem in the iot network, we propose a security scheme involving web access. the use of audio steganography in the lan is based on transmitting confidential audio information between the desktop and home server. in contrast, data distribution between home servers and other computers would be encrypted from a lan (internet). therefore, the paper provides the following efficiency metrics as a steganographic scheme for iot implementation using a robust and lightweight algorithm: computational time, compression ratio, and signal-to-noise ratio, which can accommodate mass deployment [7]. the remainder of the document is arranged accordingly. iot steganography is shown in sec. ii. sec. iii surveys the latest literature on iot steganography. the scheme suggested is defined in sec. iv. sec. v describes modelling tests and outcomes of associated success evaluations. sec. vi ends the paper with future works.2. 2. problems in iot security safety in iot networks entails challenges. these challenges, summarised below, must first be solved before implementing these networks. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2022 01 2023 | volume 6 | issue 4 | e5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:anju.gera@gmail.com anju gera and vaibhav vyas 2 • iot networks need to protect a wide range of products, including laptops, cameras etc. the suggested protection strategies should handle the whole range of heterogeneous systems without compromising their functionality. • devices capacity: because of the heterogeneity of iot architecture connected devices, multiple nodes are available, which include iot networks with limited storage capacity and communication capacities. • data transmission rate: protection schemes should also be able to have high payloads for secured data transfer. 3. related works three essential techniques give security and privacy: cryptography and steganography. encryption turns natural text into an unknown person in an unreadable form. watermarking hides data in a digital medium and sends covers, including ownership and copyright, where the hidden message can be visible or invisible. the unique features, problems and peculiarities of running iot security systems are addressed in an essential work by f. djebbar [1]. the distributed implementation infrastructure, interoperability and heterogeneity of devices and the high traffic amount of iot components are some of these peculiarities. the authors of [2] note that these unique features of iot play an essential role in raising the risk of security attacks in iot compared with other systems with clearly defined security policy and resources in a managed environment. the study [5,6] aims to create an iot security architecture consisting of two algorithms, the aes and the steganography of photography. lightweight encryption is a sophisticated approach for limited conditions, such as rfid tags, cameras, contactless smart cars and medical equipment. in programme deployment, smaller code and ram size implementations which do not always take advantage of the security-performance trade-offs are favoured. if the wsn is built into iot devices to gather adjacent tools and boost the iot device output on the network, self-jamming can be used as a protection mechanism to protect data from disclosure. indeed, selfjamming is a tactic that avoids passive attacks by intentionally jamming the messages obtained by eavesdropper [9,10] and corrupting them. it can be achieved by noise when transmitting data. el gamal encryption is the encryption process used in their analysis. the encrypted message is integrated into the homogenous mp3 audio file frames. the encrypted message is improved with the spread spectrum approach and xor modulation to improve randomness before embedding the register's message. 4. proposed scheme in the real scenario, the mic using desktop allows this opportunity to authenticate customer speech to open doors. in that case, the desktop will receive and transmit users' voices to authentication servers or other computers (ex. cloud storage) outside the lan network for storage, the secrecy of the transmitted data is compromised by every eavesdropping attack, particularly on the lan network. e.g., the voice intercepted is shown as sensitive information in figure 1, and the authentication server [1] would authenticate any intruder who succeeds in getting it through an eavesdropping attack. figure 1. real scheme figure 2 illustrates the proposed scheme for securing a transmitted voice using an iot device. in this case, audio steganography is used to secure sensitive information, such as user voice, which is sent from an ip desktop (iot device) on the lan network. in addition, a home server can be used as a centralised device on the lan network to receive a voice that is already shielded using audio steganography to encrypt it to the computers that are stored on the internet (cloud storage). figure 2. proposed approach eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2022 01 2023 | volume 6 | issue 4 | e5 securing data using audio steganography for the internet of things 3 as a result, the steganography technique can be used as an alternative authentication method for transmitting data in a protected manner. we are implementing audio steganography to protected audio, which is expected to be transferred from an ip desktop to a home server. in order to make the scheme simple, we consider that bob, who owns a home, is entering the desktop with mic to load audio. after the mic has successfully loaded bob's audio, it stores it as audio and loads another audio called the cover audio. instead of transmitting the audio directly to the home server, the audio is covered (embedded) in the chosen audio (cover audio) with a steganography technique to generate another audio (stego audio) that includes the original audio. later, the stego audio can be sent to the home server to recover the original audio from the stego audio using the same steganography method, albeit in a reverse manner. in the other hand, eve, the eavesdropper, has successfully attacked bob 's network to intercept data transfer between the laptop and the home server for any classified information. he realised that a laptop with a microphone would serve as an audio authenticator for bob's front door home. as a result, the user loaded all audios, including stego audio, but does not doubt the audio as it seems to be identical to other audios loaded. steganography is a way of rendering sensitive information and communications undetectable and stopping hackers from identifying them [10]. in the following, the spread spectrum technique was used to conceal encrypted text in the optical audio signal. cast spectrum is a process by which the energy produced in particular by the wavelength is purposefully cast to the frequency domain , resulting in a signal with a broader wavelength. spread spectrum systems encode data as a binary series that sounds like noise but can be understood by a receiver with the right key. there are two types of spectrum spread techniques: the direct sequence spread spectrum (dsss) and the frequency hopping spread spectrum (fhss). in the direct sequence spread range, the data to be transmitted is split into small sections and each piece is assigned to a frequency channel throughout the range. frequency hopping spread spectrum is used in this research work. in frequency-hopping spread spectrum, the frequency spectrum of the audio file is modified such that it jumps easily between frequencies. the explanation for this is that it would be easier to decompose the digital audio signal into an analogue signal using the one dimensional discrete cosine transform (dct). the dct is one of the strong compact transformations. the bulk of the signal energy is transmitted to the first transition coefficients, the lower energy or information is transmitted to other (i.e. high-frequency) coefficients. for x = 0,1,……..n-1, where , where represents the initial sequence of the audio, n denotes the last frames in the audio file, and x denotes the number of frames in the audio file, and u denotes the height of the frame. the spread spectrum combined the compressed text file with the low frequencies of the audio signal using eq.1: ssprect = fdct (low) eq.(1) the embedded signal is applied to the other highfrequency frames using eq.2: fframe(t) = ssprect + fdct (high) eq.(2) the analogue signal generated is then transformed to a digital signal using the inverse discrete cosine transform (idct) as shown below: cdct(u) = eq.(3) where the latest audio signal (stego file) is cdct(u) .the research work was analysed using the following efficiency metrics: computational time, bit per character, compression ratio and signal-to noise ratio. 5. result and discussion the system was implemented using matlab (r2017a version) programming language on windows 8.1 operating system platform. the research work was evaluated using the following performance metrics: computational time, compression ratio and signal to noise ratio. 5.1 signal to noise ratio (snr) signal to noise ratio is a parameter used to know the amount by which the signal is corrupted by the noise. it is defined as the ratio of the signal power to the noise power. alternatively, it represents the ratio of desired signal (say a music file) to the background noise level. it is measured in decibel (db). snr can be calculated by eq. 4 [12] below. snr (db) = eq.(4) 5.2 computational time this is the time taken for the system to execute its function. from table 1, the value of the signal to noise eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2022 01 2023 | volume 6 | issue 4 | e5 anju gera and vaibhav vyas 4 ratio is more than 50db as the size of the text file to be inserted varies from 40 kb to 200 kb, and this means that there will be no distortion of the audio. but from 240 kb to 400 kb, the values of the signal to noise ratio have started to decrease; rendering the values less than 50db and this means that there would be distortion as the value falls from 50db. table 1. snr value after embedding audio size 5. conclusion and recommendation a scheme based on image steganography is proposed in this article, as the ip desktop with microphone and memory capability is used as an iot device to address privacy issues during transmission between smart devices and home servers. in this study, an audio steganography method for mp3 that uses dct and spectrum spread techniques has been developed. implementation and subjective experimentation have shown that the built audio steganography technology supports digital audio mp3 format. the device built has the ability to insert a hidden message of a size of up to 400 kb. additionally, the system has the ability to insert a text size of 250 kb of respect to the digital audio duration or size without any distortion and has the ability to maintain the same size after embedding text into it. these findings suggest that the proposed scheme will satisfy the specifications and difficulties of iot steganography by being able to handle a large number of devices and a large amount of iot traffic. further studies should be carried out to incorporate lightweight cryptography in combination with steganography (dual steganography) techniques to provide more protection for transmitted data using iot devices across the network. references [1] f. djebbar, “lightweight noise resilient steganography scheme for internet of things,” 2017. [2] u. khadam, m. m. iqbal, m. alruily, m. a. al ghamdi, m. ramzan, and s. h. almotiri, “text data security and privacy in the internet of things : threats , challenges , and future directions,” vol. 2020, 2020. [3] h. a.abdullah, a. a. abdulameer, and i. f. hussein, “audio steganography and security by using cryptography,” i-manager’s j. inf. technol., vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 17–24, 2015, doi: 10.26634/jit.4.4.3644. [4] f. djebbar, b. ayad, h. hamam, and k. abed-meraim, “a view on latest audio steganography techniques,” 2011 int. conf. innov. inf. technol. iit 2011, pp. 409–414, 2011, doi: 10.1109/innovations.2011.5893859. [5] a. jurcut, t. niculcea, p. ranaweera, n. an, and l. khac, “security considerations for internet of things : a survey,” sn comput. sci., vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 1–19, 2020, doi: 10.1007/s42979-020-00201-3. [6] c. t. jian, c. c. wen, n. h. binti ab rahman, and i. r. b. a. hamid, “audio steganography with embedded text,” iop conf. ser. mater. sci. eng., vol. 226, no. 1, 2017, doi: 10.1088/1757-899x/226/1/012084. [7] mohsen bazyar, rubita sudhirman, “a new method to increase the capacity of audio steganography based on the lsb algorithm”, journal teknologi science and engineering, 74:6 (2015), 49-53. [8] k.sakthisudhan,p.prabu and dr.c.m.marimuthu,”dual steganograpghy approach for secure data communication”, elsevier international conference on modelling, optimization and computing,2012. [9] mengyu qiao, andrew h. sung, qingzhong liu, “mp3 audio steganalysis”, information sciences, vol. 231, pp. 123-134, may 2013. [10] rostam, h. e., motameni, h., & enayatifar, r. (2022). privacy-preserving in the internet of things based on steganography and chaotic functions. optik, 258, 168864. [11] gera, a., & vyas, v. (2022). hiding capacity and audio steganography model based on lsb in temporal domain. recent patents on engineering, 16(2), 65-74. [12] gera, a., & vyas, v. (2022). message security enhanced by bit cycling encryption and bi-lsb technique. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2022 01 2023 | volume 6 | issue 4 | e5 microsoft word paper_technologycameraready_v05fin.doc analytic hierarchy process for assessing e-health technologies for elderly indoor mobility analysis elena simona lohan dpt. of electr. & comm. eng., tut, finland elenasimona.lohan@ tut.fi oana cramariuc dep. of physics, tut, finland centrul it pentru stiinta si tehnologie, bucharest, romania oana.cramariuc@ tut.fi łukasz malicki knowledge society association ul. grażyny 13/15 lok. 221, 02-548 warszawa, poland lukasz.malicki@ ssw.org.pl neja samar brenčič mks electr. syst./ izriis neja.samarbrencic@ izriis.si bogdan cramariuc centrul it pentru stiinta si tehnologie, romania bogdan.cramariuc@ citst.ro abstract accidental falls and reduced mobility are major risk factors in later life. changes in a person’s mobility patterns can be related with personal well-being and with the frequency of memory lapses and can be used as risk detectors of incipient neurodegenerative diseases. thus, developing technologies for fall detection and indoor localization and novel methods for mobility pattern analysis is of utmost importance in e-health. choosing the right technology is not only a matter of cost and performance, but also a matter of user acceptability and the perceived ease-of-use by the end user. in this paper, we employ an analytic hierarchy process (ahp) to assess the best fit-to-purpose technology for fall detection and user mobility estimation. our multi-criteria decision making process is based on the survey results collected from 153 elderly volunteers from 5 eu countries and on 10 emerging ehealth technologies for fall detection and indoor mobility pattern estimation. our analysis points out towards a bluetooth low energy wearable solution as the most suitable solution. categories and subject descriptors h.4 [information interfaces and presentation]: miscellaneous. general terms design, human factors. keywords analytic hierarchy process (ahp), elderly e-health care, fall detection, indoor mobility, user surveys. 1. introduction falls are one of the principal sources of injuries and hospitalization for elderly [5]. also, mobility is a good indicator of health status and changes in movement patterns may signal an increased risk of the onset of a neurodegenerative disease (nd) [13]. for example, moving back and forth in a repetitive way between the same places inside the house may be associated with mild memory losses, remaining in a sitting position for long periods of time may signal mild depression. there is accumulating support in the literature that one of the key factors in increasing the efficacy of an e-health tele-monitoring system is to incorporate in the e-health system the right technology for detecting abrupt falls and estimating the indoor location and mobility [3][11]. there are several emerging technologies to support the fall detection and mobility pattern analysis, as it will be discussed in detail in section iii. each of these technologies has their advantages and drawbacks, and there are very few studies yet which analyze these technologies from the elderly users’ point of view based on survey data. it is the goal of our paper to provide a new framework, based on user survey results, expert opinions and ahp for helping the e-health tele-monitoring system designer to choose the most suitable technology for fall detection and indoor positioning, as bases for mobility pattern analysis. 2. analyzed population 2.1 survey methodology a survey on elderly preferences toward various technologies was conducted in five european countries: france (fr), switzerland (ch), romania (ro), poland (pl) and slovenia (sl). it was based on structured interviews conducted by human operators using a questionnaire, specifically developed, in the local language. most of the questions used during the survey were categorical, with fixed answers, selected from a number of example-situations. few questions, such as when the respondents were asked to justify their preference toward a certain technology, were open type requiring a narrative response. the participants were selected based on the following two criteria: 1) above retirement age or with permanent disability; 2) living alone or households of maximum two inhabitants. 2.2 statistics on survey participants table 1. respondents characteristics based on surveys country ro ch fr pl sl total number of respondents 61 6 10 44 32 153 av. number of flat rooms 3.2 6.7 3.8 3.1 5.2 4.4 average age [years] 73. 1 74. 3 81. 7 74. 0 70. 3 74.7 most recurrent age 65 72 86 65 66 65 % of living alone 27. 9 50 60 27. 3 25 38.0 % female respondents 60. 50 60 45. 75 58.2 mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261667 6 4 % of respondents with chronic condition(s) 78. 7 66. 7 80 59. 1 53. 1 67.5 the main characteristics of the analyzed population are given in table 1: the number of respondents per country, the average number of rooms in the respondent primary dwelling, the average and most recurrent respondent age (all being above 60 years old), and the percentages of people living alone, of female respondents and of respondents with at least one chronic health condition. 3. used technologies mobile health assistive technologies for remote monitoring of fall detection and mobility pattern analysis fall into two main categories: i) the wearable technologies, which requires that the users carries a tag, a sensor or a transmitter with her/him (e.g., embedded in clothes, as a bracelet or as a portable device such as the mobile phone), and ii) the device-free technologies, where certain wireless transceivers, tags and sensors are installed in the user home, but the user is not required to carry on any device. 3.1 wearable technologies wearable technologies are the most widespread ones in the ehealth community. the user comfort is not the highest with these technologies, but they are typically more precise than the devicefree solutions. rfid tags: radio frequency identification (rfid) tags are becoming an attractive option for e-health applications, due to their low-cost, tracking and positioning capabilities [12]. passive rfid tags can be embroidered in human clothes and they ‘communicate’ through backscattered power measurements with an in-room reader. rfid ranges are typically small (few m), allowing thus for proximity positioning. recent rfid-based fall detectors have been studied in [5]. ble tags: bluetooth low energy is a bluetooth version meant for low power applications. ble-based solutions have been slightly investigated in the context of fall detection and indoor positioning [8]. wearable ble tags are already available. wifi tags: wifi technology is one of the most popular wireless technologies nowadays and is already heavily present around us: in houses, hospitals, universities, commuting halls, etc. most portable wireless devices have nowadays a incorporated wifi chipset and clothing embedded wifi transceivers are becoming a reality. wifi-based fall detectors were reported in [17] and wifi-based positioning solutions are widespread [11]. accelerometer-based wearable devices: they measure the human body acceleration along certain axes. 3d digital accelerometers are widely used in e-health monitoring [5]. positioning estimation via an accelerometer typically requires few additional sensors, such as gyroscopes (measuring the direction change) and barometers (measuring the height change). uwb tags: ultra wide band (uwb) technology is based on sending short time pulses over a very wide bandwidth, and achieving thus centimeter-level accuracy in positioning accuracy [11]. uwb is still a rather expensive technology and wearable solutions are still rather scarce [18]. 3.2 device-free technologies the device-free or contact-less technologies do not require that users carry any device and thus they cannot be forgotten to be worn. typically, such technologies offer a lower accuracy than their wearable counterpart, since most of them (with the exception of vision systems) are based on the human body influences on the signal strength fluctuations between the in-house tags and inhouse receivers, when the person crosses the wave path. some of them (e.g. vision systems) are quite privacy invasive, and thus have a low user acceptability, as our surveys showed [8]. rfid in-house systems: the same principles as for the rfid tags apply, but this time the tags are scattered all through the house, not carried on by the person. the human body changes the signal propagation characteristics and the readers can thus detect the human presence and movements [12]. ble in-house systems: the technology is the same as with the case of the ble tags apply, with the main difference that the tags are on fixed places inside the house (not carried on). the fall detection and positioning principles [19] are similar with the one from the rfid in-house system. wifi in-house systems: similarly with rfid and ble in-house systems, the wifi in-house systems are contact-less systems, where the access point and the wifi tags or transmitters are installed externally to the human wearable fabrics or pockets. the fall detection and positioning principles [12] are similar with the one from the rfid and ble in-house system. uwb in-house systems: uwb in-house systems differ from uwb tags in the fact that they do not employ any wearable devices [4]. the fall detection and user position are based on the time of arrival of multipath reflections due to human body presence. device-free uwb solutions are still scarce in the literature. vision/camera-based systems: the vision systems are those systems requiring at least one surveillance camera in users’ homes. the surveillance cameras capture continuously the images of the users and analyze their movement patterns and behavioral changes based on vision navigation and pattern matching techniques [6]. other technologies: tactile or smart floors can also offer a device-free solution for user status monitoring indoors. the estimation accuracy depends on the density of the pressure sensing nodes, and the information can be sent to the central server through the wifi network [2]. tactile floors are however too expensive and disruptive technologies for the use in elderly homes, and thus they are not included in our analysis. acoustic and ultrasound solutions have also been investigated in the context of elderly automatic monitoring of activities and indoor positioning [2][12]. 4. analytic hierarchy process analytic hierarchy process (ahp) belongs to the category of multi criteria decision making (mcdm) processes, which derive ratio scales from paired comparisons between criteria and factor [1][2]. ahp can help the decision makers to choose between various options by taking into account both quantitative and qualitative factors. the priority weights can be gathered based on user surveys and expert opinions, as done here. 4.1 problem decomposition a block diagram of the ahp decision tree is shown in figure 1: a decision regarding the suitability of a certain technology can be reached by taking into account several criteria and by dividing the problem into an hierarchical process: the first-level hierarchy shows the criteria according to which a decision is reached, and the second-level hierarchy shows the options (or technologies) to be analyzed. each level has a certain priority factor or weight associated to it, here denoted by iw (first level) and ijv (second level), 1, 2,....; 1, 2,...i j= = according to previous [8] and the current user surveys [3][22], the most important factors to evaluate the quality of a e-health technological solution for fall detection and indoor positioning/mobility analysis are: 1. the system cost: this includes the component costs, and the installation and maintenance costs. 2. the technology acceptability by the end user refers to the subjective appreciation of users whether a certain technology would be acceptable or not to be installed in their homes (e.g., camera based solutions tends to be less acceptable than non-visual sensor-based solutions due to privacy concerns). 3. the ease of use of the technology: this refers to how much input, effort and technological knowledge is required from the user’s side in order to use a certain technology. 4. the accuracy of the solution provided by the technology: here, it refers to positioning accuracy, which is also directly related to the accuracy of deriving viable mobility patterns. 5. the false alarm rates: in here, it refers to the rate of detecting and reporting false falls to the caregivers. 4.2 ahp equations once the main decision criteria are chosen (figure 1), pair-wise comparison matrices at each hierarchy level can be built. figure 1. problem decomposition via ahp. a pair-wise comparison matrix { } , 1, h h ij i j n a a = = for hierarchy level h (here, h=1,2) is built as given in eq. (1), where the ija weights tells us how many times a column criterion (criterion i) is more important than a row criterion (criterion j). the lower diagonal elements of ha are obviously the inverses of the upper diagonal elements of ha . 12 13 1 1 2 3 1 .... .................................... 1 1 1 .... 1 h h h h n h n n n a a a a a a a ⎡ ⎤ ⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥= ⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ ⎣ ⎦ (1) the normalized version of ha is the matrix hm with elements: { } , 1, 1 with ijh ij ij ni j n ij i a m m m a = = = = ∑ (2) the so-called priority vector 1 nhv r ×∈ is obtained via: ( ) , 1, 2, t h h h sum a v h n = = (3) where tha stands for the transpose of matrix ha .the elements of the priority vector are the weights at each hierarchical level: for the first hierarchical level: { }1 1,i i nv w == and { }2 1,i ij j nv v == , i=1,n for the second hierarchical level of figure 1. a decision about the best technology according to the multicriteria of levels 1 and 2 in of figure 1 is taken by computing the final priority levels it of each technology and sorting the technology according to its priority level: 1 2 1 , 1, n i i ij j t w v i n = = =∑ (4) 4.3 ahp pair-wise comparison matrices based on our survey results with the survey data in table 1, on literature searches and on expert opinions based on discussion between authors, the following level 1 pair-wise comparison matrix has been obtained (table 2). for example, this tells us that the cost is 4 times more important than the accuracy from the user’s point of view and the ease of use is twice more important than the false alarm rate. table 2. level-1 pairwise comparison matrix cost acceptability ease of use accuracy false alarm cost 1 1/2 2 4 4 acceptability 2 1 4 10 5 ease of use 1/2 1/4 1 2 2 accuracy 1/4 1/10 1/2 1 1/2 false alarms 1/4 1/5 1/2 2 1 the consistency ratio of table 2 matrix is 2%, which is much below the 10% consistency, showing thus a very good consistency of the data. the five level 2 pairwise comparison matrices are shown in our supplementary material of [8] due to lack of space. in order to build those, we used an average dwelling size of 4.4 rooms (as based on surveys, table 1) and we assumed that the wearable solutions need one tag/user and the device-free solutions need 4 tags/room. these assumptions are based on literature studies and authors’ knowledge on the technological needs in indoor positioning. the in-house rfid and uwb systems also require one reader per room (due to line of sight requirements), while in-house ble and wifi solutions work with one receiver per house. the vision-based system was also assumed to require one surveillance camera per room. the level 2 priority weights according to each criterion and to each technology are summarized in table 3 which also shows which technology is the best among others with respect to a certain criterion. the letters stand for: a) wearable ble tag + in-house receiver (rx) ; b) wearable rfid tag + in-house readers; c) wearable wifi tag + in-house receiver; d) wearable uwb tag + in-house rx; e) wearable accelerometer tag + in house rx; f) inhouse ble system (user is device free); g) in-house rfid system; h) in-house wifi system; i) in-house uwb system; j) vision-based system/ video cameras. higher priority means better technology. it also shows which are the drawbacks and advantages of a certain technology with respect to a certain criterion. for example, technology a (wearable ble tag) is the most cost effective technology, while technology j (vision-based system) is the easiest to be used among the 10 considered ones. table 3. level-2 priority weights ijv [%] techn a b c d e f g h i j cost 28.2 4.6 23.5 1.9 22.3 4.3 2.9 5.9 1.4 4.8 accep 13.0 13.0 13.0 13.0 13.0 9.8 6.2 9.8 6.2 3.1 ease of use 6.2 8.3 2.0 4.2 2.1 14.6 14.6 14.6 12.5 20.8 accur 1.5 1.5 0.75 30.1 0.6 1.5 3.0 0.8 30.1 30.1 false alarm s 1.0 1.5 1.0 29.4 5.9 0.7 1.0 0.7 29.4 29.4 5. suitability ranking the 2-level ahp analysis based on the pairwise comparison tables and eq. (4) gives the suitability ranking. the technologies are ranked from the most suitable (rank 1) to the least suitable, by taking into account the user preferences and the 5 optimization criteria of table 2. the gaining technology is a solution based on wearable ble tags and an in-house ble receiver, followed closely by wearable accelerometer and wearable wifi solutions, while the least suitable technology is an in-house (contact-less) rfid system, no doubt due to high cost, low accuracy and low comfort when installed in the house. the suitability according to ahp, given as percentages, is as follows: rank 1: wearable ble tag + in-house rx (14.41%); rank 2: wearable accelerometer tag + in house rx (12.71%); rank 3: wearable wifi tag + in-house rx (12.64%); rank 4: wearable uwb tag + in-house receiver (11.27%); rank 5: vision system (9.40%); rank 6: in-house uwb (8.93%); wearable rfid tag + in-house readers (8.70%); rank 7: in-house wifi system (8.22%); rank 8: in-house ble system (7.84%); rank 9: in-house rfid system (5.84%). 6. conclusions choosing the right technology to support e-health solutions via fall detection and user mobility patterns analysis is a challenging problem. the aim of our paper has been to identify which of the existing technologies for indoor positioning, fall detection and mobility pattern analysis can satisfy most of the requirements of elderly with respect to acceptability, ease of use and cost, by taking into account also the performance indicators (i.e., accuracy and false rates). an ahp analysis was used based on user survey data collected in 5 eu countries. the result of our analysis show that the most suitable technology among the 10 most promising ones in the field of fall detection and indoor mobility is a technology based on a wearable ble tag and additional fixed inhouse receiver. our analysis also shows that wearable technologies are preferable to the device-free technologies, mostly because their better performance and lower associated costs. another observation is that none of these technologies has a significantly higher priority than the others (the highest priority level is 14.4%, only slightly higher than the 10% likelihood, which is the likelihood of randomly selecting one of these 10 technologies), which points out towards the fact that stand-alone solutions may be unable to address all optimality criteria and more advanced hybrid architectures are needed to be created. 7. acknowledgments this work was supported by the following projects: academy of finland (projects 250266 and 283076), eu aal nitics, mobile@old, pn-ii-pt-pcca-2013-4-2241 no 315/2014. 8. references [1] aflaki, s. meratnia, n., baratchi, m., havinga, p. (2013). evaluation of incentives for body area network-based healthcare systems. ieee intelligent sensors, sensor net. and inf. proc., 515-520, apr. [2] basiri, a., peltola, p., silva, p., lohan, e., moore, t., hill c (2015). indoor positioning technology assessment using analytic hierarchy process for pedestrian navigation services. ieee icl gnss, sweden, jun. [3] igual, r., medrano c, plaza, i. (2013). challenges, issues and trends in fall detection systems. biomedical engineering online, 12:66. [4] irahhauten, z., nikookar, m., klepper, m. (2012). a joint toa/doa technique for 2d/3d uwb localization in indoor multipath environment. ieee int. conf. on comm., 4499-4503, jun. [5] karantonis, d., narayanan, m., mathie, m., lovell, n., celler, b (2006). lmplementation of a real-time human movement classifier using a triaxial accelerometer for ambulatory monitoring. ieee trans. on inf. techn. in biomedicine, vol. 10(1), 156 167. [6] kawaji, h, hatada, k., yamasaki, t., aizawa, k. (2010). imagebased indoor positioning system: fast image matching using omnidirectional panoramic images. acm mpva, oct, italy. [7] koblasz, a. (2010). using rfid to prevent or detect falls, wandering, bed egress and medication errors. us patent us 7714728 b2, may. [8] lohan, e., cramariuc, o., malicki, l., samar, n., cramariuc,b. (2015) [online supplementary material] http://goo.gl/guklmb [9] lohan, e.s., rusu-casandra, a., cramariuc, o., marghescu, i., cramariuc, b. (2011). end-user attitudes towards location-based services and future mobile wireless devices: the students’ perspective. mdpi information, vol. 2(3), 426-454. [10] mager, b., patwari, n., bocca, m. (2013). fall detection using rf sensor networks. ieee pimrc, 3472-3476. [11] mautz, r. (2012). indoor positioning technologies. habilitation thesis, eth zurich, feb. [12] moyer, v.a. (2012). prevention of falls in community-dwelling older adults: u.s. preventive services task force recommendation statement. annals of int. medicine, vol. 157(3), 197-204. [13] ni scanaill, c., carew, s., barralon, p., noury, n., lyons, d., lyons, g.m. (2006). a review of approaches to mobility telemonitoring of the elderly in their living environment. annals of biomedical engineering, vol. 34(4), 547-563. [14] osterweil, j. (2009). method and apparatus for body position monitor and fall detect ion using radar. us patent us7567200 b1, july. [15] saaty, t.l. (2008). decision making with the analytic hierarchy process. int. j. services sciences, vol. 1(1), 83-98. [16] schwarzmeier, a., weigel, r., fischer, g., kissinger, d. (2014). a low power fall detection and activity monitoring system for nursing facilities and hospitals. ieee conf. on biomedical wireless technologies, networks, and sensing systems, 28-30, jan. [17] tarng, w., lin, c.h., liou, h.h. (2012). applications of wireless sensor networks in fall detection for senior people. int. journal of computer science & information technology, vol 4(4), 79-95. [18] teng, x.f., zhang, y.t., poon, c.y., bonato, p. (2008). wearable medical systems for p-health. ieee rev. in biomedical eng., vol.1, 62-74. [19] vuegen, l., van den broeck, b., karsmakers, p., van hamme, h., vanrumste, b. (2003). automatic monitoring of activities of daily living based on real-life acoustic sensor data: a preliminary study. 4th workshop on speech and language processing for assistive technologies, 113-118, france, aug. [20] xhafa, f., moore, p., tadros, g. (2015). advanced technological solutions for e-health and dementia patient monitoring. igi global, 1-389. web. 8 may. 2015. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-7481-3 [21] yanying, g., lo, a., niemegeers, i. (2009). a survey of indoor positioning systems for wireless personal networks., ieee commun. surv. tutorials, vol. 11, 13-32. [22] zielinska, i., malicki, l., samar brencic, n., consoli, a., ayadi, j., gilardi, l., cramariuc, o., stanciu, d., didi, t., smidtas, s. d2.1. the results of the multi-national survey. nitics project public deliverables, http://nitics.eclexys.com/node/6. this is a title a mobile crowd-sensing platform for noise monitoring in smart cities m. zappatore1,*, a. longo1, m.a. bochicchio1, d. zappatore1, a.a. morrone1 and g. de mitri1 1dept. of innovation engineering, univ. of salento, via monteroni sn, 73100 lecce, italy abstract modern cities are moving towards novel approaches for urban sustainability for improving citizenship’s life quality, thus aiming at the smart city model. environmental and mobility issues represent two key areas where policy makers address their interventions and, amongst them, noise pollution is one of the most significant causes of public concern. however, noise monitoring campaigns are expensive and require skilled personnel. a viable alternative is represented by mobile crowd sensing (mcs) paradigm, which exploits mobile devices as sensing platforms. in this paper, we propose a mcsbased platform that exploits noise measurements collected by citizens and offers a suggestion system to city managers about noise abatement measures (in terms of both estimated noise reduction and average installation costs). several field tests demonstrated the feasibility of this approach as a suitable way to support city managers and to widen the possibilities of collaborative urban noise monitoring. keywords: mobile crowd sensing, urban noise monitoring, urban traffic noise abatement measures, data warehouse. received on 30 november 2015, accepted on 29 april 2016, published on 20 july 2016 copyright © 2016 m. zappatore et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.18-7-2016.151627 1. introduction the continuous improvement in wireless communications, boosted by a series of key technological enablers [1], is nowadays not comparable to any other communication technology. this has originated a shift towards new reference models for networks, devices and standards. as for the mobile devices, we can observe how smartphones, tablets and wearable devices are quickly replacing pdas, laptops and notebooks as the new boundary, since they combine high computational power, embedded sensors (e.g., accelerometers, gyroscopes, light, magnetometers, etc.), smart and intuitive user interfaces. as for the network infrastructures, the broadband capabilities of novel 4g wireless communication standards (i.e., lte† and lte-a‡ [2]) promise up to 1gb/s transfer speed and high-quality coverage. moreover, many other contexts are benefitting *corresponding author. marcosalvatore.zappatore@unisalento.it † lte: long term evolution (wireless communication standard) ‡ lte-a (also known as lte+): lte advanced (wireless communication standard) from wireless communications: smart homes with interconnected household appliances, automated industry processes and remote applications represent indeed other concrete situations where mobile devices can prove their effectiveness. the penetration rate of mobiles into daily life activities, and the corresponding users’ familiarization level with such devices, are nowadays so significant that mobiles can be leveraged as an effective way to improve life quality conditions as well as an effective technological driver for offering a wide range of services within smart cities. one of the most appealing trends in exploiting mobiles pervasively is represented by their usage as sensor data sources, as described by a new sensing paradigm named mobile crowd sensing (mcs) [3]. according to mcs principles, mobiles, along with their built-in sensors and additional pluggable sensors, represent very powerful sensing nodes that overcome typical 1 research article eaeai endorsed transactions on smart cities eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 m. zappatore et al. limitations of wireless sensor networks (wsns). on the one hand, from a communication network point of view, they can provide wider coverage areas, greater number of deployable nodes (without requiring any reconfiguration procedure when new nodes have to be added) and more reliable connectivity (thanks to the wireless communication networks serving the mobile). on the other hand, if we consider the sensing capabilities offered by mobile devices, they can offer sufficient levels of accuracy thanks to their embedded sensors or external, pluggable – and more accurate – sensors. therefore, if mobiles are used as sensor data sources in a reasonable way, and even if such devices obviously do not replace professional metering equipment but simply complement their capabilities, they can be used to fulfil a series of relevant tasks. amongst these tasks we can enlist: 1) being dynamically scattered across huge areas with heterogeneous and complex sensing purposes; 2) acquiring contextual awareness opportunistically from the surrounding environment; 3) allowing users to improve their knowledge about specific scientific phenomena and research challenges; 4) allowing easy integration with other ict platforms in smart cities [4]. consequently, multiple roles can be envisioned for mobile devices [5] according to the mcs paradigm. firstly, mcs allows defining innovative services capable of managing contextual information and suitable to interact with user’s social and physical situations. secondly, mobile devices represent a promising solution to engage their owners in collaborative, large-scale monitoring experiences. this may effectively promote wide participatory contributions from citizens, yearning of life quality improvement, as well as positive behavioural changes in citizenship about environmental sustainability. additionally, this makes possible to harvest large and heterogeneous amounts of information from citizens, describing their continuously evolving urban environments. such data can be forwarded to city managers, thus allowing them to have better awareness of the potential issues affecting their municipalities, without relevant additional costs. finally, mobile devices can enlarge the scope of traditional monitoring campaigns significantly, so that the expensive deployment and maintenance of professional metering equipment can be spared for ad-hoc interventions only in those city areas where the noise levels highlighted by mcsmediated campaigns are higher. the features enlisted so far fit perfectly with the requirements of modern smart cities, where contextual information availability, collaborative monitoring and relevant data streams about urban environments are fundamental aspects to be achieved. by starting from such premises, in this research activity, we opted for the urban noise-monitoring scenario, which is gaining relevance in modern cities as assessed by several reports from the european commission. europeans, indeed, are becoming more and more concerned about how noise can affect their quality of life and, consequently, policy makers should consider noise-related aspects when dealing with urban and traffic monitoring and planning. we propose a platform with the following features: 1) direct involvement of users in sensing activities; 2) suggestion of noise abatement interventions to local administrators; 3) gathering of users’ opinions in order to obtain psychoacoustic measurements (i.e., how sound is perceived by humans in terms of loudness, sharpness and direction [6]). in addition to the benefits achievable by the adoption of mcs briefly outlined so far, these three features contribute to improve the overall quality of currently available mcs solutions in the noise-monitoring domain, which are typically tailored to single user’s needs and do not provide any kind of valuable suggestions to city managers. our platform has been designed, developed and tested (in the city of brindisi, southern italy) as a distributed system that gathers sensor data and users’ comments from mobiles and sends them to a context broker application that forwards them to a nosql data storage instance for persistent storage. subsequently, a complete extract-transform-load (etl) pipeline elaborates and manages collected measurements in a data warehouse (dwh) system: this step allows us to aggregate raw data depending on different aspects (e.g., sensing location and device type, measurement time, etc.) as well as to identify outliers. the outlier detection is a crucial elaboration phase in mcs solutions: the outliers represent measurements exhibiting significant biases in comparison with the average, so that they have to be identified and evaluated in order to determine (or, at least, infer from an algorithmic point of view) whether they are caused by wrong measurement procedures or malfunctioning sensing devices. only freeware and open-source it solutions have been used to promote knowledge sharing and reuse. according to the aspects pointed out throughout this section, our proposal behaves as: 1) a sensing platform; 2) a system suggesting noise reduction and abatement policies to urban authorities; 3) a preliminary, low-cost, large-scale and sufficiently accurate monitoring tool. this will allow small and medium municipalities to perform noise monitoring without the need of expensive professional metering equipment. therefore, the platform has a noise-prevention and pre-screening usage: it allows locating areas with potential noise pollution risks where more accurate measurement campaigns requiring professional metering equipment can be addressed. the pre-screening capability of our application represents another relevant advantage for smart city context due to financial and spending reviews, which normally limit the start of professional noise monitoring campaigns. another important aspect to be mentioned pertains to the importance of the developed mobile application for acoustic data collection. even if current mobile marketplaces offer a considerable variety of noise sensing applications (as it will be thoroughly described in sections 3 and 3.3), the majority of them is devoted to personal use only, thus not allowing the smartphone owner to contribute in large and collaborative monitoring activities. only a couple of very recent research initiatives (see again section 3.3) propose a mcs-based approach to noise sensing but they do not offer any decisionsupport tool for city managers and policy makers in order to suggest them possible noise abatement interventions in their 2 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 a mobile crowd-sensing platform for noise monitoring in smart cities municipalities and to estimate the impact of such measurements on current noise pollution levels. before describing our research activity in the rest of the paper, it is worth to point out that throughout this document, when we will use the term “noise”, we will refer only to the “acoustic noise”, since many other noises of different physical nature can be considered (e.g., electromagnetic noise, electrostatic noise, signal processing noise, etc.). the paper is organized as in the following: section 2 describes the actual scenario in terms of noise pollution concerns, health-related effects of noise exposures, typical urban noise sources and noise monitoring regulations. mobile crowd sensing paradigm, along with examples of its applications in urban contexts and in noise monitoring, is presented in section 3. the proposed platform design choices are detailed in section 4, in terms of both data modelling and logical architecture. section 5 presents the developed platform prototype (both the mobile application for data gathering and the web application for data visualization). several discussion aspects are coped with in section 6. section 7 draws conclusions and sketches out further developments. 2. urban noise 2.1. urban noise pollution concerns historically, noise pollution has not been considered similar to other urban pollutants (e.g., chemical or radiological) and still a low number of cities and administrations implements noise-control policies against potential health risks despite several technical reports by the european commission ascertained citizens’ concerns about noise pollution issues. according to the 2013 urban mobility report [7], indeed, the majority of europeans believes that noise (72%) represents the fifth most significant problem within cities after air pollution (81%), road congestion (76%), travelling costs (74%) and accidents (73%). the noise pollution concern reaches even higher values in italy (83%), bulgaria (85%), greece (87%) and malta (92%). if examined from a sociodemographic point of view, the problem is less considered by students (66%) and much more by managers (76%). the situation in italy is well-described by a series of statistical analyses. the annual report by istat § [8] about the overall quality of the urban environment demonstrates the scarcity of noise assessment interventions nationwide: only 0.98% of the cities carried out noise monitoring campaigns in 2013, mainly required directly by citizens (91%). in 63.2% of the cases, at least one regulatory threshold was trespassed. these values are confirmed by the 10th national report on urban areas, by ispra** [9], which assesses that 52% of the noise emission controls performed in administrative centres exceeded thresholds, mainly due to high vehicular traffic volumes. § istat: italian national institute of statistics large monitoring campaigns would allow italian cities to apply the acoustic classification plan (pca, in italian) for their geographical area, as requested by national laws [10]. this law established that each city should be partitioned into six different area classes (depending on the main socioeconomic activities performed therein) where specific noise thresholds for day and night time-windows hold. however, in 2013, only 53% of the italian administrative centers fulfilled such a requirement. 2.2. health-related effects of noise exposure the necessity of proper noise monitoring activities is enforced also by the outcomes of several epidemiological research works that thoroughly analyse possible correlations between health effects and noise [11]. the outcomes of a primary exposure to a constant environmental noise source can be classified into acute effects, chronic effects and longterm risks [12] but it is important to point out that the exposure levels vary depending on multiple causes and on individual basis (i.e., some subjects are more noise-sensitive than others). amongst the acute effects, we can enlist: decrease sleep quality and quantity, sleep fragmentation [13]; stress and distraction [14]; temporary change in hearing or noise-induced hearing loss (nihl) [15]. moreover, especially in urban scenarios, noise can cause the so-called noise annoyance [16], which stands for a series of socio-behavioural changes and overall discontent in citizens residing in noisy areas that may determine additional effects (e.g., increased drug consumption, increased number of accidents). chronic effects entail hypertension, reduced learning and productivity, disruption of endocrine system and diabetes [17]. the long-term risks range from increased risk of injury to possible ischemic heart disease (ihd), increased risk of heart attack and permanent nihl [18]. from a more general perspective, long-term risks mainly depend on the time duration of the exposure. evidences from several research studies ( [19], [20]) demonstrate that people exposed to higher-volume sound sources or people exposed chronically due to specific life and working conditions (e.g., residents along busy roadways or residents located along a descending/ascending flight path to/from an airport) have the higher risks. noise emissions also affect more heavily specific categories of subjects or people exhibiting additional health risks: for instance, children living in noisy contexts [21] or attending schools located in dense urban areas show poor performances, stress, decreased learning rates, misbehaviour, concentration deficits, hyperactivity and scarce reading comprehension [22]. the chronically ill and the elderly are two other population categories especially vulnerable to noise-related diseases. however, although the specific correlation between health effects and noise is even more documented than other environmental pollutants, the results in addressing noise ** ispra: italian superior institute for the environmental preservation and research 3 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 m. zappatore et al. emissions and planning noise reduction interventions in urban contexts are still disappointing. local authorities do not yet implement stable noise monitoring policies due to several factors, such as high equipment costs, scarcity of skilled personnel and lack of environmental awareness. typical monitoring stations are fixed installations that are located close to take-off and landing airport strips or in the proximity of traffic hotspots. their costs are so relevant (i.e., buying costs: up to 25k€, rental costs: up to 3k€/month) that small and medium municipalities cannot afford similar expenses, thus depriving their citizenship of noise mapping campaigns. consequently, this scenario determines an overall relevant request of novel monitoring solutions to be deployed also in small cities, since even small municipalities have the right to become smart or even smarter. 2.3. noise sources in urban contexts citizens in urban contexts are exposed to multiple sound sources (and the corresponding generated noise), exhibiting different characteristics in frequency and time. a widelyadopted categorization partitions noises into impulsive, transient and continuous ones. the impulsive noise is due to short-duration pulses having random amplitude and random duration (typically less than one second). typical impulsive sources are hammering noises and gunfire. transient noise consists of noise pulses having longer duration or relatively short pulses followed by decaying low frequency oscillations. vehicle pass-by and aircraft flyover are the most common transient sources. continuous noise, instead, exhibit stable conditions over a relatively long time period. as for what concerns the noise sources, the most relevant one within urban contexts is represented by vehicular traffic. it is generated by multiple components: engine and transmission, rolling tires over the asphalt, aerodynamic, braking systems and vehicle-mounted devices, such as horns, sirens and whistles. traffic noise levels depend on many vehicle-related factors, such as typology, speed and age [23]. since it is strictly related to traffic noise, we can also consider the noise induced by roadwork and construction sites. these noise sources, which can be very annoying for the population due to their potential long duration over time, range from interventions by utility companies (e.g., gas, electricity, water, cable services) to constructions (e.g., realization of new buildings, renovation or demolition of existing buildings, etc.). leisure time activities such as concerts and festivals represent another significant source of noise, especially when rock and pop music are played. recent studies highlighted how years of exposure to loud music played at discotheques and during concerts may induce irreversible noise-induced hearing loss in both ears of at least 10db at 3 khz. recent tests activities performed during music festivals highlighted how the individual sound exposure per evening varied between 90 and 115 db(a), with an average exposure of 100 db(a) and prolonged peaks of 110 db(a) [24]. the noise generated by airplanes and airport installations is another major source of disturbance, especially when airports are in close proximity to cities. their contributions are: take-off and landing phases (generated by: aerodynamic, engine and propulsion systems) as well as airport activities (e.g., maintenance and emergency vehicles, baggage and passenger transportation systems, etc.) [25]. 2.4. current noise monitoring regulations in italy and europe one of the widely adopted scale to quantify noise exposure is the a-weighting: it measures the sound pressure level (spl) in units of db(a) [26] and allows measuring the dependence of perceived loudness w.r.t. frequency. since sounds are typically fluctuating (i.e., they vary in time and have different durations) and since spl is an instantaneous measurement instead, the equivalent sound level leq(t) is preferred [26] as the reference exposure descriptor in noise regulations and guidelines. it measures, in db(a), the steady sound level conveying the same sound energy of the actual time-varying noise source in a given place during a given time window t (where t typically ranges from 30s to 24h). in a more simplified explanation, leq(t) averages the spl values measured during t, thus smoothing spikes and outliers. italian noise regulations [27] classify urban areas into six acoustic classes depending on their main usage and building typologies. as reported in table 1, different threshold leq(t) values are provided for each of those classes. in addition [10], [28], these thresholds are also expressed w.r.t.: time of the day (diurnal: 6a.m. – 10p.m.; nocturnal: 10p.m. – 6 a.m.); sensor position w.r.t. the noise source (insertion values: if near the source; emission values: if far from the source); road type (w.r.t. vehicle capacity and speed) and age (novel or already existing roads). the italian laws adopt a precautionary approach, so that the law thresholds that cannot be trespassed (i.e., limit values) are always below the noise emission values representing a lower risk or a potential risk for human health (i.e., quality values and attention values, respectively). as a reference, it could be useful to consider that in urban contexts typical noise values at 15m from the observer are: heavy truck (90db(a)); congested city road (80db(a)); light car traffic (60db(a)). as for the normative situation in the continent, the european commission promulgate in 2002 the environmental noise directive (end) 2002/49/ec [29] about the assessment and management of environmental noise trying to define a common approach across all member states for avoiding, preventing or at least reducing harmful effects of the exposure to environmental noise. the directive aims at harmonizing noise indicators and assessment methods by producing strategic noise maps (snms), enabling comparison of noise levels and affected areas across member states; heightening public awareness about noise as a significant environmental pollutant; adopting strategic action plans (saps) to prevent and reduce noise where/when needed. the end has been acknowledged in italy by the dlgs 194/05 [30] law, but after many years, some issues and misalignment remain between them. this is mainly due to a 4 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 a mobile crowd-sensing platform for noise monitoring in smart cities significant difference between the european directive and the italian law, from a normative point of view. on the one hand, the italian law determines and provides the thresholds to be abided by, the noise monitoring and controlling procedures, the noise abatement and reclamation techniques. on the other hand, the european directive aims at reducing the population noise exposure independently from the compliance with law thresholds and limits established by individual member states. therefore, the european directive does not impose any strict control or obligation on noise exposure but it strongly relies on the individual member states and their capabilities of informing the population about noise exposure levels and their potential health-related effects as well as of involving citizens during the definition of saps for noise exposure containment. the brief normative overview sketched so far highlights how significant can be the impact of smart-city-like solutions providing people the possibility of becoming better aware about noise-related issues within their cities. the mcs-based platform proposed in this research work exactly aims at this direction. table 1. leq(t) threshold values in db(a), according to [10], [27]. the columns corresponding to law limits are grayed out. acoustic class limit quality attention day night day night day night c1. protected 45 35 47 37 50 40 c2. residential 50 40 52 42 55 45 c3. mixed 55 45 57 47 60 50 c4. intense human activities 60 50 62 52 65 55 c5. mainly industrial 65 55 67 57 70 60 c6. exclusively industrial 65 55 70 70 70 70 3. mobile crowd-sensing (mcs) 3.1. mobile device pervasiveness the most recent analyses for the mobile market confirm what have been outlined in the introduction. according to the ict data and statistics division of the itu (international telecommunication union) [31], by the end of 2015 mobile cellular subscriptions will reach a worldwide penetration rate of 97% (127% in western europe [32], 139% on average in eu countries and 158% in italy [33]). in q1 2015, mobile broadband subscriptions reached 535mn in western europe only. by the end of the same year, the mobile broadband technology (3g and 4g wireless communication standards †† umts: universal mobile telecommunications service (wireless communication standard) such as umts†† and lte-a respectively) will represent the most dynamic market segment. they will achieve a penetration rate of 48% in eu countries (52% in italy) and an overall network coverage of nearly 69% of the world population, which reaches the 89% if we consider the urban population only. the prospected trend for year 2020 is even more evident. as envisioned in [32] by ericsson company, the number of worldwide mobile subscriptions will reach 9.2bn (6.1bn for smartphones) w.r.t. the actual 7.1bn (2.6bn for smartphones). the increase for western europe will amounts 140mn, although the 80% of new mobile broadband subscriptions will come from asia pacific, the middle east and africa. as for the mobile traffic growth forecasts, the worldwide monthly data traffic per smartphone amounts 1.05tb/month for q1 2015 and it is expected to reach 4.9tb/month in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (cagr) of 30% [32]. from a socio-demographic point of view, it is estimated that 90% of world population over 6 years of age will have a mobile phone by the end of 2020 [32]. in italy, the statistical analysis performed in 2013 by nielsen [34] ascertained that 59% of users in the age 16-24 uses smartphones. this percentage increases up to 72% for individuals ageing 25-34 and 70% for subjects in the age 35-44. the success of mobile broadband solutions is due to many reasons, such as high data rates, reliable coverage, high quality of service, extreme portability, data plans and monthly bills less expensive than fixed-broadband plans. moreover, the statistical analyses briefly sketched so far, demonstrate that the highest smartphone penetration rates come from youngsters in urban scenarios, since they are early adopters of new technological solutions and they are typically inclined to use their smartphones to perform many heterogeneous activities (e.g., social networking, audio/video streaming, mobile banking and shopping, location-based services). therefore, our application will benefit significantly from its diffusion across youngsters as primary data collectors. 3.2. mcs paradigm and its applications in urban contexts mcs became known more than one decade ago, when burke et al. [35] proposed the notion of participatory sensing (ps) for the first time, and then it rapidly found application in urban scenarios. such paradigm is realized once individuals are provided with personal electronic devices capable of collecting and analysing data in order to share local knowledge on a broader scale, so that each single user may become a data source point without the need of deploying ad hoc sensor nodes around him [35]. the first applications were aimed only at user’s selfmonitoring in the healthcare sector (e.g., tracking of: nutrition, drug assumption, physical activity) but they rapidly broadened their scope to very heterogeneous contexts. the 5 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 m. zappatore et al. original definition of ps has been then absorbed under the new term of mobile crowd sensing (mcs) [3] that currently describes a paradigm about collecting data directly from mobiles, which is much more advantageous than traditional wsns and whose definition emphasizes the role of mobiles in leveraging their sensing and computational capabilities. mcs actually exhibits multiple features. depending on whether 3g/4g standards (e.g., edge‡‡, umts, lte) or short-range standards (e.g., wi-fi, bluetooth) are used, two different transmission paradigms are possible, named infrastructure-based transmission and opportunistic transmission respectively. similarly, user involvement is now much more considered than before, since mcs applications can be differentiated depending on whether people are allowed to choose when monitoring a specific event (participatory sensing) or simply delegate their mobiles to automatically send data without requiring their participation (opportunistic sensing). nevertheless, the most important step towards a new way of gathering sensor data from users is represented by the significant shift from the initial self-monitoring applications to the so-called community monitoring, where larger and larger number of participants are involved in sensing campaigns. these aspects are particularly evident in urban monitoring scenarios, where four main application areas can be considered. the first area refers to mobility-related issues, such as traffic monitoring and parking availabilities [3] or road safety control [36]. the second category gathers all those applications devoted to the environmental monitoring, such as control of air pollutants ( [37], [38], [39]) and water pollutants [40], [41]. in the third sector, we can enlist the emergency management applications, such as flood alerting systems [42] or earthquake immediate sensing [43], [44]. the last group of applications comprises large-scale events monitoring and planning [45], such as music festivals or exhibitions, in order to follow specific groups of people or to profile their activities or interests. 3.3. mcs-based applications for noise and sound monitoring despite a general interest about mcs-based initiatives for urban monitoring, the currently available solutions dealing with acoustics and noise are mainly focused on research and development and only a couple of them have been deployed so far on a large-scale, in order to achieve significant positive societal impacts within citizenship. the majority of mcs applications for noise monitoring, indeed, are for personal use only: they reproduce main sound level meter (slm) functionalities and allow users to check how loud their surrounding environment is; however, they do not provide noise measurement aggregation on a geographical/temporal basis. ‡‡ edge: enhanced data gsm environment (wireless communication standard) this is the case of apps for controlling sound levels, such as advanced decibel meter [46], sound meter pro [47] or decibel meter pro [48]. very few research works address noise mapping, such as the “ear-phone” project [49] where nokia phones were used to predict sound levels in a given environment, “noisespy” [50], which exploited mobiles carried by bicycle couriers to collect data in cambridge, or the “2loud?” project [51] that uses iphones to assess nocturnal noise within buildings near highways in australia. one of the main limitations in such activities is that users are only involved as data collectors but no specific platform functionalities are tailored to administrators for improving citizenship’s life quality. therefore, if specific software solutions for noise mapping within urban contexts are needed, city managers still have to consider professional systems and platforms, such as the software application suite developed by softnoise [52], which provides a complete toolset of products for environmental noise calculations (“predictorlima”) and mapping (“mapatwork”) as well as for occupational noise mapping (“noiseatwork”). soundplan acoustics [53] represents a similar solution: it is a noise modelling software for technicians and professionals, which offers advanced noise-mapping functionalities and animations for 3d sceneries. the obvious drawback of such products is represented by their high cost and the necessity of skilled personnel capable of managing them properly. consequently, city administrations typically cannot afford their adoption on a large scale. 4. the proposed platform 4.1. overview the proposed system addresses multiple categories of users: on the one hand, municipality managers will be provided with a web application suggesting how to reduce noise levels and where regulatory thresholds are exceeded. on the other hand, mobile users will be allowed not only to collect measurements but also to learn about noise metering and acoustic principles directly on their devices. in order to make this possible, national and international noise norms and regulations have been embedded. this mcs approach also allows us to overcome typical drawbacks of traditional noise monitoring techniques, which are more accurate but much more expensive. by embedding users’ comments into our data collection app, we also can integrate the approach of noise socio-acoustic surveys [54] to analyse the noise-induced annoyance. 4.2. data modelling approach data coming from smartphone-embedded sensors need to be managed properly: after the collection phase, measurements 6 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 a mobile crowd-sensing platform for noise monitoring in smart cities must be cleansed, transformed and stored in order to make them available for final users. these processing steps can be tackled very effectively by revolving to a data warehouse (dwh) approach [55], according to which data are processed in an extract-transform-load (etl) pipeline. the suitability of such an approach is given by the inherent nature of sensor data, which are amenable to be managed in a multidimensional model. a typical approach to this scenario is represented by the dimensional fact model (dfm) [55], which is a conceptual model characterized by a high graphical expressivity, whose clarity allow representing concepts in a straightforward way, thus easing the comprehension of the multidimensional analyses that can be performed on data. the core element in a dfm is the fact: it represents any concept relevant to decision-making processes and which evolves in time. in order to describe it qualitatively, the socalled fact attributes are needed. similarly, the qualitatively description for a fact is given by the measures, which represent numerical properties or relevant calculations. being a multidimensional entity, a fact can be analysed along different coordinates, called dimensions, which enlist several dimensional attributes per each, organized into directed trees departing from the fact. dimensional attributes qualify the finite domain of their dimension along with its different degrees of granularity (e.g., the temporal dimension can vary from seconds to days, weeks, months; a product is described by its name, series, brand, etc.). figure 1 allows us to introduce the dfm notation as well as our modelling choices. we selected the noise measurement as the fact: it is depicted as a rounded box in fig.1. fact measures are inside the rounded box: they refer to both spl and maximum/minimum/average leq(t). we have considered the following dimensions: time (both timestamp and date/month/year); geographical position (latitude, longitude, town, province, region, country); sensor type (external or embedded); device type (model and brand); measurement type; outlier condition. the dimension representing user’s annotations refers to the acoustic source and it is optional. more in details, we firstly manage the acoustic source uniqueness: the user will be asked to evaluate whether there is a predominant acoustic source around her/him or not. then, a series of other user’s annotations are considered, which are all referred to the predominant acoustic source in case of multiple sources present in the same environment. these additional annotations are: source type (i.e., natural or artificial), location type (i.e., indoor or outdoor), annoyance (i.e., annoying or not annoying), nuisance (i.e., how much the acoustic source is deemed noisy by the user) and distance from the observer (i.e., very close, close, quite distant). §§android 4.2 apis (level ≥ 17): http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.2.html *** orion: http://catalogue.fiware.org/enablers/publishsubscribecontext-broker-orion-context-broker in fig.1, the dimensional attributes for each dimension are represented as circles connected by lines to the fact, whilst the dimension is the root circle. figure 1. dimensional fact model (dfm) for the fact: “noise measurement” 4.3. platform logical architecture: design choices and significant components our platform consists of a mobile sensing app and of a cloudbased system tasked to data management. some platform components have been developed by using fiware [52], a middleware supported by the future internet public-privatepartnership (fi-ppp) project of the european union. fiware is becoming an important technological driver for the development of cost-effective and reusable it solutions for the so-called “future internet”, a broad definition encompassing multiple and cross-disciplinary areas such as smart cities, logistics, internet of things, environmental sustainability and transportations. the developed mobile app works on android mobile devices (android 4.2 apis§§). the app mimics a professional slm user interface and collects peak, average and current values of spl and leq(t) on customizable temporal windows, as required by eu and italian noise regulations. measurements are stored locally (short-term history) and sent to the cloud-hosted system for data aggregation and filtering. the data brokering functionality is achieved by using orion***, a generic enabler (ge) from fiware that provides publishing and subscribing operations on collected data. data from orion are persisted into a cloud-based instance of mongodb, the no-sql document-based dbms, thanks to the fiware cygnus††† connector. figure 2 depicts the proposed three-layer logical architecture. the first layer consists of non-persistent sensor data storage on mobiles (implemented via sqlite), of persistent storage on the cloud (via mongodb) and of ††† cygnus: https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware-cygnus#section1 7 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 m. zappatore et al. relational dbs (via mysql) for law regulations, device technical specifications and administrative divisions. the second layer has context-brokering capabilities for managing multiple sensors as well as data filtering (thanks to pentaho ce ‡‡‡, a freeware etl application), integration and reporting functionalities. the third layer offers a web app for accessing data reporting and integration results. mobiles and a limited number of fixed monitoring stations represent data sources. we also developed a web app for data visualization purposes, according to requirements elicited from users (i.e, city managers and citizens). figure 2. platform logical architecture 5. the developed prototype 5.1. mobile application the user interface (ui) of the mobile app mimics a professional slm, thus offering also to unskilled users a way for learning how to manage such kind of equipment as well as to understand which physical quantities (and corresponding units of measurement) are involved in noise monitoring campaigns. figure 3 depicts the app page for the participatory measurements. both leq(t) and spl values are reported and plotted on a xy graph (users can switch between the time analysis and the frequency analysis mode by switching on the corresponding radio-button placed below the graph area), as well as the selected observation time period t. once the measurement ends, users can choose amongst: 1) starting a new measurement by discarding the current one (round orange button in the bottom right corner); 2) sending the measurement without any comments (right green button at the page bottom); 3) commenting and then sending the measurement (left green button at the page bottom). ‡‡‡ pentaho: http://community.pentaho.com/projects/data-integration/ figure 4 represents the app page for comments and assessments, where users can describe the noise source, thanks to radio-buttons, in terms of: location (indoor or outdoor), nature (artificial or natural), annoyance, estimated distance from the observer, uniqueness, typology (by selecting amongst a set of predefined values such as truck engine, car traffic, construction site, crowd, machinery, etc.). it is also possible to quantify the perceived nuisance level, by activating a slider (whose psychometric 10-value scale adheres to specifications proposed in [54]), and to add freetext comments. the round orange button in the bottom right corner allows users to take pictures of the area where noise measurements come from. users’ comments are particularly relevant in order to better characterize measurements taken according to the mcs paradigm: by providing personal comments and evaluations, the users contribute to enrich raw sensor data with contextual information, thus allowing more data management opportunities. for instance, measurements taken inside buildings can be separated from outdoor ones, thanks to the characterization of the measurement scenario provided by the users. similarly, measurements taken by different people at the same location, within the same time range can be compared w.r.t. the perceived nuisance level, thus analysing people differences in perceiving the same sound sources. in the same way, by providing photos of the surrounding sound sources, the users can contribute in creating a live, photographic map of the noisy spots within a city. figure 3. mobile ui: main screen for measurement 8 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 a mobile crowd-sensing platform for noise monitoring in smart cities figure 4. mobile ui: page for user’s comments 5.2. web application we also developed a web application for city managers: it allows users to access a multi-layered, geo-referenced map where data coming from the platform are visualized properly. more in details, the first layer is devoted to visualize measurements coming from a given area as points in a choropleth map (i.e., a map where the colour ramp used to represent the measurement location points is directly proportional to the measured leq(t) values). another layer (fig.5) provides users with the interpolation of measurements achieved in the same area as an intensity heatmap (i.e., a map where adjacent measurements are interpolated according to a given algorithm in order to compute leq(t) values also for those points where no measurements were actually performed). intensity maps are extremely useful for understanding how noise levels are perceived throughout the urban environment without requiring to scatter all across the city mobile sensors. a third layer depicts public transport routes (see again fig.5), in order to cross-correlate visually potential issues about noise pollution with transportation issues. a fourth layer allows the user to superimpose vehicular traffic data with noise mapping, in order to compare noise issues with traffic jams and busy transportation routes. the rendering of all the layers described so far has been achieved by forwarding measurement data, after the etl process, towards a cartodb [56] instance, an open-source, cloud-hosted, geospatial database for map storage and visualization. figure 5. web app: intensity map of interpolated leq with suggested noise abatement measures (in the right vertical frame). the interpolation refers to measurements collected within a 1-hour time window. public transportation routes are visualized as well, thanks to an additional layer 9 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 m. zappatore et al. in addition, the intensity map offers the possibility to dynamically explore how noise level abatement interventions may impact on actual interpolated leq(t) measurements: by selecting from proper dropdown lists a given noise abatement measure, users can see how interpolated values could be reduced accordingly on that area. at this moment, we considered measures addressing traffic noise emissions (since they represent the most relevant cause of urban noise pollution). the system suggests, for each different abatement measures, the corresponding estimated impact on leq(t) and estimated average costs. more specifically, city administrators are provided with several traffic noise abatement interventions (fig. 6). as a first choice, the system proposes interventions on traffic speed/volumes and road pavement techniques. low-noise asphalts (e.g., thin-layer, double-layer, porous) are low-cost and significantly effective options for reducing traffic noise [57]. moreover, they can be applied directly in specific noise hotspots without requiring any relevant environmental or architectonic modification. a second typology of intervention is related to speed limit enforcements, especially in the range 40-70km/h: traffic flow restriction measures are particularly useful, not only in terms of noise reduction but also for air quality and road safety [58]. typically, such solutions have even lower costs for municipalities than low-noise asphalts but they may have collateral social costs due to travel time losses. figure 6. urban traffic noise abatement measures (excerpt from the table provided to city managers): expected impact on leq(t) and estimated costs (for measures aimed at reducing speed or vehicles flow the indirect installation costs per traffic sign are reported). in order to provide noise perception reference values, we remind the reader that a ±2db(a) variation is barely noticeable by humans, a ±3db(a) variation is perceptible, a ±6db(a) is clearly perceived, a ±10db(a) is perceived as the doubling/halving of the loudness of a given sound. 10 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 a mobile crowd-sensing platform for noise monitoring in smart cities other possible suggested interventions are represented by vertical (e.g., speed bumps/humps, rumble areas) and horizontal (e.g., roundabouts, traffic circles) traffic calming measures [23]: however, administrators must evaluate their application by examining each specific case since speed reduction artefacts may generate additional noise (e.g., once a vehicle reaches a road hump). in addition, the suggestion system also proposes noise exposure-reduction measures, such as the noise barriers. barriers are the most effective noise-reducing solution [59] but their installation cost is quite relevant (nearly 300 €/m2 instead of 20 €/m2 on average for low-noise asphalts) and their environmental and visual impact is significant, thus requiring proper preliminary analysis before deciding for their installation in a given location. further combinations of noise abatement interventions and more configuration parameters are also possible for such noise abatement measures: they are actually under investigation in order to be implemented in the next prototype of our platform. more specifically, we are implementing the possibility to apply different noise abatement policies to different roads and city areas, in order to offer estimations about selective and differentiated interventions. similarly, we are enlarging the range of available options, by considering also the evaluation criteria typically used for noise barrier selection. users will be allowed to select amongst barriers [60], [61] differing for: typology (i.e., absorptive vs reflective), material (e.g., wood, plastic, steel, concrete, etc.), height and length, shape and barrier-tops (e.g., conventional, t-profile, yprofile, arrow-profile, curved, etc.). all these design aspects will be briefly described in terms of both installation costs and noise reduction effectiveness. 6. discussion 6.1. measurement accuracy the platform has been preliminary tested at our university campus. subsequently, 20 students from our faculty performed several on-site tests in the central area of the city of lecce (95k inhabitants, southern italy). they collected measurements in multiple 1-hour time windows by moving across high-traffic hotspots (e.g., roundabouts, 4-lane roads, typically congested streets, etc.). three different types of android-based smartphone have been used as metering devices. some of the collected measurements have been also used to produce the noise maps described in section 5.2 (fig.5). the need for testing different smartphones is related to the measurement accuracy issue, which assumes a considerable relevance in mcs contexts, since mobiles embed sensors exhibiting lower accuracies than professional metering equipment. the same issue also refers to their embedded microphones, which are normal directional microphones, instead of the omnidirectional, shielded ones which are available in professional slms. therefore, we coped with this by evaluating the accuracy of the smartphone-embedded microphones instrumentally: we selected a 30-second steady, mid-level and broadband noise source and then we repeatedly compared measurements provided by different models of smartphones to data obtained with a professional, portable, class-1 slm (i.e., deltaohm hd9019). after several comparison sessions, we achieved an acceptable average accuracy: data from mobiles were affected on average by a ±5db bias, which confirms the most recent research works [62] and thus demonstrating their amenability to be leveraged as preliminary monitoring stations. in addition, we also implemented, as a step of the etl process, a univariate algorithm for the outlier detection in order to remove measurements having an excessive sound level amplitude in a given temporal window. we opted for a slightly modified version of the tukey’s method [63], which is simple and quite effective with datasets following both a normal distribution and a not highly skewed lognormal distribution (which is the case of environmental sensors working in normal conditions, without relevant malfunctioning issues or particularly high concentrations of out-of-threshold noise sources). moreover, accuracy issues can be further reduced by implementing calibration procedures for smartphone builtin microphones. these methodologies allow to assess in a more rigorous way the reliability of a given device as an accurate sensor source: they allow us to quantify the discrepancy between a professional measurement and a mcs-based one, so that the latter one can be provided with an additive correction factor. multiple calibration approaches are available in scientific literature for acoustic monitoring equipment. the first and more reliable one requires the comparison between the measurement achieved with a given mobile device and the one achieved by a professional slm (obviously, both referring to the same sound sample). the major drawback of such an approach is that with large numbers of users it is impossible to perform extensive calibration campaigns (also if we consider that periodical calibration are required). other calibration solutions are therefore needed. the second version of the developed prototype will offer: 1) self-calibration performed by each user against a known sound sample; 2) an extensive database of already calibrated smartphones, so that large portions of users can benefit from the already available correction factors. 6.2. privacy issues the web app visualizes collected measures on a georeferenced map: the providing users, scattered on a large area, gather and send measurement by using their mobile devices. this casts the need of proper privacy protection approaches, since one of the most relevant concerns of 11 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 m. zappatore et al. smartphone users, nowadays, is the fear of being tracked or identified as a direct consequence of the usage policies and actions they perform on their devices. in order to minimize such risk and to make aware users of the adopted privacy-preservation strategies, we propose the following interventions. firstly, any information or metadata capable of identifying the device owner is discarded and users are notified about this when they start the app for the first time. mobile devices are only indexed thanks to their imei (international mobile equipment identity) code, which do not allow going back to respective owners (therefore, mobiles are traceable but their owners are unknown to both platform managers and other application end users). secondly, users are required to login to our platform if they want to enrich participatory noise measurements with comments and photos: this solution allows us to achieve a better reliability in psychoacoustic measurements (since registered users are willing to contribute responsibly). 6.3. user engagement and effective channels for data gathering mcs activities usually require specific solutions for engaging people in data gathering campaigns, so that they should not lose interest after their first experiences in mcs. moreover, the involved participants should be informed about how to perform measurements correctly, in order to avoid data quality worsening. thirdly, mcs apps must exhibit effective channels for data gathering, so that their usage mode seamlessly help users in gathering data in the right way. all these aspects have to be considered when designing and implementing mcs solutions, as they represent the key elements for widening the lifespan of a given mcs activity. for such reasons, we are implementing a series of additional functions on our initial platform prototype. amongst them, the most relevant one pertains to the released mobile app. we are planning the release of a second version of the mobile app, not anymore as a standalone app but as a plugin for third-party mobile apps (which we can call “hosting apps”). this different type of distribution will allow us to widen the number of potential users, who will experience the capabilities offered by our platform as an add-on for hosting apps they typically already use. in addition, we will not select the hosting apps simply by considering their level of diffusion amongst mobile users but by paying much more attention to the usage modalities these apps actually offers. indeed, we will select hosting apps that require people to use their smartphone in a way that is also suitable for performing measurements in an effective and reliable way. amongst the requirements needed for identifying hosting apps, we can enlist the following ones: 1) do not use smartphone built-in microphone for other audio registering purposes; 2) do not use other external sensors plugged into the audio jack connector; 3) do not require the usage of specific covers that may obstruct the microphone and hinder the measurement quality; 4) require an intensive usage from smartphone owners, in order to be in idle for shorter timeperiods. 7. conclusions the enormous diffusion of mobile devices is disclosing new opportunities in everyday life for people: the computational power offered by such devices, along with their rich built-in sensor equipment and the capability of being connected anywhere and anytime can be exploited in a plethora of novel and useful ways. one of the core areas where mobile devices can be effectively leveraged is represented by smart cities: urban environments aiming at becoming more environmentally sustainable and more itoriented than ever before in order to improve their citizenship’s life quality. several solutions have been proposed in scientific literature so far about smart cities, dealing with potentially any kind of sector: transportation, logistics, pollution monitoring, public services, wireless communications and so on. however, policy makers and city managers are constantly involved in searching novel ways to cope with typical urban issues, such as environmental quality monitoring and urban mobility. these two aspects, indeed, have a strong mutual relationships, since vehicular traffic is considered one of the prominent causes for urban air and noise pollution. therefore, proper sensing approaches are needed, in order to collect relevant data. the majority of municipalities, unfortunately, cannot afford expensive and long professional metering campaigns, even in western countries, due to several reasons, ranging from equipment considerable installation and maintenance costs to lack of skilled personnel for managing sensors and interpreting their data. consequently, in this paper we decided to leverage the diffusion of a novel sensing paradigm known as mobile crowd sensing (mcs), according to which mobile devices can be used as sufficiently accurate sensing platform, for engaging citizens into large urban noise monitoring campaigns at potentially no cost. we selected the noise monitoring as our first area of application in order to exploit the sound-registering capability offered by mobile built-in microphones. we developed a platform allowing citizens to gather noise measurements (both opportunistically and participatory). collected measurements are then aggregated, filtered and interpolated in order to provide city managers with an overview of the actual noise pollution levels in their cities. specific noise abatement measures are suggested to city managers (in terms of both estimated noise reduction and average installation costs) thanks to a dedicated web app. the proposed solution promises to be very effective in a smart city scenario, where citizens directly contribute to enhancing their quality of life and city managers are constantly informed about noise levels across the entire urban framework without the need of expensive monitoring 12 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 a mobile crowd-sensing platform for noise monitoring in smart cities networks. several tests assessing the accuracy achievable by smartphone built-in microphones in sound monitoring have been performed with satisfactory results. a series of privacy-preserving techniques have been also presented in the paper. the system has been preliminary tested in city of southern italy hosting a large variety of noise sources within its framework (i.e., airport, commercial and touristic harbour, railway station, highway). other additional improvements are actually under development: model scalability, introduction of multiple noise abatement measures, additional setup parameters (e.g., different noise barrier materials and shapes). acknowledgements. this research activity has been developed and financed by the eu-funded project sp4um (grant agreement n. 632853, subgrant agreement n. 021), within the “frontiercities” fiware accelerator, and by the edoc@work3.0 project. references [1] a. goldsmith, wireless communications, cambridge university press, 2005. 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[63] d. hoaglin, b. iglewicz and j. tukey, "performance of some resistant rules for outlier labeling," journal of american statistical association, vol. 82, pp. 1147-1149, 1986. 14 eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e3 ai for healthy meal preparation in smart cities 1 ai for healthy meal preparation in smart cities bhuvana namasivayam1,* 1software developer, verizon connect, atlanta, usa. abstract introduction: ‘food is medicine’. eating healthy fresh cooked foods is increasingly becoming a challenge, especially among working professionals, elderly people, people in care homes and those getting medical care, as they find it difficult to cook everyday meals and to make sure they take in all necessary nutrients regularly. objectives: with the intervention of robotics and ai, food preparation and delivery can be made efficient in a way it supports overall health and wellbeing. methods: the proposed idea is a smart city ai scheme with robots engaged in food preparation tasks such as chopping, grating etc, robotic kitchens assembled to prepare foods as per the dietary needs of various groups of people and delivery bots and drones to effectively deliver meals, fruits and necessary supplements on a daily basis and also pick up leftovers for effective waste management. this can also be extended to smart hospitals for providing nutritious meals to patients to aid in faster recovery and also avoid the carelessness and haste in food preparation when human workers are involved. keywords: robot, food preparation, drone, artificial intelligence, everyday meals received on 31 july 2022, accepted on 26 september 2022, published on 27 september 2022 copyright © 2022 bhuvana, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i4.2267 1. background eating healthy is slowly becoming a priority for a lot of people these days and people are willing to spend more money to buy or make healthy wholesome food. at the same time, it is also a challenge to make sure to take in healthy meals on a regular basis, especially among working professionals, elderly people and people getting medical care, because of the time and effort it demands. a good number of people are dependent on house help and restaurants for their everyday meals, but it is still hard to ensure they get wholesome meals with all required nutrients on a regular basis. human prepared meal plans catered to meet nutrient requirements which are becoming increasingly prevalent are quite expensive. also, the availability of such healthy meals should not be a luxury that only the privileged can enjoy and relish. hence creating a system that can provide healthy nutrient rich *corresponding author. email: bhuvana.n21@gmail.com inexpensive meals to everyone alike, becomes important in order to create a healthier and more energetic society [10]. in this day and age, making use of technology and ai to form a system that can provide healthy everyday meals is scalable and efficient and can cater to a large number of people. 2. smart city ecosystem a smart city is an ecosystem of smart capabilities that work with one another to make the city a desired place to live and work. artificial intelligence (ai) plays an important role in the future development of smart cities. a smart city ai framework is an intelligent network of connected objects and machines transmitting data using wireless technology amongst themselves in some cases and to the cloud [17]. by providing the necessary infrastructure, communication platform and enabling access to relevant eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:bhuvana.n21@gmail.com bhuvana namasivayam 2 data to integrate any new technological system, smart cities provide a suitable ecosystem to such an initiative. smart cities, in general, also have a health service system that uses technology such as wearable devices, iot, and mobile internet to dynamically access medical information of people, connect people and institutions related to healthcare together and also actively manages medical ecosystem needs in an intelligent manner [4]. iot, mobile internet, cloud computing, big data, 5g, microelectronics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology form the main components of smart healthcare. technology applications and apps also encourage healthier behaviour in people and assist them with the proactive management of a healthy lifestyle. it puts consumers in control of health and well-being [23]. one of ai's biggest potential benefits is to help people stay healthy so they don't need to visit a doctor, or at least not as often. the use of ai and the internet of medical things (iomt) in consumer health applications is already helping people in different ways [3]. 3. robots for food preparation with ai and robotics becoming more accessible, robots are increasingly becoming a commonplace for the food and beverage industry. the early uses of robots in the food industry were primarily for packaging and palletizing operations [7]. now, they are used for various food processing operations from the farm to fork, such as salad making, mixing, chopping, dairy and cheese processing operations like stirring curds, slicing cheese, meat processing operations such as cutting, sorting and packaging and many more [21]. a number of tech firms are now developing robots that can cook and plate up entire meals, both for commercial and domestic kitchens. they can turn on the oven and hob, pick up and put down saucepans and spatulas, stir, whisk and flip [15]. a robotic kitchen has various robots performing different food preparation tasks for different ingredients and an assembler to bring everything together, combine as needed and to arrange entire meals. for example, a steamer component cooks grains and pasta, and a separate element dispenses sauces and garnishes. the different components can be in different temperature-controlled lanes [5], [25]. the robotic kitchen also includes food safe bins where staff in-charge can place ingredients to be cooked. as an alternative, the ingredients are deposited at intervals automatically into bowls that travel through the kitchen on a conveyor belt. an ai vision system, that’s integrated with the robot, identifies the food and the robot picks it up, and cooks it as per the instructions fed to it. the robot then places food in a hot holding area [11]. the chef’s movements can be recorded while making a recipe in a similar kitchen setup as the robot and then transferred onto the robotic arms. those movements would then be streamlined by the robotics team, and formulate a consistent program that would produce the same dish every time [1]. it can also utilise data from the robotic assembly line and other inputs to optimise workflows, recipe development, and food scheduling. a lot of start-up companies are also developing robots that can perform complex food preparation tasks such as flipping burgers, making fried food etc [9]. robotic kitchens are becoming increasingly popular worldwide. an initiative by a start-up in chennai, india in building a fully automated kitchen that can cook more than 800 recipes for provided orders, with no manual effort [24]. a restaurant in boston, called spyce has a dynamic menu where guests can select a dietary or allergy preference on the app while placing an order, and the app instantly reshuffles an item’s ingredients to fit those parameters [8],[12]. 3.1 advantages of robotic kitchens advantages of using robots as compared to manual labour are, they save time, consistency in adding ingredients and preparation, are more hygienic, cost effective and helps reduce food waste. they help people save time and focus on meaningful activities. robots have become capable of producing 350 bowls per hour and completing an order in two to five minutes. there are robots developed that can prepare 50 pizzas an hour, using 35 different toppings and cheeses [18]. performing the various tasks needed to get a dish ready can be tedious and hard to get it right every time for a human chef. for example, griddling patties for burgers, toasting buns and spreading sauces to get a burger ready can be hard or close to impossible to get it right every time maintaining consistency and quality, but the robot chef can do it precisely, quickly and effortlessly. quality food gets delivered quickly and as per guests’ specifications. using robots also helps reduce food waste, avoids cross-contamination, decreases oil spillage, manage resources better and can bring in sustainability [13]. 3.2 robotic kitchen components the main components in a robotic kitchen are robotic arms, which perform the action of picking and placing items and different types of sensors that are integrated in high-precise and lightweight frame structure. often, there is an endeffector attached to the arms that is customised for a specific food preparation task. end-effectors include a wide variety of shaped grippers, suction cups, and other food manipulation devices specific to the size, shape, and rigidity of the food products they are handling. in addition, there is also a computer vision system to determine orientation of the food to be manipulated, attached to the robot. some robot chefs are integrated with natural language processing features and can respond to voice menu orders. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first ai for healthy meal preparation in smart cities 3 robotics also requires special food-safe materials. stainless steel is used commonly since it can withstand caustic cleaning chemicals. in addition, food-safe lubricants can be used on moving parts. cabinets, kitchen appliances and equipment optimised for human and robot use, are integrated and connected to the fully automated kitchens. they can also include a recipe recording system and a connected gui screen with access to a library of recipes. 4. delivery robots and drones four-wheeled, cooler-sized robots that deliver food and beverages, drones that fly to your backyard to deliver food and groceries are increasingly becoming the next future of robotics [16]. robots are already deployed for delivering on college campuses, and in various controlled environments. the robots use satellite imagery to navigate from place to place. they are mostly connected to a centralised computing system which determines the best path for the robot to take for efficiency and safety and also optimises the routes and delivery for the different bots connected to the system at any given point. each robot also has its own set of cameras, sensors and radar to ensure that it can avoid obstacles such as cars, animals and pedestrians [14]. 5. proposed smart city ai scheme for improving overall wellbeing a smart city set up offers various advantages for efficient and autonomous meal preparation and delivery with robotic systems and drones. with iot and high speed 5g network, the overall speed and performance of the system is improved [19]. food delivery bots connected with smart city iot infrastructure and communicating with iot traffic controls and sensors offer efficient and safe navigation and routing through pedestrian walkways in smart cities. exchange of information between meal preparation robotic systems and delivery systems along with the data of dietary requirements of people in the community can be properly utilised to improve the effectiveness of the scheme [2], [22]. a similar robotic kitchen set up in individual households would cost a fortune, whereas a smart city ecosystem with its connected infrastructure, shared resources and services and access to collective data and information encourages community initiatives that can be effectively implemented to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. the proposed idea is a smart city ai scheme that includes fully automated robotic kitchens with robots and robotic arms engaged in food preparation tasks such as chopping, grating etc, mixing and assembling foods for various pre-programmed recipes and also pack entire meals for people individually based on their dietary needs. figure 1. ai powered meal preparation system the scheme or ai ecosystem proposed also integrates the food preparation units with delivery bots and drones to effectively deliver meals, fruits and necessary supplements on a daily basis to individual homes and care homes in the smart city and also pick up leftovers for effective waste management [6]. this can also be extended to smart hospitals within the smart cities for providing nutritious meals to patients to aid in faster recovery. the system can also be integrated securely with health records of the patients to provide daily supplements and required medications. with the use of robots for meal preparation, the speed and consistency of the number of dishes or food units prepared is considerably increased as compared to human chefs and that provides the way to accommodate individual nutrient needs in every day’s meal preparation schedule. a centralised and decentralised cloud infrastructure and processing system becomes the backbone of the fully automated meal preparation scheme, providing connectivity and communication between the different components of the ecosystem, powering the robotic and ai components and algorithms to function seamlessly, handling and analysing data and information gathered from the smart city’s iot to formulate workflows, optimise routes and make intelligent decisions and also by integrating necessary security and fail safe mechanisms [20]. an ai powered mobile application can be integrated with the scheme for people to include their dietary requirements and receive daily notifications on meal preparation and delivery. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first bhuvana namasivayam 4 6. benefits of the proposed scheme • everyday delivery of fresh meals and nutritious snacks for older people and people getting medical care. • save money and human resources. • variety of menu, catered to dietary needs and nutrition requirements. • more hygienic • fewer mistakes as compared to human workers and reduce food waste. • faster meal preparation and hence • can be extended to use ai to analyse various body types and conditions if any, based on health data collected and to assist people to eat nutritious meals based on that. • cost effective as it can be built to cater to entire communities and also serve different classes of people, equally. 7. conclusion the impact technology and ai can have in improving the collective health of the community is significant and with the belief that nutritious food has the ability to heal and prevent illness, the intent of the proposed idea is to create a healthier and more sustainable societies and cities. references [1] agarwal r, jachowski d, shengxi d. robo-chef: automatic recipe generation. tech. np. 2009 nov. [2] amin su, hossain ms. edge intelligence and internet of things in healthcare: a survey. ieee access. 2020 dec 15;9:45-59. [3] astromskė k, peičius e, astromskis p. ethical and legal challenges of informed consent applying artificial intelligence in medical diagnostic consultations. ai & society. 2021 jun;36(2):509-20. [4] brown j, cug j, kolencik j. internet of things-based smart healthcare systems: real-time patient-generated medical data from networked wearable devices. american journal of medical research. 2020 apr 1;7(1):21-7. [5] cha e, forlizzi j, srinivasa ss. robots in the home: qualitative and quantitative insights into kitchen organization. in proceedings of the tenth annual acm/ieee international conference on human-robot interaction 2015 mar 2 (pp. 319-326). [6] diran d, van veenstra af, timan t, tesa p, kirova m. artificial intelligence in smart cities and urban mobility. policy department for economic, scientific and quality of life policies. 2021. [7] duong ln, al-fadhli m, jagtap s, bader f, martindale w, swainson m, paoli a. a review of robotics and autonomous systems in the food industry: from the supply chains perspective. trends in food science & technology. 2020 dec 1;106:355-64. [8] fürstenau d, auschra c, klein s, gersch m. a process perspective on platform design and management: evidence from a digital platform in health care. electronic markets. 2019 dec;29(4):581-96. [9] hoffmann t, prause g. on the regulatory framework for last-mile delivery robots. machines. 2018 aug 1;6(3):33. [10] klein ja, watson jl, editors. the handbook of food and anthropology. bloomsbury publishing; 2016 aug 25. [11] liu b, zhang m, sun y, wang yc. current intelligent segmentation and cooking technology in the central kitchen food processing. journal of food process engineering. 2019 oct;42(6):e13149. [12] madon s, schoemaker e. digital identity as a platform for improving refugee management. information systems journal. 2021 nov;31(6):929-53. [13] moreno-camacho ca, montoya-torres jr, jaegler a, gondran n. sustainability metrics for real case applications of the supply chain network design problem: a systematic literature review. journal of cleaner production. 2019 sep 10;231:600-18. [14] mukherjee s, baral mm, venkataiah c, pal sk, nagariya r. service robots are an option for contactless services due to the covid-19 pandemic in the hotels. decision. 2021 dec;48(4):445-60. [15] naeem abass m, zohry ae, gamal saad soliman s. the possibility of using robot as one of the artificial intelligence techniques in the food and beverage department in five-star hotels: managers' perspective. 2022 jun 1;11(2):857-907. [16] romanjuk m. delivery robots serving last mile b2c: an evaluation of tallinn residents' incentives behind the usage of delivery robots in 2020 on the basis of starship technologies example. [17] rozenes s, cohen y. artificial intelligence synergetic opportunities in services: conversational systems perspective. applied sciences. 2022 jan;12(16):8363. [18] rusu rb, gerkey b, beetz m. robots in the kitchen: exploiting ubiquitous sensing and actuation. robotics and autonomous systems. 2008 oct 31;56(10):844-56. [19] sallabi f, shuaib k. internet of things network management system architecture for smart healthcare. in 2016 sixth international conference on digital information and communication technology and its applications (dictap) 2016 jul 21 (pp. 165-170). ieee. [20] shuaib m, alam s, alam ms, nasir ms. self-sovereign identity for healthcare using blockchain. materials today: proceedings. 2021 mar 27. [21] singh a, chavan a, kariwall v, sharma c. a systematic review of automated cooking machines and food service robots. in 2021 international conference on communication information and computing technology (iccict) 2021 jun 25 (pp. 1-6). ieee. [22] suppa a, kvist j, li x, dhandapani v, almulla h, tian ay, kissane s, zhou j, perotti a, mangelson h, langford k. roundup causes embryonic development failure and alters metabolic pathways and gut micro-iot a functionality in non-target species. microbiome. 2020 dec;8(1):1-5. [23] tian s, yang w, le grange jm, wang p, huang w, ye z. smart healthcare: making medical care more intelligent. global health journal. 2019 sep 1;3(3):62-5. [24] vijai c, wisetsri w. rise of artificial intelligence in healthcare startups in india. advances in management. 2021 mar 1;14(1):48-52. [25] wallin pj. robotics in the food industry: an update. trends in food science & technology. 1997 jun 1;8(6):193-8. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first myketiak_mobihealth_final.pages new/s design: informing future design processes by understanding media reporting of medical errors with medical devices [invited paper] chrystie myketiak university of brighton
 college of arts and humanities
 falmer campus brighton, uk bn1 9ph c.myketiak@brighton.ac.uk shauna concannon queen mary university of london
 school of electronic engineering and computer science
 london, uk e1 4ns s.concannon@qmul.ac.uk paul curzon queen mary university of london
 school of electronic engineering and computer science
 london, uk e1 4ns p.curzon@qmul.ac.uk abstract in this paper we present a case study of media reporting about medical technology issues. we discuss two incidents involving human error with medical devices that resulted in infant deaths, and their relevance for the medical device design and mobile health communities. our analysis into the language and discourses of news reporting shows that the news narratives of these incidents emphasise human aspects of the error and neglect device issues. better design is not conceptualised as an option in these narratives, even when systemic issues are discussed in relation to errors with devices. however, there is a possibility for better design solutions if practitioners are aware of the discursive construction of errors, including how critical incidents are framed and developed in news discourse. categories and subject descriptors j.3 life and medical sciences (e.g., health) j.5 arts and humanities (e.g., linguistics) general terms design, human factors. keywords critical discourse analysis; human error; medical devices; news reporting; patient safety; sociolinguistics. 1. introduction the media helps drive technology cultures, yet its influence is underexplored within the medical device and mobile health communities. this study presents an analysis of news articles about incidents involving medical error and patient deaths. we examine the news reporting of two infant deaths in hospitals in different countries from the same temporal period using critical discourse analysis (cda). both deaths were linked to employee errors in administering medication using medical devices. print and online news articles were gathered on these cases. we found differences in how the errors were discursively constructed. the first case involved an ‘out by 10’ mathematical error, which was often explained in the news articles as ‘user error’ with an interruption being the only systemic issue mentioned. the second case involved incorrect medication and the focus in that coverage was on workspace, personnel and medication placement changes that would be implemented in order to reduce similar errors in the future. 
 an important issue for the medical device design and mobile health communities is how, despite the differences in how these narratives frame the error in the news, there was no focus on the devices, their design, or use. both cases lacked discussion of how poor design/usability could have contributed to the errors or of how improved design could prevent similar errors. although there is a great deal of research on the issues and implementation of wireless sensors for health monitoring (e.g., [14, 27]), there has been little discussion of operator errors post-implementation. our analysis suggests that when incidents with devices occur, the discussion in the media and the framing of investigations lacks emphasis on socio-technical systems and human-computer interaction (hci) issues, including the use, design, and potential for improvement of device design. we assert that this propagates a discourse of technological determinism whereby individuals, organisations, designers, manufacturers, and the media may contribute to a narrative that users (individually or systematically) are responsible for errors and that thinks only of individual or ergonomic refinements rather than how use is impacted by good (and poor) design. this means there is little encouragement from these sources for error reduction improvements in designs and opportunities for designs to be iteratively improved are lost. mobihealth 2015, october 14-16, london, great britain copyright © 2015 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-10-2015.2261762 2. literature review the field of health communication is broad, with a long history of examining the dynamics of clinical conversations (e.g., [25]). more recently, there have been studies examining mediated interaction, such as emergency hotline calls (e.g., [10, 20]) and health-oriented online communities (e.g., [9, 19]). a complement to this research has been a focus on media representations of specific health topics (e.g., [4, 17, 18]). however, there has been little research on the intersection of media, health, and design. we tie this body of work to that which focuses on design solutions in healthcare technology. in particular, patient safety is a serious technology concern (e.g., [11, 13, 23]). issues surrounding technology and patient safety cover a wide terrain, including bridging strengths from many disciplines (e.g., computer science, engineering, mathematics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, etc.) to improve devices, clinical practices, and incident reporting. the language of reporting cultures provides understanding of individual incidents. it also matters to healthcare technologists because it examines: • the sociocultural environment of medical errors (e.g., real-life use as well as in the larger society where incidents are reported and stories are discussed) • the linguistic and discursive construction of errors (e.g., whose story is told, where/how are users positioned) • how the future of medical device design including mobile healthcare can be impacted by ‘human error’ incidents 3. methodology 3.1. methods this study uses cda, a qualitative methodology often used in sociolinguistics. we adopt corpus techniques as described by [1] to enable this. in addition to cda, we provide supplementary quantitative data, as others using corpora approaches to discourse analysis in the area of health and illness have done [17, 18]. we concentrate on how these incidents are linguistically framed (cf. [21]); examining specific aspects of news discourse, including headlines [2, 7] and noun phrases [6]. the cases examined here were selected because they were critical incidents involving patient safety (infant deaths) and interactive medical devices (infusion pumps) in 2009 with sufficient english language news coverage for analysis. these two incidents are also comparative in that they took place in urban hospitals in western countries (canada and the united kingdom) with publicly-funded health care. • the first case (n=80 articles) involved a four-month old male infant in the uk who died two days after two nurses infused him with 10 times the prescribed amount of sodium chloride. • the second case (n=14 articles) involved a six-week old male infant in canada who died two weeks after pharmacists mixed humulin r (insulin) rather than heparin in his iv food (he was one of four premature babies who received the incorrect medication). news articles were gathered through a combination of lexisnexis, which indexes news articles, and online searches in two countries (canada and uk) in 2012 and 2013 to maximise the sample size; duplicates, such as wire articles running in multiple newspapers, are counted once. the cases are referred to as cases 1 and 2. we made a conscious choice not to use the names of the infants or staff who were involved in the incidents. while these names are part of the public record, we position this research as both sensitive and vulnerable [15] and wish to minimise further harm to those involved and their families. in addition to the infant deaths, nurses were blamed in one of the incidents; we do not want to contribute to a culture of ‘naming, blaming, and shaming’ [12] that some in the medical profession critique [24]. we maintain that this ethical decision does not impede our work. 3.2. data there was an inquest following the infant’s death in case 1, which involved a mathematical error whereby the patient received 10 times more medication than prescribed. number entry research has shown that ‘out by 10’ are a standard class of errors that even skilled users may make [22]. this case received significantly more coverage than case 2. the staff members involved in case 1 were named in the coverage and the nurses were framed as culpable prior to the verdict. news reporting about case 1 covered three distinct temporal periods (2009, 2010, 2012). in contrast with case 1, no individuals were publicly blamed in case 2, in which one of four infants who were infused with the incorrect medication on a neonatal ward died. the error originated in the hospital pharmacy when the incorrect drug was mixed into the patients’ iv food. while the hospital acknowledged the error, a spokesperson said it was a ‘mistake’ and focused on contributing factors as well as procedural and spatial changes that would be implemented in the future. 4. results and discussion we focus our results and discussion on one central theme relating to the data of each incident and how its narrative is constructed. following this we discuss the trend across the two incidents and their narrative arcs to neglect device-related components of the errors. 4.1. reading news headlines headlines draw readers’ attention to news stories, and are critical to news discourse [2, 6, 7]. in examining the headlines associated with the cases where nurses were blamed for infant deaths (case 1), the language used reduces the nurses to the incident and frames them in negative terms. more interesting is the variation in the headlines and how the language of headlines position nurses as incompetent through the deployment of lexical items. table 1. case 1 headline terminology analysis terms in headlines 2009 (n=8) 2010 (n=24) 2012 (n=48) nurse/s or name 0 13 46 adjective applied to nurse 0 5 0 incident applied as adjective to nurse 0 1 9 although two nurses were involved in the error, most headlines (n=52) used the term ‘nurse’ or referred to one nurse by name, with an additional seven headlines using the plural ‘nurses’ (total 59/80 headlines). further analysis also shows a temporal element: none of the articles from 2009 mention the nurse/s involved; instead all articles (n=8) from that period focus on the patient. in 2010, the emphasis is evenly mixed with 24 articles, 13 of which have headlines referencing the nurses. however, in 2012, when the inquest into the death takes place, the headlines skew towards emphasising one nurse (45/48 headlines; an additional headline uses ‘nurses’). thus, there is a notable change over the news cycle of the story: while the subject of headlines immediately after the incident is the patient, in the two subsequent news cycles it is the nurse/s. in the second reporting period (2010) there is also a discursive element of blame that occurs in some of the headlines that refer to the nurse/s. the use of adjectives works to frame the nurses as meriting blame. the five headlines that use adjectives to modify the nurse/s are all negative (lazy (n=2), distracted, bungling, and sickest). the adjectival use terms such as ‘bungling’ or ‘lazy’ when preceding the term ‘nurse’ frame her as culpable for the error and challenge notions of her competency and work ethic. the use of the term ‘sickest’ in a headline frames the nurse in an exclusive category: first it is an absolute and second it implies that the error was purposeful rather than a mistake. additionally, the focus on ‘lazy’, whilst not as dramatic, is a negative linguistic framing tool: it eliminates other possibilities that may have led to the error. mathematical errors can occur for many reasons, individual and systemic, yet this immolates those options. other headlines reduce the nurse to the incident itself (e.g., ‘saline baby death nurse’, ‘fatal blunder nurse’ and ‘salt-death nurse’). although there was one of these found in 2010, as table 1 indicates, the bulk of these (n=9) were in the final reporting period (2012). in these examples, the death comes before the nurse, limiting her to it. the reduction of identity to the incident frames the nurse one-dimensionally as a ‘salt-death nurse’. by using the incident to modify the noun, the nurse is reduced to the incident and, through the lack of person-first language, becomes defined by it. 4.2. system-wide responsibility in the news in case 2 system-wide responsibility was narrativised in the telling of the incident, and received far less news coverage than case 1. in more than half (n=8) of the articles there was discussion of multiple spatial, ergonomic, and non-technical human factors that the hospital resolved to address in the future. various other factors may also have contributed to case 2 receiving less media attention: press culture and regulation differences within canada affect what details can be reported and when [26]; and the decision not to publicly name any of the staff involved, resulted in a news story that did not have a ‘villain’ to anchor the narrative against a ‘helpless victim’, a pattern that can be found in news stories and other narrative forms, including folktales [5]. however, by immediately acknowledging systemwide factors and releasing a plan of how to avoid future errors of this kind, the hospital thereby engaged in ‘image repair discourse’ [3]. the hospital’s public relations approach included addressing systemic factors that were not tied to individual behaviours (e.g., interruptions) but to space, staffing targets, and labeling practices. action points included increasing the size of the hospital pharmacy and the number of pharmacists on staff; implementing safety checks, (e.g., having a second member of staff doublecheck medication); relabeling humulin r to its generic name “insulin” in order to avoid potential confusion with similarly named drugs, such as heparin; and storing insulin in a separate part of the pharmacy, away from other drugs, including heparin. of these action points the last two are specific to the incident – changing how the drug is referred to and where it is stored – and will only prevent a like error from occurring in the future (i.e., an error involving insulin). so although these action points appear to broach system-wide issues that may have contributed to the error they do little in preventing other drug or medical device errors with similar causes. however, by addressing these concerns, the organization took control of the narrative, altering the story itself rather than the way it was framed and moved the focus away from individuals. what is critical is that regardless of the potential efficacy of these actionables with respect to patient safety, they are part of a narrative of ‘taking responsibility’ and allow the hospital to re-position the narrative. the hospital’s own telling (through their spokesperson) of the incident and their proposed actions take the focus from the error and patient death and move it onto their response to the error. 4.3. ‘it’s all about people’ donald norman succinctly described good hci as ‘all about people’ [16]. while people are critical in design processes, our analysis illustrates that devices and design are absent in this coverage. the errors in both cases were described as medication based: a ‘medication error’ and ‘medication mix-up’, respectively. in the total sample (n=94) there was no discussion of the devices used, how the devices may have contributed to the errors, or how better design could have prevented errors. in sum, devices were rendered invisible: organisations and the media did not discuss the possibility that design and devices could be improved. the narratives expressed in the public domain were about people, who were constructed as victims and/or villains. this emphasis is different from what norman and others have called for; the argument for design to be people-centred requires taking situated contexts and actual practices into account and embedding that knowledge into design from the earliest stages. a significant portion of the articles (n=39) mentioned factors that contributed to the error (e.g., interruptions, physical space, labeling, double checking) that good design can broach; of those, 28 of the articles pertained to case 1 (n=80) and focused on interruptions and the remaining 11 were from the case 2 sample (n=14), which covered a wider range of systemic factors. a small number of those articles also discussed changes in guidance that resulted from the errors (n=3 for case 1, n=8 for case 2), but again the focus was on what staff members could do differently or how the workspace could be re-organised. these media case studies illustrate a lack of discourse regarding better design or the possibilities of design: in public and work life technology and design are conceptualised as fixed rather than iterative. 5. limitations as this study consists of a cda of two historic case studies and relies on the information in our corpus, we do not have detailed information about the specific device models used; however, through cda, rich insights are garnered and issues surrounding error interpretation are highlighted that could be of particular relevance for the development of healthcare technology including mobile and remote healthcare application design. this paper offers a theoretical viewpoint that can enhance the understanding of error interpretation in health technologies and inform design protocols that encourage post-implementation, in situ evaluation and monitoring. 6. conclusions while users are critical in usability and design processes, our research into news narratives illustrates that usability and design need to take a more prominent role in public discourse when errors occur. our analysis shows that the reporting on usability related errors is already focused on people and their spaces and that this is problematic for hci researchers and usability designers. even when learning rather than blame is promoted, which has been encouraged by some (e.g., [24]) the discussion in these news narratives focuses on reframing user errors and workplace changes, including traditional ergonomics (e.g., moving supplies, making spaces larger), as is seen in case 2. in both of our news media case studies, technology is seen as outside the realm of what can be transformed, and is discussed only in relation to ‘training’. therefore, the socio-technical system whereby these devices are used, and real-life errors actually occur may be neglected. this suggests a schism with how devices are presented and perceived: there is a focus on human factors in design processes and usability, yet when errors with medical devices occur the device is often rendered invisible. this occurs within the organisations where the devices are used as well as how those errors are communicated to the general public; this can be seen in how the organisations and the news frame the error. it is not simply that a wider understanding of human factor design issues is needed in the general population or within organisations. rather, we propose that design itself may benefit from a more informed and reflexive outlook if hci practitioners and medical device designers have both awareness and a better understanding of the culture of errors, including news reporting of critical incidents. if there were wider public discussion when medical incidents occurred that included the possibility of design changes preventing future errors, then this could promote innovation in design, rather than supporting the status quo. 7. acknowledgments the authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the engineering and physical sciences research council (uk), grant number (ep/ g059063/1). 8. references 1. baker, p. using corpora in discourse analysis. continuum, london, 2006. 2. bednarek, m. and caple, h. news discourse. continuum, london, 2012. 3. benoit, w.l. image repair discourse and crisis communication. public relat rev 23, 2 (1997), 177-186. 4. berry, t.r., wharf-higgins, j., and naylor, p.j. sars wars: an examination of the quantity and construction of health information in the news media. health comm 21, 1 (2007), 35-44. 5. conboy, m. the language of the news. routledge, london, 2007. 6. cotter c. news talk. cambridge university press, cambridge, uk, 2010. 7. dor, d. on newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers. j pragmatics 35, 5 (2003), 695-721. 8. eysenbach, g., powell, j., englesakis, m., rizo, c., & stern, a. health related virtual communities and electronic support groups: systematic review of the effects of online peer to peer interactions. bmj, 328, 7449, (2004), 1166. 9. hamilton, h.e. reported speech and survivor identity in on-line bone marrow transplantation narratives. j socioling 2, 1 (1998), 53-67. 10. imbens-bailey, a., and mccabe, a. the discourse of distress: a narrative analysis of emergency calls to 911. lang commun 20, 3 (2000), 275-296. 11. kushniruk, a.w., triola m.m., borycki e.m., stein b., kannry j.l. technology induced error and usability: the relationship between usability problems and prescription errors when using a handheld application. intl j med inf 74, 7-8 (2005), 519-526. 12. lester, h. and tritter, j.q. medical error: a discussion of the medical construction of error and suggestions for reforms for medical education to decrease error. med ed 35, 9 (2001), 855-861. 13. lin, l., vincente k.j., doyle d.j. patient safety, potential adverse drug events, and medical device design: a human factors engineering approach. j biomed info 34, 4 (2001), 274-284. 14. milenković, a., otto, c., & jovanov, e. 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(2010). wireless sensor network based e-health system: implementation and experimental results. ieee t consum electr, 56(4), 2288-2295. comprehensive survey on smart cities architectures and protocols 1 comprehensive survey on smart cities architectures and protocols syed waqar shah1,, tahira magsi1, and ahthasham sajid1,* 1department of computer science, faculty of ict, balochistan university of information technology engineering and management sciences, quetta, baluchistan, pakistan abstract the world has advanced more than two centuries in the last 20 years in every aspect of existence. every day, new inventions are made that improve our quality of life and make our lives easier. one aspect of contemporary innovation is the idea of the smart city. many businesses and governments are embracing the idea of the "smart city" to improve quality of life for citizens while cutting costs. this model is made up of a variety of different technologies. i nternet of things, cloud and fog computing, uav, and other technologies are among them. on the other hand, in order to achieve these important goals, it is necessary to provide the multiple system components with the necessary synchronisation and mechanism, which calls for well-organized interaction and communication protocols. in this study, we categorise the networking requirements and characteristics of smart. keywords: iot, cloud computing, uav. received on 19 june 2022, accepted on 05 september 2022, published on 07 september 2022 copyright © 2022 syed waqar shah et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc bync-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i18.2065 * corresponding author. email: ahthasham.sajid@buitms.edu.pk 1. introduction the smart cities concept brings revolution to urban planning. in 1994 amsterdam formed a virtual digital city to endorse internet procedures [3]. they are the result of knowledge-intensive and ground-breaking policies, pointing at refining sensible enactment of cities [4]. smart cities are based on an auspicious combination of human capital, and commercial capital [4].the smart cities concept is a superlative typical urban gathering, but in actuality, we note numerous smart appearances in urban systems, such as creative districts, smart urban villages, or sustainable knowledge-based urban spaces [4]. the contextual idea of smart cities is built on the circumstance that cities house, in principle, a variety of inventive talents and can offer novel and justifiable solutions [1]. the accumulation compensations generated in modern urban groups are critical limitations for developing the potential benefits of innovative urban spaces. it has been projected that by almost 2050, two-thirds of the world's inhabitants will be living in urban regions, which will be around 7billion people. hence, equipping the cities with smart technologies and analytics can make it resilient and efficient. a large number of cities like dubai, singapore, amsterdam, new york etc., around the globe start using the smart city concept to facilitate their citizens using city infrastructure. these smart services help to improve the working techniques of different departments e.g. education, transportation, healthcare, and many others. the smart city concept is based on many advanced technologies like i.o.t, wireless sensor networks (wsn), robotics, unmanned ariel vehicles (uav), cyber-physical systems (cps), big data analytics, etc. [5]. a major step toward the practical understanding of the smart city concept comprises the growth of a communication setup capable of gathering data from a large diversity of unlike devices in a typically constant and seamless manner, according to the internet of things (iot) paradigm [2]. the internet of things (iot) period is progressing into a sensor-initiated, actuation-driven, and eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 03 2022 09 2022 | volume 6 | issue 18 | e5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:ahthasham.sajid@buitms.edu.pk https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/internet-of-things syed waqar shah, tahira magsi, and ahthasham sajid 2 machine intelligence-based decision-making platform for smart cities [3]. the smart environment is sedate by the attraction of the natural environment, pollution intensities, environmental safety activities, and resource supervision methods. it is assumed that cities can be well-defined as smart if they have the following elements as described in figure 1 below [13]. figure 1. elements of smart city 2. characteristics of smart city as there is no predefined description of a smart city but a handful of researchers have jotted down a few characteristics which sum up the modern city. a digital city comprises all the expected virtues one looks forward to in a modern city. a city must be inclusive of its entire people who are liveable and appreciate the innovation of technology. the city is resilient and resource efficient. as per the economic point of view, it will be dynamic (adaptable to change) and sustainable. but it must care for the environment and be climate-friendly. the natural ecosystem is in complete harmony with such a resilient city [19]. while the tool used to achieve the holy grail is embedding the information and communication technology (ict) in the nerve of the city through huge financial expenditure. the assistance of data-driven information with a participatory approach paves a path for integrating planning. figure 2 [12] demonstrates the characteristics and tools which can help in transform a city into a smart city. figure 2. characteristics and tolls of smart city [12] 3. related work the amount of work issued concerning about network and communication issues of the digital city is meagre. zanella et al [6] cursory define the ways through which iots can be deployed in padova, italy. zanella offered a two-way approach to address the data access, i.e. (i) using unlicensed short-range communication using a multi-hop mesh network (ii) using licensed long-range cellular technology [7]. laccase et al. suggested utilizing raspberry-pi card to control the street lights through the zigbee sensor network and wi-max [8]. while wan et al. proposed event-based communication architecture that allows facilitating communication between machine to machine (m2m), as machine being the essential component of the modern city [9]. quality of service is a vital part of any application to be successful. jin et al in their research paper presented different architecture concepts based on quality of service (qos) [10]. information-driven architecture (idra) is an innovative network architecture that focused on network functions and services such as forwarding, naming, addressing, etc. [11]. these network services are mostly used for configuration purposes for different applications. the participatory sensing network architecture is wellthought-out a special case and a new model of iot. in this model, citizens through their consumer devices gather, examine, and share sensor records. this can be entitled “human-as-a-sensor”. in this mode, wireless infrastructures such as wi-fi, gprs, and 3g are used. some conceivable applications of this architecture are ecological observing, intellectual carrying, and healthcare. qos in such a network can be complicated as humans are the central foundation of data and humans can be slothful, privacy-stricken, and prone to errors. the smart economy is restrained by private enterprise and a city's output, alteration to changes, the suppleness of the labour market, and international collaboration [13]. smart mobility is professed by the convenience of information and communication organization, from side to side the growth of supportable, ground-breaking, and harmless transport [13]. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. this is the body text with indent. 4. architectures of smart cities there are many proposed models of architecture that are suggested by numerous authors but the two main which are quite adaptable are: 1. centralized operational platform: this model is proposed by mahmoud et al. he has suggested that a digital city must have a pyramid-shaped architecture. smart city smart mobility smart people smart environment smart living smart economy smart governance eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 03 2022 09 2022 | volume 6 | issue 18 | e5 comprehensive survey on smart cities architectures and protocols 3 where every management and operation is monitored through a centralized platform. at the bottom, of the pyramid, there lies a smart infrastructure that includes all the devices that are employed in this project. following that in the middle tier, there lie smart database resources, smart building management, and smart infrastructure; which keep a record of all the data being generated. while at the top of the helm, lies the smart city itself which take care of all the affair of the city. figure 3. centralized operational platform 2. three layer architecture: three-layer architecture was proposed by harrison et al, whose crux is that a city will be divided into three halves for better management. according to this model, the instrumented layer captures and integrates the live world data with the help of the sensors, like water reading meter or water quality measurement, etc. then it’s the onus of the interconnected layer to act as the middleman and integrated the data collected and maps numerous outputs into some useful information. in the end, the intelligent layer processes the desired data into a broader context to identify city-related issues and analyze them to take action upon them. figure 4. three layers architecture 5. networking characteristics of smart cities 5.1 bandwidth bandwidth ranges from low, medium, and high (l, m, h) [15]. for example, if those applications which only control commands required a small bandwidth then those applications which utilized image and video data required medium or high bandwidth. 5.2 delay tolerance delay tolerance varies from application to application in smart city architecture. in some applications where immediate control is essential, a delay means disaster e.g. collision between cars while in some applications, such as uavs required data for future dispensation. 5.3 power consumption power consumption is a vital need for a smart city system. however, it is visible in table 1 [14] that those applications which have a local energy source, easily deal with high power consumption and those applications which have low energy capacities have low power consumption. 5.4 reliability reliability levels vary from one application to another. as shown in table 1 [14] smart water networks have medium dependability necessities and smart grids and intellectual conveyance have a high-reliability ratio. 5.5 security security importance is the same as reliability. for example, some applications due to it critical data required high security and some applications required medium security level i.e. monitoring applications. 6. routing protocols of smart cities smart city is an amalgamation of heterogeneous networks and technologies. so, every component that gets embedded in the digital city base has its own characteristics and requirement. therefore, all relevant protocols are to be followed to take maximum utilization from that component. wireless technology: in the smart city if wireless technology is deployed then its only communication mode will be wi-fi, gprs, or 3g networks. short-range applications are designed where the required energy is limited and are compact in size. they smart city database resource smart infrastructure intelligent layer interconnected layer instrumented layer eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 03 2022 09 2022 | volume 6 | issue 18 | e5 syed waqar shah, tahira magsi, and ahthasham sajid 4 don’t need frequent battery changes. applications that are short-range and installed are in smart buildings; water and grid prefer ieee 802.15.4 zigbee protocol [20]. table 1. networking protocols for smart city applications protocol data range transmis sion range applications satellite 10 mbps (for upload) 7 1 gbps (downloads) satellite can cover 100’s km to entire earth uav, monitoring uav, intelligent transport cellular 4g/ lte 300 mbps to1gbps normally 1 km area diameter pipeline monitoring, smart grid, uavs, smart water cellular 3g 144 kbps (mobile) to 42 mbps (stationary) 1km to several stationery -dowimax 802.16 275mbps up to 56km -do802.11n 15,30,45,60,9 0,120,135, 150 mbps 250m outdoors all 802.11g 6,9,12,18,24, 36,48,54mbp s 140m outdoors all 802.11b 1,2,5.5, 11mbps -doall 802.11a 24,36,48,54 mbps 120m outdoors all bluetooth 802.15.1 1mbps 10 to 100 m smart water, grid and building zigbee 802.15.4 20kbps to 250kbps 10 to 20m smart water, grid and building bluetooth uses ieee 802.15.1 which serves as master/slave time division duplex (tdd) protocol. it ranges from 10 to 100 m. (wimax), cellular 3g, cellular 4g/lgt, and satellite use ieee 802.11a, ieee 802.11b, ieee 802.11b, ieee 802.11 g protocols respectively. these protocols are the most frequently used in all urban city systems. 3g and 4g are used in smart grid applications, water management, pipeline monitoring, and uavs while satellite communication is employed for uavs, pipeline monitoring and intelligent transport. table 1 further describe the details of protocols with features. 7. conclusion with each passing day, all technical platforms—including cloud computing, the internet of things, wireless networks, robotics, etc.—have experienced a growth. the goal is to create a city that is smart and capable of coping with the constantly expanding population as well as their demands through the convergence of all these technologies. to provide the greatest utility with the least amount of overhead costs, every vista is being investigated. the core of smart technology relies entirely on reliable routes for communicating information. the only paradigm for turning a town or metropolis into an intelligent one is a quick and dependable transmission route. people do absolutely contribute to technology when they are connected to it directly through applications. acknowledgements. we would like to thanks our teacher dr. ahthasham sajid to motivate and guide us for the understanding and writing of a survey paper as class assignment during ms (cs) course. references [1] ermacora g, rosa s, bona b (2015) sliding autonomy in cloud robotics services for smart city applications. in: proceedings of the tenth annual acm/ieee international conference on human-robot interaction extended abstracts. acm. pp 155–156 [2] a. cenedese, a. zanella, l. vangelista and m. zorzi, "padova smart city: an urban internet of things experimentation," proceeding of ieee international symposium on a world of wireless, mobile and multimedia networks 2014, 2014, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/wowmom.2014.6918931. [3] hadi habibzadeh, tolga soyata, burak kantarci, azzedine boukerche, cem kaptan, sensing, communication and security planes: a new challenge for a smart city system design, computer networks,volume 144,2018. [4] giordano a, spezzano g, vinci a (2016) smart agents and fog computing for smart city applications. in: international conference on smart cities. springer. pp 137–146 [5] mohamed n, lazarova-molnar s, al-jaroodi j (2017) cloud of things: optimizing smart city services. in: proceedings of the international conference on modeling, simulation and applied optimization. ieee. pp 1–5 [6] zanella a, bui n, castellani a, vangelista l, zorzi m (2014) internet of things for smart cities. ieee internet things j 1(1):22–32 [7] centenaro m, vangelista l, zanella a, zorzi m (2016) long-range communications in unlicensed bands: the rising stars in the iot and smart city scenarios. ieee wirel commun 23(5):60–7 [8] leccese f, cagnetti m, trinca d (2014) a smart city application: a fully controlled street lighting isle based on raspberry-pi card, a zigbee sensor network and wimax. sensors 14(12):24408–24 [9] wan j, di l, zou c, zhou k (2012) m2m communications for smart city: an event-based architecture. in: computer and information technology (cit), 2012 ieee 12th international conference on. ieee. pp 895–900 [10] jin j, gubbi j, luo t, palaniswami m (2012) network architecture and qos issues in the internet of things for a smart city. in: communications and information technologies (iscit), 2012 international symposium on. ieee. pp 956–961. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 03 2022 09 2022 | volume 6 | issue 18 | e5 comprehensive survey on smart cities architectures and protocols 5 [11] de poorter e, moerman i, demeester p (2011) enabling direct connectivity between heterogeneous objects in the internet of things through a network-service-oriented architecture. eurasip j wirel commun netw 2011(1):61 [12] transform, transformation agenda for low carbon cities. online: http://urbantransform.eu/about/smart-energycity/[accessed: july 2016]. [13] elaborated by the authors based on (stawasz & sikorafernandez, 2016; zanella et al., 2014; caragliu et al., 2011). [14] gurgen l, gunalp o, benazzouz y, gallissot m (2013) self-aware cyber-physical systems and applications in smart buildings and cities. in: proceedings of the conference on design, automation and test in europe, pages 1149–1154. eda consortium. [15] lombardi m, pascale f, santaniello d. internet of things: a general overview between architectures, protocols and applications. information. 2021; 12(2):87. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12020087 [16] jawhar, i., mohamed, n. & al-jaroodi, j. networking architectures and protocols for smart city systems. j internet serv appl 9, 26 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-018-0097-0 [17] benatia, s.e., smail, o., boudjelal, m., cousin, b. (2019). esmrsc: energy aware and stable multipath routing protocol for ad hoc networks in smart city. in: hatti, m. (eds) renewable energy for smart and sustainable cities. icaires 2018. lecture notes in networks and systems, vol 62. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03004789-4_4 [18] el-garoui, l.; pierre, s.; chamberland, s. a new sdnbased routing protocol for improving delay in smart city environments. smart cities 2020, 3, 1004-1021. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities3030050 [19] ketu, s., mishra, p.k. a contemporary survey on iot based smart cities: architecture, applications, and open issues. wireless pers commun 125, 2319–2367 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-022-09658-2 [20] khatoun, rida & zeadally, sherali. (2016). smart cities: concepts, architectures, research opportunities. communications of the acm. 59. 46-57. 10.1145/2858789. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 03 2022 09 2022 | volume 6 | issue 18 | e5 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13174-018-0097-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04789-4_4 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04789-4_4 https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities3030050 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-022-09658-2 evolving mixed societies: a one-dimensional modelling approach michael bodi ∗ artificial life lab of the department of zoology karl-franzens university graz, michael.bodi@uni-graz.at martina szopek artificial life lab of the department of zoology karl-franzens university graz, martina.szopek@unigraz.at payam zahadat artificial life lab of the department of zoology karl-franzens university graz, payam.zahadat@unigraz.at thomas schmickl artificial life lab of the department of zoology karl-franzens university graz, thomas.schmickl@unigraz.at abstract natural self-organising collective systems like social insect societies are often used as a source of inspiration for robotic applications. in return, developing such self-organising robotic systems can lead to a better understanding of natural collective systems. by unifying the communication channels of the natural and artificial agents these two collective systems can be merged into one bio-hybrid society. in this work we demonstrate the feasibility of such a bio-hybid society by introducing a simple one-dimensional model. a set of patches forms a one-dimensional arena, each patch represents a stationary robot, which is controlled by an ahhs (artificial homeostatic hormone system) control software. the stationary robots are able to produce different types of environmental stimuli. simulated bees react diversely to the different stimuli types. an evolutionary computation algorithm changes the properties of the ahhs and defines the interactions between the robots and their properties of stimuli emission. the task is an aggregation of simulated bees at a predefined aggregation spot. we demonstrate that an evolved ahhs is a very feasible tool for controlling these stationary robots. furthermore we show that an ahhs even works robustly in different setups and dynamic environments even though the controller was not specially evolved for these purposes. ∗corresponding author . categories and subject descriptors a.1.3 [general and reference]: document types—general conference proceedings; f.5.9.2 [theory of computation]: design and analysis of algorithms—distributed algorithms, self-organization; k.3.7.1 [computing methodologies]: artificial intelligence—distributed artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems; k.3.7.3 [computing methodologies]: artificial intelligence—distributed artificial intelligence, mobile agents; k.7.1.2 [computing methodologies]: distributed computing methodologies—distributed algorithms, self-organization general terms algorithms keywords mixed-societies, bio-hybrid systems, evolutionary computation, multi agent systems, swarm robotics 1. introduction natural self-organising collective systems like social insect societies are often used as a source of inspiration for robotic applications. in return, developing such self-organising robotic systems can lead to a better understanding of the natural collective systems. by unifying the communication channels of the natural and artificial agents these two collective systems can be merged into one bio-hybrid society. biology knows many examples of collective behaviour on a wide range of organisational complexity, from organisms as simple as slime moulds (nakagaki, 2001) or bacteria (camazine et al., 2001) via insects and fish to highly sophisticated representatives of birds and mammals. the most intriguing example for the efficiency of collective behaviour is found in social insects. for example in ants, detailed research has been conducted on phenomena like chain formation (lioni et al., 2001) and bridge formation (deneubourg et al., 1990). bict 2015, december 03-05, new york city, united states copyright © 2016 icst doi 10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262514 one of the most studied social insects is the european honeybee apis mellifera. honeybees are not only crucial for agricultural and economical purposes (e.g. pollination), but have also successfully found their way into engineering approaches. for example, honeybees inspired the development of bio-inspired algorithms for controlling autonomous swarm robots (schmickl et al., 2008; bodi et al., 2012, 2011). robotic devices also become more important in biological studies. the simplest form for such robotic applications would be a sensor network for monitoring animals (zacepins et al., 2011). a more ambitious approach is the usage of robotic agents in animal societies for the purpose of influencing the animal behaviour (halloy et al., 2007). the ongoing eu-project assisibf presents a new approach for closing the loop of interaction between natural and artificial agents for the purpose of forming a bio-hybrid mixed society consisting of animals (honeybees apis mellifera) and stationary autonomous robots called casus (combined actuator sensor units)(schmickl et al., 2013b,a). casus are equipped with several sensors (e.g., temperature sensors, proximity sensors) (salem and schmickl, 2014) and actuators (e.g., heating devices, vibration devices). this system should be able to adapt without a priori knowledge of the open system as we are using evolutionary computation for adapting the interface between the natural and the artificial society with the goal to produce common collective behaviours. for closing the loop of interaction between bees and casus, it is first necessary to find a set of different stimuli, to which bees show different behavioural responses. it is already known, that honeybees are collectively attracted to temperature (szopek et al., 2013). finding other appropriate stimuli types is part of the research in the assisibf project. figure 1 shows a preliminary experiment using real honeybees and casu prototypes. in this preliminary experiment the casus use temperature to pull the bees from the left to the right side of an experimentation arena. the temperature settings were controlled solely by the experimenter with no autonomy of the casus or interaction between the casus and the honeybees. the approach of the assisibf project is to form such a bio-hybrid society of bees and casus by using evolutionary computation. these evolved controllers should learn to use the different stimuli to alter the behaviour of the bee collective (e.g., aggregation, separation, path following) therefore we decided to test in simulation, whether or not, the reaction-diffusion controlled artificial homeostatic hormone system (ahhs) controller is the right tool for this task. the aim of this work is to evolve a controller for such a bio-hybrid system consisting of two types of autonomous agents: predictable but unprogrammable agents (simulated honeybees) and programmable and evolvable agents (simulated casus). we answer the following questions: (i) is it possible to evolve a controller to redirect reactive agents by the use of different types of environmental stimuli? (ii) is an ahhs controller, evolved for a specific setup, able to perform tasks in a more general environment? to answer these questions, we developed a one-dimensional proof of concept model of a bio-hybrid system in netlogo (wilensky, 1999). 2. methods a set of 101 patches, located in a straight line, represents a one-dimensional experimentation arena (figure. 2). each patch can be considered as one casu (combined actuafigure 1: snapshots of a preliminary experiment with real casus and a group of honeybees. (a) the left casu was heated up to 36 ◦c (preferred temperature of young bees). after the bees aggregated there, the left casu was cooled down and the right casu was heated up to 36 ◦c. the majority of the group followed the optimum, but some bees remained at the left casu (b). tor sensor unit) which is able to generate three different stimuli types via implemented actuators. the casus are controlled by an ahhs control software which controls the ’behaviour’ of the casus by perceiving concentrations of virtual hormones and reacting to them according to a set of rules. these rules can then be changed by an evolutionary computation algorithm. 2.1 the ahhs control software ahhs (artificial homeostatic hormone system) (schmickl and crailsheim, 2009; schmickl et al., 2011) is a reactiondiffusion-based system inspired by the turing process (turing, 1952) which describes processes of natural pattern formation and growth. ahhs has already been successfully implemented in robotic applications (stradner et al., 2009; schmickl et al., 2010; hamann et al., 2010) and has been investigated in terms of pattern formation and diversity generation capabilities (zahadat et al., 2013). an ahhs is defined by a set of artificial hormones and a set of rules. the rules define how sensory inputs and hormone concentrations participate in making changes in hormone concentrations and outputs of the system (see figure 3). both, hormones and rules, may be changed by an evolutionary process. in our one-dimensional model we use 8 different hormones h which can have values between 0 and 255. h1 forms a prime gradient from left to right, meaning that on the left side h1 has a value of 255 and on the right side a value of 0. this gradient feeds spacial information into the system. h2 has a constant value of 127 across all of the arena with exception of patches -5 to 5. within this area h2 generates ‘white noise’ (figure 4), meaning that every patch from -5 figure 2: screenshots of the one-dimensional experimentation arena. yellow dots represent honeybees. the green area represents the target for the bees. the purple area represents a mixture of two environmental stimuli: red = temperature, blue = light. this screenshot shows the different behaviours of bees and casus for an unevolved (random) (a) and an evolved (b) genome. figure 3: graphical representation of the ahhs and the interactions between hormones inside an ahhs, the interaction between two ahhs controllers and the interactions between ahhs and casus. h1 h4 represent different artificial hormones and their interactions. h4 controls the properties of the casu (located above h4). to 5 produces a random hormone value in every time step. this area of white noise marks the aggregation spot for the honeybees. the hormones h3 h5 are used to control the actuators within the casus, h3 controls an attractive stimulus a, h4 controls a repelling stimulus b and h5 controls a stumulus c which servers a stopping signal. h6 h8 serve as ‘free hormones’ and are used by the ahhs for computing. 2.2 stimuli and honeybee model each patch contains 3 actuators which act as the sources of 3 different types of stimuli. these stimuli types are further called type a, b, and c and are different in terms of their physical properties and the reaction of the simulated bees to them (see table 1). stimulus a serves as an attractive signal (e.g., temperature and chemicals) and stimulus b serves as a repulsive signal (e.g., light, airflow). this means that a bee tends to move to a neighbouring patch if the intensity of stimulus a is higher or the intensity of stimulus type b is lower in the neighbouring cell. stimulus c serves as a stopping signal (e.g., vibration), meaning that if the intensity of the stimulus is above a certain threshold value the bee stops on the cell, ignoring the attractive or repulsive stimulus. it’s noteworthy, that the assumed reactions of the simulated bees to the mentioned stimuli in this model are more or less arbitrary. these reactions do only have the purpose to test the suitability of the described algorithms. it is part of the assisibf project to determine the behavioural response of the honeybees on different environmental stimuli in laboratory experiments. as already mentioned, the casus are able to generate 3 different types of stimuli and the simulated bees react differently to each type of stimulus. a bee moves to a neighbouring patch, called newpatch, based on following equation: figure 4: hormone levels of the prime gradients used in our model. the x-axis represents the space of the onedimensional experimentation arena. hormone h1 generates a gradient throughout the arena. hormone h2 is used as a marker for the target area by producing white noise at this location. attri = (ai −acurr) + (bcurr −bi), (1) newpatch = { arg maxi attri, if attri > 0 and ccurr < th curr, otherwise , (2) whereby curr is the current patch and ai, bi, and ci are the intensities of the stimuli a, b, and c in patch i. in this experiment we use a simplified simulation of temperature, vibration and light as examples of stimuli of types a, b, and c. the intensities of the stimuli and the increase value of the stimuli in each time-step are both limited between 0 and 1. the threshold value of the vibration is set to 0.1. the values of all parameters used in this simulation can be found in table 1. in this model the bees do not have any physical properties, which means that the bees are able to move through each other and can stack up on a single patch. we made this decision because real honeybees can form very dense aggregations and sit on top of each other. it’s also noteworthy, that the parameters of the stimuli do not precisely correspond to reality and the effects of these stimuli on the bees are assumed to be linear for simplification of the simulation, since the purpose of this simulation is to test the before mentioned algorithms. table 1: characteristics of the stimuli used in the models. stimulus a (temperature) b (light) c (vibration) effect attractive repellent stop-signal diffusion rate 0,2 0 0,01 decay rate 0,1 1 0,9 instantly reachable no yes no blockable by bee no yes no figure 5: graphical representation of the feedbacks within our model. 2.3 experimentation 2.3.1 experiment i: the goal of this experiment is to evolve an ahhs controller that leads the bees to form an aggregation at a predefined target area which is marked by white noise of hormone h2. at the beginning, 11 bees are placed equally distributed within the arena. these bees move around in the arena according to their reaction to the presented stimuli. the genetic start population used in these evolutionary runs consist of 30 random genomes. for evolving the ahhs controller, a wolfpack-inspired evolutionary algorithm is used (zahadat and schmickl, 2014). this algorithm uses overlapping generations and a fixed population size representing a limited resource (e.g. food). the offspring is evaluated and ranked hierarchically according to their fitness. an evaluated offspring removes another individual with equal or lower fitness from the population. this way the population stays dynamic. the fitness function in the presented model was defined as fitness = n 2 t + ∑(x−dt 4 ) , (3) x = { 2dmax if dt = 0 dmax otherwise , (4) where nt is the number of bees in the target area, dt is the distance of a bee to the centre of the target area and dmax represents the maximum possible distance to the centre of the target area. this means that bees which aggregate in the exact centre of the aggregation spot gain more fitness, than bees which locate themselves merely within the aggregation area. the evolutionary runs were repeated 7 times for 151 time steps each. 2.3.2 experiment ii: after the evolutionary runs, we picked the genome with the highest fitness and tested it in terms of robustness and generality. in this experiment we varied the number of bees in the arena and observed the number of aggregated bees in the target zone. the tested groupsizes were 2, 5, 7, 11, 15 and 20 bees. the experiments were repeated 24 times. 2.3.3 experiment iii: in this experiment we tested the ability of the system to redirect the bees in a dynamic environment. therefore we started with 11 randomly distributed bees and the aggregation spot placed off-centre. after 150 time steps we changed the position of the aggregation spot. in one setup the aggregation spot jumped abruptly (figure 9a and 9b), in another setup the aggregation spot moved continuously to its new position (figure 9c and 9d). we monitored the number of aggregated bees after 350 time steps. the tested gap widths between the relocated aggregation spots were in both setups 11, 21, 27, 29 and 31 patches. the experiments were repeated 24 times. 3. results 3.1 experiment i: the evolutionary computation algorithm was tested with 11 equally distributed bees. their task is to aggregate in the target zone located in centre of the arena, marked by white noise of hormone h2. the system started with random genomes. as it is shown in figure 6, the fitness rises quickly. after the first evaluation the median fitness is 64 with a maximum fitness of 124,5. after 500 evaluations the median fitness already reaches 357,75 and the maximum fitness reaches the possible maximum fitness of 396. after 1500 evaluations the highest median fitness is reached with 383,25 and all but one genomes are capable of positioning the bees in the target-zone. after 2000 evaluations all genomes manage to relocate all bees in the target zone. 3.2 experiment ii: we tested the generality of the fittest genome by varying the number of bees. as we show in figure 7 the evolved genome can handle different groupsizes of bees very well. the evolved genome is able locate 100% of the bees in the target zone, independent of the tested groupsizes. 3.3 experiment iii: we tested the fittest genome in a dynamic environment. after 150 time steps we switched the position of the target zone and after 350 time steps we observed the number of bees in the new positioned target zone. as we show in figure 8 the evolved system is flexible enough to move 100% of the bees to the new target area when the gap between figure 6: results of experiment i: this figure shows the median fitness (with min, max, q1, q3) of the best genome of each evolutionary run (n = 7 repetitions). fmax represents the maximum possible fitness when all bees aggregate at the exact centre of the target area. fall inn represents the fitness when all bees aggregate in the target area (for details on the fitness function see equation 3 and 4). figure 7: results of experiment ii: mean fraction of bees (with stdev) aggregated in the target area. (n=24 repetitions/experiment) the targets is between 11 and 21 patches. once the gap exceeds 27 patches, the number of aggregated bees drops. but still, looking at the 27 patch gap, an average of 96.7% (stdev ±6,4) of the bees are aggregated in the target area. beyond that distance the aggregation drops rapidly. with gaps of 29 and 31 patches only 13.3% (stdev ±12) and 9,6% (stdev ±7,5) of the bees aggregate at the new target area, respectively. when the target is not moved abruptly but continuously, 100% of the bees could be pulled into the repositioned target area, independent of the gap width. 4. discussion 4.1 experiment i: as we have shown in figure 6 the median fitness is 357,75 after already 500 evaluations. at this point also the maximum fitness of 369 is reached by at least one genome. after 2000 evaluations all evolved genomes reach high fitness valfigure 8: results of experiment iii: mean fraction of bees (with stdev) aggregated in the target area after it has been moved to a new position. the solid line represent the results for abrupt target changes, the dashed line represents the result for continuous target changes. (n=24 repetitions/experiment) (a) gap of 10 patches (b) gap of 20 patches (c) gap of 10 patches (d) gap of 20 patches figure 9: example screenshots of experiment iii: spontaneously and continuously moving targets with a gap of 11 and 21 patches. the yellow lines indicate the trajectories of the bees. the green areas represent the target areas. the stimuli are represented by a mixture of red (temperature) and blue (light). ues (median fitness: 383,25) and are able to pull the bees into the target area. the steep increase of fitness and the good fitness performance strongly indicate that the combination of our evolutionary computation algorithm and the ahhs control software is a feasible tool for developing robot that can learn to manipulate animals. 4.2 experiment ii: as we have shown in figure 7 an evolved ahhs can use the casu’s actuators to lure the bees to a desired location. although the ahhs controller was evolved for groups of 11 bees it is able to fulfil this task also with other group sizes. we tested group sizes between two and 20 bees and in all cases 100% of the bees were directed to the target area. since we did not model any interaction between the bees, they can be considered as an indirect probe of the casu stimuli landcape. therefore this result is not really surprising. nevertheless this result serves us as a sanity check of our model. 4.3 experiment iii: when the target area changes its position abruptly, an evolved ahhs is capable to redirect the bees into the new target unless the gap between the two targets gets too big. as we have shown in figure 8, a gap of 11 to 21 patches can be vanquished without any losses to the aggregation properties. all bees can be redirected into the new target area. when the gap surpasses 20 patches, the number of bees located in the new target decreases. reaching a gap distance of 27 patches the number of redirected bees starts to decrease slightly, but still 97.7% of the bees could be redirected. at a gap distance of 29 patches and above the number of redirected bees decreases significantly. this can be explained by the properties of ahhs, as a hormone gradient triggers the actuators of the casus. since the evolution of ahhs was performed with a target area located in the centre of the arena, the hormone gradient does not spread far enough to overcome the gap. but when the target area does not jump abruptly to a new position, but continuously moves there, all bees can be redirected to the new target, no matter how far the gap between the target is. this can be explained by the fact, that not only the target moves continuously to the new position but also the hormone gradient does. this way the bees can easily be ‘pulled’ to a new location. 5. conclusion and future work in this work we answered the question if an evolved ahhs is suitable for controlling casus and luring simulated honeybees into a predefined target zone. therefore we generated a model of a one-dimensional experimentation arena containing casus, controlled by an ahhs controller. we showed that the combination of the wolfpack inspired evolutionary algorithm and ahhs is very promising tool for this tasks. we also answered the question if an ahhs controller, evolved for a specific setup, is able to perform tasks in a more general environment. once evolved, ahhs is capable of reacting to dynamical environmental changes. our results strongly indicate that an evolved ahhs is a flexible and reliable tool and a promising approach for controlling stationary autonomous robots to influence the behaviour of simulated honeybees. we are well aware that, because of the strong simplification of the bee model and the stimuli model, there’s a reality gap from our modelling approach to the real world setup. nevertheless, our results indicate that the observed algorithms are a feasible choice for the real world problem. in the future we plan to extend our model by implementing the actual physical properties of the stimuli used. once we have experimentation data of how honeybees react to the given stimuli types, this will also be implemented into our model. furthermore we will transfer the gained knowledge to the real world and test our approach on real casus with real honeybees. 6. acknowledgements this work was supported by: eu-ict ‘assisi|bf’, no. 601074. references bodi, m., thenius, r., schmickl, t., and crailsheim, k. 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(2014). wolfpack-inspired evolutionary algorithm and a reaction-diffusion-based controller are used for pattern formation. in proceedings of the 2014 conference on genetic and evolutionary computation, gecco ’14, pages 241–248, new york, ny, usa. acm. analysis of rate-based pull and push strategies with limited migration rates in large distributed networks w. minnebo and b. van houdt department of mathematics and computer science university of antwerp iminds middelheimlaan 1, b-2020 antwerp, belgium {wouter.minnebo,benny.vanhoudt}@uantwerpen.be abstract in this paper we analyze the performance of pull and push strategies in large homogeneous distributed systems where the number of job transfers per time unit is limited. job transfer strategies which rely on lightly-loaded servers to attract jobs from heavily-loaded servers are known as pull strategies, whereas for push strategies the heavily loaded servers initiate the job transfers to lightly loaded servers. to this end, servers transmit probe messages to discover other servers that are able to take part in a job transfer. previous work on rate-based pull and push strategies focused on the impact of the probe rate on the mean job response time. in this paper we also limit the overall migration rate and show that any predefined migration rate can be matched by both the rate-based pull and push strategies. we present closed form formulas for the mean response time (as a function of the allowed probe and migration rate) and validate their accuracy by simulation. we also introduce and analyze a new pull strategy and show that under high loads it is superior to the push strategies considered, while the push strategies offer only a very limited gain for medium to low load scenarios. categories and subject descriptors c.4 [computer systems organization]: performance of systems; d.4.8 [operating systems]: performance keywords distributed computing, performance analysis, processor scheduling 1. introduction in order to optimally use the available resources in a distributed network it is desirable to be able to dynamically relocate jobs among a large number of processing nodes. jobs may enter the network via one or multiple central dispatchers (e.g., [4,10,12,14,15]) or via the processing nodes themselves (e.g., [2, 3, 8, 13]). a central dispatcher will distribute the jobs among the nodes using some load balancing algorithm. in a more distributed approach, the nodes themselves will arrange for jobs to relocate after they are scheduled. two approaches are common: push and pull. in a push variant (or work sharing) highly loaded nodes attempt to find lightly loaded nodes to migrate jobs to. pull variants (or work stealing) reverse the roles, so that lightly loaded nodes try to attract work from the highly loaded nodes. several authors studied the performance of push and pull strategies. a comparison for a homogeneous distributed system with poisson arrivals and exponential job lengths was presented in [1, 2] and extended to heterogeneous systems in [9, 11]. these studies showed that the pull strategy is superior under high load conditions, while the push strategy achieves a lower mean delay under low to moderate loads. nodes typically communicate by means of probe messages, exchanging information such as queue length. for simplicity we assume that sending/receiving probe messages is instantaneous and does not incur an extra computational or bandwidth cost. when a node wants to push or pull a job, it probes a random other node to see if a transfer between the nodes would be allowed. under a traditional pull or push strategy a server sends a maximum of lp probes the instant its last job completes or the instant a job arrives when the server is already busy [1,2]. the fraction of queues sending probe messages is different, and as a result pull and push strategies achieve a different overall probe rate for the same load of the system. this makes a performance comparison biased, as sometimes the strategy with the higher probe rate is best [5]. in [5] rate-based pull and push variants are introduced that can match any predetermined probe rate r, allowing the comparison of pull and push strategies when they use the same number of probes. in these variants, probes are no longer sent at job arrival or completion times but at a fixed rate r as long as the server is idle (for pull) or has jobs waiting (for push). the main result in [5] showed that the rate-based push strategy results in a lower mean delay if and only if λ < √ (r + 1)2 + 4(r + 1) − (r + 1) 2 , under the so-called infinite system model and that a hybrid pull/push strategy is always inferior to the pure pull or push strategy. valuetools 2015, december 14-16, berlin, germany copyright © 2016 icst doi 10.4108/eai.14-12-2015.2262564 in [6] the model was extended with an extra parameter t, where a node is considered highly loaded if it has more than t jobs. this allowed the construction of the max-push strategy that extended the range of λ values where the push variants outperformed the pull strategy. all prior work, including [5, 6], assumed zero cost for job transfers, which is not always realistic. when jobs are difficult to migrate, it would be desirable to be able to limit migrations to a predefined overall migration rate m, while not exceeding the predefined overall probe rate r. this paper makes the following contributions: 1. we indicate how to set the parameter r (and t) of the push, pull and max-push strategy to match any predefined migration rate m. 2. we argue that setting t = 1 for the pull strategy is no longer optimal when an overall migration limit m is considered, as was the case in [6] and introduce a new pull strategy, called the conditional-pull strategy. 3. we show that the conditional-pull strategy is equivalent in stationary queue length distribution to the maxpush variant when the overall probe rate r tends to infinity, i.e., when only an overall migration limit m is considered. 4. we consider a system where both an overall probe limit (r) and an overall migration limit (m) are imposed. for this system we compare the performance of push and pull strategies. we find that even for moderate r the conditional-pull performs almost as well as the max-push for low to moderate loads, and performs significantly better for higher loads. the paper is structured as follows. section 2 summarizes the rate-based strategies considered in this paper. in section 3 we briefly summarize earlier work concerning ratebased pull and push strategies, and introduce an overall migration limit m for these strategies. also, we derive an expression for the corresponding maximum probe rate rboth|m for the rate-based push and pull, and rewrite the mean delay in an equivalent form. in section 4 we adapt the max-push strategy to match m by finding the corresponding probe rate rmp|m , after summarizing earlier work. section 5 considers pull strategies with t > 1, and introduces the new conditional-pull strategy. it is shown that the conditionalpull is equivalent to the max-push strategy in case there is no probe limit r and only a migration limit m. in addition, the infinite system model describing the evolution of the conditional pull strategy is numerically validated, and argued to be the proper limiting process as the system size tends to infinity. finally, we compare the mean delay of max-push and conditional-pull in section 6. 2. rate based strategies we consider a continuous-time system of n queues, where each queue has a single server and infinite buffer. each queue operates under poisson job arrivals with rate λ < 1, and exponential service time with mean 1. jobs are processed in a first-come-first-served order. traditional strategies send a maximum of lp probes the instant a server’s last job completes or the instant a job arrives when the server is already busy. in contrast, under rate-based strategies probes are no longer sent at job arrival or completion times but at a fixed rate r as long as the server is idle (pull) or has at least t jobs waiting (push). more formally, probe messages are transmitted by a server according to an interrupted poisson process with rate r. the strategies considered in this paper can be summarized as follows: 1. rate-based push: as soon as the queue length exceeds t, a server starts to generate probe messages according to a poisson process with rate r. whenever the queue length drops below t, this process is interrupted until the queue length exceeds t again. the node that is probed is selected at random and is only allowed to accept a job if it is idle. 2. rate-based pull: whenever a server is idle it generates probe messages according to a poisson process with rate r. this process is interrupted whenever the server is busy. the node that is probed is selected at random and is only allowed to transfer one of its jobs if its queue length exceeds t. 3. max-push: the instant a new job arrives at a queue with length t, probes are sent at an infinite rate. when λ < 1 this corresponds to stating that the job is instantaneously transferred to an empty server. a server with t jobs in its queue, generates probe messages according to a poisson process with rate r. whenever the queue length drops to t − 1, this process is interrupted as long as the queue length remains below t. the node that is probed is selected at random and is only allowed to accept a job if it is idle. 4. conditional-pull: whenever a node is idle, the node will generate probe messages according to a poisson process with rate r. this process is interrupted whenever the server becomes busy. the probed node is selected at random and the probe is always successful if there are at least t jobs waiting to be served, and successful with some probability p (matching m, see (26)) if there are exactly t − 1 jobs waiting to be served. we do not consider hybrid strategies, which combine both push and pull behavior. these were proven to be inferior to a pure push or pull strategy when t = 1 [5, theorem 4]. 3. pull and push strategies infinite system models and closed form solutions for both pull and push strategies were introduced in [5] and [6]. before introducing new constraints and strategies, we briefly summarize the main findings of [5] and [6]. the evolution of both the rate-based pull and push strategy under the infinite system model is described by a set of odes denoted as d dt x(t) = f(x(t)), where x(t) = (x1(t), x2(t), . . .) and xi(t) represents the fraction of the number of nodes with at least i jobs at time t. from [6, theorem 2 and 3], it is known that d dt x(t) = f(x(t)) has a unique fixed point π̄ = (π̄1, π̄2, . . .) with ∑ i≥1 π̄i < ∞ that is a global attractor, given by π̄i = λ ( (1 + r)λi−1 −rλt ) 1 + r(1 −λt ) 1 ≤ i ≤ t + 1, (1) π̄i = π̄t+1 ( λ 1 + (1 −λ)r )i−t−1 i > t + 1. (2) this fixed point is used in conjunction with little’s law in [6, corollary 1] to formulate the mean delay dboth of a job under the push or pull strategy: dboth = 1 1 −λ − rλt ( λ (1−λ)(1+r) + t ) 1 + r(1 −λt ) . (3) from the relationships r = (1 − π̄1)rpull|r and r = rpush|rπ̄t+1, we find r = (1 −λ)rpull|r, (4) and r = λt+1 (1 −λt ) + 1/rpush|r . (5) it follows that whenever r > λt+1/(1−λt ), the rate rpush|r can be chosen arbitrarily large (i.e., rpush|r = ∞). 3.1 limiting the overall migration rate when the overall migration rate is limited, the choice of r must satisfy this constraint. we first indicate how to set r to match m, and rewrite the formula for the mean delay. then we show whether r or m is the strictest constraint for a given load λ. theorem 1. both rate-based pull and push strategies match a predefined migration rate m by letting the probe rate r = rboth|m , with rboth|m : rboth|m = m (λ(1 −λ) + m)λt −m . (6) for this setting, both strategies achieve the same mean delay. proof. the relationship (6) readily follows from the formulation of the overall migration rate for both rate-based strategies: mboth = r(1 −λ)λt+1 r(1 −λt ) + 1 . (7) from a push perspective this equation describes the fraction of nodes with queue length larger than or equal to t + 1 (π̄t+1 = λ t+1/(1 + r(1 − λt )) from (1)) sending probes at rate r, succeeding with probability (1 − λ). for a pull strategy the overall migration rate is expressed as the fraction of empty queues (1 − λ) sending probes at rate r and succeeding when probing a queue of length t + 1 or longer (π̄t+1 = λ t+1/(1 + r(1 −λt )) from (1)). theorem 2. the mean delay of rate-based pull and push strategies can be expressed as dboth = 1 1 −λ ( 1 − mboth λ ( t + λ (1 −λ)(1 + r) )) . (8) 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0 5 10 15 20 t 1 t 2 t 3 t 1 t 2 t 3 r push|r r pull|r r both|m r=1 m=0.125 1−m/r load (λ) p ro b e r a te ( r) figure 1: the probe rates r imposed by either the probe limit r = 1 for push (dot-dashed) and pull (dashed), or migration limit m = 1/8 (full), for t = 1, 2, 3. note that rpull|r is independent of t. proof. equation (8) follows by rewriting (7) to rλt 1 + r(1 −λt ) = mboth λ(1 −λ) , and substituting this expression in (3). the previous theorem shows that the improvement in mean delay compared to a standard m/m/1 queue, can be expressed as a migration frequency (m/λ) times a migration gain (t + λ/((1 −λ)(1 + r))). the migration frequency denotes how many migrations per job take place on average. the migration gain quantifies the number of places in the queue the migrating job skips. all migrating jobs skip at least t places by construction of the strategy, and skip more places depending on the queue length of the job sender. the average number of places skipped above t equals the average number of customers in an m/m/1 queue with service rate 1 + r(1 −λ), which equals λ/((1 −λ)(1 + r)). both the overall migration limit m and the overall probe limit r impose a maximum on r. in case r ≤ m, all probes are allowed to generate a migration, so r will only be constrained by r. in any practical setting there will be more probes allowed than migrations, and the probe rate will be constrained by r or m depending on λ. an overview of the probe rates matching r or m, for both push and pull strategies with t = 1, 2, 3, is given in figure 1. to determine the range of λ in which each constraint is most strict, we determine the intersection of rboth|m with rpush|r and rpull|r. lemma 1. the probe rates rpush|r and rboth|m intersect at λ = 0 and 1 −m/r only, and both rates are positive for λ = 1 −m/r if and only if ( 1 − m r )t > r 2 r−m+r2 . the proof is given in appendix a of [7]. theorem 3. for the rate-based push strategy r should be set as follows in order to respect both the probe rate r and migration rate m: 1. r ≥ λt+1/(1 −λt ) and m ≥ λt+1(1 −λ)/(1 −λt ): r can be arbitrarily large. 2. r ≥ λt+1/(1 −λt ) and m < λt+1(1 −λ)/(1 −λt ): r can be at most rboth|m . 3. r < λt+1/(1 −λt ) and m ≥ λt+1(1 −λ)/(1 −λt ): r can be at most rpush|r. 4. r < λt+1/(1 −λt ) and m < λt+1(1 −λ)/(1 −λt ): let τ = ( 1 − m r )t and υ = r 2 r−m+r2 . • if τ > υ, r can be at most rboth|m if λ < 1−m/r and at most rpush|r otherwise. • if τ ≤ υ, r can be at most rpush|r. the proof is given in appendix b of [7]. lemma 2. if m < r 1+tr , rboth|m − rpull|r has a unique root λt in (0, 1), otherwise it has no roots in (0, 1). the proof is given in appendix c of [7]. for t = 1, the unique root λt of lemma 2 reduces to λ1 = √ m + m/r. however, there seems to be no closed form expression for general t. theorem 4. for the rate-based pull strategy r should be set as follows in order to respect both the probe rate r and migration rate m: 1. m ≥ λt+1(1 −λ)/(1 −λt ): r can be at most rpull|r. 2. m < λt+1(1 −λ)/(1 −λt ): • if the migration limit is sufficiently high (m ≥ r 1+tr ), then r can be at most rpull|r. • if the migration limit is sufficiently low (m < r 1+tr ), r can be at most rpull|r if λ < λt , and at most rboth|m otherwise. the proof is given in appendix d of [7]. 4. max-push the rate-based push is unable to reach an overall request rate higher than λt+1/(1−λt ) for any t. when the overall probe limit r exceeds this value, it is possible to use the remaining request rate by using the max-push variant as introduced in [6]. this strategy lets nodes with a queue length of t send probes at a finite rate rmp|r, and migrates all new arrivals to queues with length t by sending probes at an infinite rate until an empty server is found. as λt+1/(1− λt ) is an increasing function in λ and decreasing in t, the unique solution for λ to λt+1/(1 −λt ) = r is increasing in t. therefore, there is a unique t > 1 satisfying λ t+1 /(1 −λt ) ≤ r < λt/(1 −λt−1). (9) for this t, the evolution of the max-push strategy can be described by a set of odes d dt x(t) = g(x(t)), where x(t) = (x1(t),x2(t), . . .) and xi(t) represents the fraction of the number of nodes with at least i jobs at time t. theorems 7, 8 from [6] show that the set of odes has a unique fixed point π̇ = (π̇1, . . . , π̇t ) that is a global attractor, and can be expressed as π̇i = λ i 1 + ( λ 1−λ + r)(1 −λ t−i) 1 + ( λ 1−λ + r)(1 −λ t−1) , (10) for 1 ≤ i ≤ t. the mean delay dmp of a job under the max-push strategy is given by [6, corollary 3]: dmp = 1 −λt + ( λ 1−λ + r)(1 −tλ t−1 + (t − 1)λt ) 1 + r(1 −λ)(1 −λt−1) −λt . (11) for the max-push strategy the overall probe rate r equals r = π̇t ( λ 1 −λ + r ) , (12) as the instantaneous transfer of an arrival to a queue with t jobs requires 1/(1 − λ) probe messages on average. therefore, a predefined overall probe rate r can be matched by setting rmp|r = r λt−1(r + λ) −r − λ 1 −λ , (13) where 0 ≤ rmp|r < ∞ for λt+1/(1 − λt ) ≤ r < λt/(1 − λt−1). 4.1 limiting the overall migration rate as the rate-based push strategy cannot exceed the probe rate λt+1/(1 − λt ), it is unable to exceed an overall migration rate of (1 −λ)λt+1/(1 −λt ). it follows that when m > (1−λ)λt+1/(1−λt ), queues with a length of at least t +1 can probe at an arbitrarily high rate without exceeding the migration limit m, effectively reducing all queues to a length of at most t. queues with length t can then send probes with a finite r to match m. in other words, in order to match m (instead of r as in the previous section), set t such that (1 −λ)λt+1 1 −λt ≤ m < (1 −λ)λt 1 −λt−1 . (14) and determine the probe rate rmp|m when the queue length equals t by the following theorem: theorem 5. the max-push strategy matches a predefined migration rate m by letting the probe rate r = rmp|m with rmp|m = λ ( m ((1 −λ)λ + m) λt −λm − 1 1 −λ ) . (15) when matching m this way, π̇i for i ≤ t reduces to π̇i = λ i − m(1 −λi−1) 1 −λ , (16) proof. the relationship (15) follows from the formulation of the overall migration rate. the migrations of new arrivals in queues with length t are given by π̇tλ. the migrations resulting from a successful probe sent by queues with length t are given by π̇tr(1−λ). probes are successful if they locate an empty server, which they do with probability 1 − λ. therefore, the overall migration rate can be expressed as mmp = π̇t ( λ 1 −λ + r ) (1 −λ) (17) = (1 −λ)((1 −λ)r + 2λ)λt+1 λ(r(1 −λ) + 1) − ((1 −λ)r + λ)λt . the reduction of π̇i to (16) follows from substitution of (15) in (10), and shows the improvement over an m/m/1 queue directly. theorem 6. for the max-push strategy r and t should be set as follows in order to respect both the probe rate r and migration rate m: • if λ < 1 −m/r, t must be chosen according to (14) and r can be at most rmp|m . • if λ > 1 − m/r, t must be chosen according to (9) and r can be at most rmp|r. • if λ = 1 −m/r, both constraints are equivalent. the proof is given in appendix e of [7]. theorem 7. the mean delay of the max-push strategy can be expressed as dmp = 1 1 −λ ( 1 − mmp λ ( α + β mmp )) , (18) with α = π̇tλt and β = π̇tr(1 − λ)(t − 1). when r = rmp|m , the mean delay dmp reduces to dmp|m = 1 1 −λ + m ( 1 −λt ) (1 −λ)2λ − mt + λt+1 (1 −λ)λ . (19) proof. the improvement in mean delay compared to a standard m/m/1 queue, can be expressed as a migration frequency (mmp/λ) times a migration gain. the migration frequency denotes how many migrations per job take place on average. the migration gain quantifies the number of places in the queue the migrating job skips. the fraction of migrating jobs arriving at a queue with length t (π̇tλ/mmp) skip t places in the queue. the fraction of migrating jobs from queues with length t, being πtr(1−λ)/mmp, skip t− 1 places in the queue. hence, the migration gain is (α + β)/mmp. the reduction to dmp|m is found by applying little’s law to the expression for π̇ in (16), and shows the improvement over an m/m/1 queue explicitly. 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 r=1 m=0.1 t 1 t 4 load (λ) m e a n d e la y ( d ) figure 2: the mean delay of the pull strategy for t = 1, ..., 4. the probe rate r is constrained by both r and m (full lines). the delay shown in dashed lines is achieved when there is no migration limit, and only the probe limit is in effect. choosing t = 1 is no longer optimal when a maximum migration rate is imposed. 5. conditional pull when only considering a maximum allowed probe rate r, the optimal choice for a pull strategy is to let t = 1 [6, theorem 5]. this is no longer the case when taking a maximum allowed migration rate m into account, as shown in figure 2. intuitively, when the migration limit is small, it is best to pull jobs from longer queues only, resulting in a lower mean delay. to reduce the mean delay of the rate-based pull strategy, we introduce the conditional pull strategy that can match both r and m. empty servers send probes according to an interrupted poisson process with rate r. under the conditional pull strategy, empty nodes always accept jobs from queues with length of at least t + 1 and also accept jobs from a queue with length t with some probability p. this strategy relies on the choice of p to match the migration rate m, and lets the probe rate r be determined by r, i.e. r = rpull|r = r/(1 −λ). thus, both r and m are matched, this is in contrast with the previous strategies, where r was always chosen as large as possible without exceeding r and m. first we note that one can easily see that for λt , being the unique root defined in lemma 2, λt < λt+1 (as m/((λ(1− λ) + m)λt − m) increases in t and r 1−λ increases in λ independent of t). given λ, the conditional pull strategy sets t such that λt−1 ≤ λ < λt , (20) with λ0 = 0. to analyze the response time of a job under the conditional pull strategy we introduce a set of odes d dt xi(t) = h(x(t)), where x(t) = (x1(t),x2(t), . . .) and xi(t) represents the fraction of the number of nodes with at least i jobs at time t. as explained below, the set of odes h(x(t)) describing the time evolution of the queue lengths under the conditional pull strategy is defined as 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 r=1 m=0.1 t 1 t 5 load (λ) m e a n d e la y ( d ) figure 3: showing the mean delay of the pull strategy with t > 1, respecting a migration limit ṁ. the conditional pull variant is shown in dashed lines. dx1(t) dt = −(x1(t) −x2(t)) + (λ + rxt+1(t) + rp(xt (t) −xt+1(t)))(1 −x1(t)) (21) dxi(t) dt = λ(xi−1(t) − xi(t)) − (xi(t) − xi+1(t)), (22) for 1 < i < t , and dxi(t) dt = λ(xi−1(t) −xi(t)) − (1 + rp1[i=t](1 −x1(t)))(xi(t) −xi+1(t)), (23) for i ≥ t, where 1[a] = 1 if a is true and 1[a] = 0 otherwise. the terms λ(xi−1(t) − xi(t)) and xi(t) − xi+1(t), for i ≥ 1, correspond to arrival and service completions, respectively. queues of length 1 are created by job transfers at rate (rxt+1(t) + rp(xt (t)−xt+1(t)))(1−x1(t)) as the fraction of empty nodes (1−x1(t)) probe at rate r, and a probe is successful with probability xt+1(t) + p(xt (t) −xt+1(t)). similarly, migrating jobs reduce the number of queues with exactly i jobs, for i > t, at rate r(1−x1(t))(xi(t)−xi+1(t)) and at rate rp(1 −x1(t))(xt (t) −xt+1(t)) for i = t. the next theorem shows that this set of odes has a unique fixed point with ∑ i≥1 π̂i < ∞. in appendix f of [7] we briefly argue why this fixed point can be used to approximate the queue length distribution of a node as the number of nodes becomes large. the argument is similar to the one used in [5]. we also validate the accuracy of this approximation by simulation in section 5.1. theorem 8. the set of odes d dt x(t) = h(x(t)) has a unique fixed point π̂ = (π̂1, π̂2, . . .) with ∑ i≥1 π̂i < ∞. the fixed point can be expressed as: π̂i = λi ( (1 −λ)r (∑t−i j=0 λj + p(r + 1) ( 1 −λt−i )) + 1 ) (1 −λ)r (∑t−1 j=0 λj + p(r + 1) (1 −λt−1) ) + 1 (24) for 1 ≤ i ≤ t , and for i > t as π̂i = πt ( λ 1 + r(1 −λ) )i−t (25) proof. assume π̂ is a fixed point with ∑ i≥1 π̂i < ∞, meaning hi(π̂) = 0 for i ≥ 1, where h(x) = (h1(x),h2(x), . . .). when ∑ i≥1 π̂i < ∞, we can simplify ∑ i≥1 hi(π) = 0 to λ − π̂1 = 0. hence, π̂1 must equal λ. the expressions for π̂i then readily follow from the conditions hi(π̂) = 0, for i ≥ 1. theorem 9. a predefined overall migration rate m can be matched by setting p = pcp|m , with pcp|m = m − π̄t+1r(1 −λ) (π̄t − π̄t+1)r(1 −λ) (26) = λ ( r ( −λ2 + λ + m ) λt −m(r + 1) ) (1 −λ)r(r + 1) (λm − (−λ2 + λ + m) λt ) . when matching m by setting p = pcp|m , π̂i reduces to π̂i = λ i − m(1 −λi−1) 1 −λ , (27) for i ≤ t . proof. the fraction of empty queues (1−λ) send probes at rate r. probes are successful with probability 1 if they locate a queue with length at least t + 1 (π̄t+1). probes are successful with probability p if they locate a queue with length equal to t (π̄t − π̄t+1). in other words: mcp = r(1 −λ)(π̄t+1 + p(π̄t − π̄t+1), (28) from which (26) follows by algebraic manipulation. the reduction of π̂i to (27) is found by substituting (26) in (24). theorem 10. the mean delay dcp of a job under the conditional pull strategy equals dcp = 1 1 −λ ( 1 − mcp λ (α−β) ) , (29) with α = t + λ (1 −λ)(1 + r) and β = r(1 −λ)pπ̄t mcp . proof. the improvement in mean delay compared to a standard m/m/1 queue, can be expressed as a migration frequency (mcp/λ) times a migration gain (α − β). the fraction of migrating jobs where the job is pulled from a queue with length at least t + 1, (r(1 −λ)π̄t+1/mcp) skip α places in the queue: the same remarks as in theorem 2 apply. the other jobs ((r(1 −λ)p(π̄t − π̄t+1))/mcp) are pulled from a queue with length equal to t, thus skipping exactly t −1 places. in other words, the migration gain can be expressed as: αr(1 −λ)π̄t+1 + (t − 1)(r(1 −λ)p(π̄t − π̄t+1)) mcp , which can be rewritten as α−β. figure 3 shows the mean delay of the conditional pull strategy. the dots represent λt , i.e., the intersection points of rpull|r and rboth|m . the conditional pull strategy achieves a lower mean delay compared to the rate-based pull strategies with t > 1, as it transfers more jobs. theorem 11. when r = +∞ and m is finite, the maxpush and conditional pull strategies have the same stationary queue length distribution. proof. when there is no probe limit r, the parameter r is allowed to be arbitrarily large for the conditional pull strategy. in this case the maximum queue length will be t as limr→∞ π̂i = 0 for i > t, see (25). we therefore know from theorems 5 and 9 that both the max-push and conditional pull strategy have the same queue length distribution when only matching m, if they use the same t. what remains to be shown is that both strategies make use of the same t. recall that λt was defined as the solution in (0, 1) of rpull|r− rboth|m , that is, r 1 −λ = m (λ(1 −λ) + m)λt −m . the left hand side tends to infinity as r tends to infinity. hence, rboth|m must tend to infinity, meaning λt is the solution to m = (1 − λ)λt+1/(1 − λt ). the λt ’s are thus exactly the m values where the max-push strategy changes its t value, see (14). hence, both the conditional pull and max-push strategy choose the same t. 5.1 model validation we validate the infinite system model for the conditional pull strategy by comparing the closed form results of theorem 10 with time consuming simulation results for systems with a finite number of nodes n. the infinite and finite system model only differ in the system size. hence, the rate r and probability p in the simulation experiments is independent of n and was determined by using the expression for p from equation (26) and r = r/(1 − λ). each simulated point in the figures represents the average value of 25 simulation runs. each run has a length of 106 time units (where the service time is exponentially distributed with a mean of 1 time unit) and a warm-up period of length 106/3 time units. load (λ) 0.5 0.65 0.7 0.75 0.8 25 1.1e-2 1.7e-2 1.9e-2 2.4e-2 2.9e-2 50 5.6e-3 8.2e-3 9.5e-3 5.7e-3 7.1e-3 system 100 2.8e-3 3.9e-3 4.6e-3 5.7e-3 7.1e-3 size 200 1.3e-3 2.0e-3 2.3e-3 2.7e-3 3.4e-3 (n) 400 7.0e-4 1.0e-3 1.2e-3 1.3e-3 1.7e-3 800 3.5e-4 5.0e-4 5.6e-4 6.6e-4 8.1e-4 1600 1.6e-4 2.5e-4 2.6e-4 3.8e-4 4.3e-4 table 1: relative error of mean delay, given by (29), for the conditional pull strategy with r = 1 and m = 0.1 when compared to simulation results. table 1 compares the mean delay in a finite system with n nodes with the mean delay in the infinite system model under the conditional pull strategy with r = 1 and m = 0.1 for n = 25, 50, . . . , 1600 and λ = 0.5, 0.65, 0.7, 0.75 and 0.8. for each combination of n and λ we also show the relative error. the error clearly decreases as n grows, and is worse for larger λ values. the observed overall migration rate in the simulation is strictly lower than the predefined m, meaning less jobs will be transferred than anticipated. hence, the mean delay in the simulation experiments is pessimistic. this error is in part due to the choice of p, which was determined using (26). this choice relies on the infinite system model whereas we are now studying a finite system. the relative error in the observed overall migration rate is nearly load-insensitive and decreases linearly as the system doubles in size, as shown in table 2. n 25 50 100 200 400 800 1600 rel. err. 4% 2% 1% .5% 0.25% .13% .064% table 2: relative error of the observed overall migration rate for finite system size when compared to the targeted migration rate m. 6. push versus pull strategies we compare the performance of the max-push and the conditional pull strategies with a predefined overall probe limit r and migration limit m (using theorems 7 and 10). the parameter t is determined by the load λ, as each strategy is only defined for a specific t given any λ (see (9), (14) and (20)). for the max-push, the value for t and r is chosen to match the strictest constraint of either r or m depending on the load (see theorem 6). for the conditional pull all idle servers probe with rate r = r/(1 −λ), and p is chosen to match m (see theorem 9). the mean delay of the max-push and conditional pull strategy with m = 0.1 and r = 0.4 is shown in figure 4. the max-push strategy is limited by the probe limit when λ > 1 −m/r and by the migration limit when √ m < λ < 1 − m/r. the mean delay of the push strategy is one in case λ < √ m, as all newly arriving jobs at a busy server can be migrated instantaneously to an empty server without violating the r and m constraints. for the conditional pull strategy the limiting factor is r when λ < √ m + m/r, and m for λ > √ m + m/r. the intervals where both strategies are constrained by m do not always overlap, i.e. √ m + m/r can be larger than 1 − m/r, as is the case for r = 1 and m = 0.3. when√ m + m/r < 1 −m/r both strategies transfer the same number of jobs when √ m + m/r < λ < 1 − m/r. however, the max-push will outperform the conditional pull as the average migration gain is larger. this is not unexpected as the max-push strategy avoids that queues become larger than t, whereas queues with a length exceeding t exist for the conditional pull as it only sends random probes at a finite rate. 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 − m/r √ m √ m + m/r push pull r=0.4 m=0.1 load (λ) m e a n d e la y ( d ) figure 4: mean delay of the max-push and conditional pull strategies, with r = 0.4 and m = 0.1. 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 − m/r √ m √ m + m/r push pull r=1 m=0.1 load (λ) m e a n d e la y ( d ) figure 5: mean delay of the max-push and conditional pull strategies, with r = 1 and m = 0.1. as expected from theorem 11, the difference in performance between max-push and conditional-pull becomes smaller when increasing r, as shown in figure 5. as the empty queues send probes with rate r = r/(1 − λ), they are allowed to send more probes as r increases. this increases the odds that a long queue is probed, thus lowering the mean delay. this can also be observed by looking at the values for t. by increasing r, a larger value for t can be used for the same load. this requires that jobs are pulled from longer queues, increasing the migration gain per transfer. in conclusion, whenever the maximum allowed probe rate r clearly exceeds the maximum allowed migration rate m (which is the case that is mainly of practical interest), the pull strategy is either clearly superior (for large λ) or has a similar performance to the max-push strategy (for medium to low λ). 7. references [1] d. eager, e. lazowska, and j. zahorjan. adaptive load sharing in homogeneous distributed systems. software engineering, ieee transactions on, se-12(5):662 –675, may 1986. [2] d. eager, e. lazowska, and j. zahorjan. a comparison of receiver-initiated and sender-initiated adaptive load sharing. perform. eval., 6(1):53–68, 1986. [3] n. gast and b. gaujal. a mean field model of work stealing in large-scale systems. sigmetrics perform. eval. rev., 38(1):13–24, 2010. [4] y. lu, q. xie, g. kliot, a. geller, j. r. larus, and a. greenberg. join-idle-queue: a novel load balancing algorithm for dynamically scalable web services. perform. eval., 68:1056–1071, 2011. [5] w. minnebo and b. van houdt. a fair comparison of pull and push strategies in large distributed networks. ieee/acm transactions on networking, 2013. [6] w. minnebo and b. van houdt. improved rate-based pull and push strategies in large distributed networks. in proc. of the ieee 21-th international symposium on modeling, analysis and simulation of computer and telecommunication systems, san francisco (usa), 2013. [7] w. minnebo and b. van houdt. tech. report: analysis of rate-based pull and push strategies with limited migration rates in large distributed networks. http://win.ua.ac.be/~vanhoudt/papers/reports/ migrationpaper.pdf, 2015. [8] r. mirchandaney, d. towsley, and j. stankovic. analysis of the effects of delays on load sharing. ieee trans. comput., 38(11):1513–1525, 1989. [9] r. mirchandaney, d. towsley, and j. a. stankovic. adaptive load sharing in heterogeneous distributed systems. j. parallel distrib. comput., 9(4):331–346, 1990. [10] m. mitzenmacher. the power of two choices in randomized load balancing. ieee trans. parallel distrib. syst., 12:1094–1104, october 2001. [11] i. v. spilbeeck and b. v. houdt. performance of rate-based pull and push strategies in heterogeneous networks. performance evaluation, 91:2 – 15, 2015. special issue: performance 2015. [12] a. stolyar. pull-based load distribution in large-scale heterogeneous service systems. queueing systems, 80(4):341–361, 2015. [13] b. van houdt. performance comparison of aggressive push and traditional pull strategies in large distributed systems. in proceedings of qest 2011, aachen (germany), ieee computer society, pages 265–274, sep 2011. [14] n. vvedenskaya, r. dobrushin, and f. karpelevich. queueing system with selection of the shortest of two queues: an asymptotic approach. problemy peredachi informatsii, 32:15–27, 1996. [15] l. ying, r. srikant, and x. kang. the power of slightly more than one sample in randomized load balancing. in proc. of ieee infocom, 2015. http://win.ua.ac.be/~vanhoudt/papers/reports/migrationpaper.pdf http://win.ua.ac.be/~vanhoudt/papers/reports/migrationpaper.pdf introduction rate based strategies pull and push strategies limiting the overall migration rate max-push limiting the overall migration rate conditional pull model validation push versus pull strategies references untitled a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining intelligent transportation systems and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay sergio nesmachnow*, sebastián baña*, and renzo massobrio* universidad de la república, herrera y reissig 565, montevideo, uruguay abstract this article proposes a platform for distributed big data analysis in the context of smart cities. extracting useful mobility information from large volumes of data is crucial to improve decision-making processes in smart cities. this article introduces a framework for mobility analysis in smart cities combining intelligent transportation systems and socioeconomic data for the city of montevideo, uruguay. the efficiency of the proposed system is analyzed over a distributed computing infrastructure, demonstrating that the system scales properly for processing large volumes of data for both off-line and on-line scenarios. applications of the proposed platform and case studies using real data are presented, as examples of the valuable information that can be offered to both citizens and authorities. the proposed model for big data processing can also be extended to allow using other distributed (e.g. grid, cloud, fog, edge) computing infrastructures. received on 9 may 2017; accepted on 18 october 2017; published on 19 december 2017 keywords: smart cities, big data, distributed computing, intelligent transportation systems copyright © 2017 sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/xx.x.x.xx 1. introduction the paradigm of smart cities proposes taking advantage of information and communication technologies to improve the quality and efficiency of urban services [1]. modern cities are increasingly becoming sensed and instrumented. the embedding of smart devices into traditional city’s physical systems together with the emergence of citizen sensors, such as mobile phones or "internet of things" (iot) enabled domestic appliances, are generating vast volumes of data that present unprecedented opportunities as well as challenges. extracting insights from these datasets is crucial to improve decision-making processes in cities and to achieve quality improvements and increase efficiency. a particular sub-domain of a smart city are intelligent transportation systems (its). its integrate synergistic technologies, computational intelligence, and engineering concepts to develop and improve transportation. its are aimed at providing innovative ∗corresponding authors. email: {sergion,sbana,renzom}@fing.edu.uy services for transport and traffic management, with the main goals of improving transportation safety and mobility, and also enhancing productivity [2]. its allow gathering large volumes of data by taking advantage of different sensors and devices present in current vehicles and infrastructure (e.g., passenger counters, gps devices, video cameras, ticket vending machines). the development of smart tools that use data gathered by its infrastructure and vehicles has risen in the past years. these tools rely on efficient and accurate data processing (even in realtime), which poses an interesting challenge from the technological perspective. furthermore, these data can be combined with more traditional data sources, such as sociodemographic data that are regularly and systematically collected by government agencies. this combined approach enables characterizing areas of study and helps answering questions such us how equitably the services delivered are and whether certain communities are disproportionally affected by poor service quality. 1 eai endorsed transactions smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ mailto:<\protect \t1\textbraceleft sergion,sbana,renzom\protect \t1\textbraceright @fing.edu.uy> sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio in this context, applying distributed parallel computing and machine learning techniques arise as a promising methodology for processing large volumes of data to be used in services and applications targeting both citizens and authorities alike. this article proposes a framework for capturing and processing large volumes of data in the context of the resolution of urban problems. the problems involve processing large volumes of data to offer real-time information to both citizens and transport authorities. the proposed framework applies distributed computing and big data processing methods to provide an easy-to-use and efficient solution. furthermore, two specific applications of the proposed framework are presented: i) an analysis of public transportation in the city of montevideo, uruguay that uses historical geo-spatial data from vehicles combined with socioeconomic datasets to withdraw conclusions regarding both quality and equability of the services provided [3] and ii) the estimation of od matrices and mobility patterns for the same public transportation system [4]. an experimental analysis is also reported, studying the computational efficiency of the proposed framework over both applications. the main results demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed solution, making it a promising approach to be applied in modern smart cities. the article is organized as follows. section 2 describes the generic framework proposed for distributed big data analysis for its in the context of the smart city paradigm and introduces the two practical applications studied. a review of related works on distributed big data analysis for smart city applications is presented in section 3. section 4 describes the proposed model for the distributed processing and the specific details of the implementations for the two cases of study. the computational efficiency analysis is reported in section 5. two examples of studies that generate useful statistics for the population are described in section 6. finally, section 7 presents the conclusions and main lines of future work. 2. big data processing for intelligent transportation systems in smart cities this section describes two problems related to processing big data from transportation systems applying distributed computing and computational intelligence. 2.1. analysis of the quality and equability of the public transportation system the first case of study proposes combining multiple datasets and performing both off-line and on-line analysis of gps data and ticket sales information from buses. given a big set of data collected from gps devices and ticket sales machines in buses, the problem consists in computing a number of important statistical values to assess the quality of the public transportation system. the information collected by gps devices includes the time and the coordinates for each bus, reported with a frequency of 10–30 seconds, which allow determining the location of each bus within its route. on the other hand, information from ticket sales include the information of every ticket sold on each bus, including: gps coordinates, time, and date the ticket was sold. additionally, if the ticket was paid for using a smartcard, a unique identifier for the smartcard is included, which allow identifying trips done by the same passenger. the main goal of the data processing is to compute relevant metrics to assess the efficiency of the public transport system in montevideo, for example: i) study the impact of traffic conditions and external events on the efficiency of the transportation system ii) analyze the real time that each bus takes to reach some important locations in the city (known as control points or remarkable locations), and iii) compute statistical information about the arriving times and delays for each remarkable location (maximum, minimum, mean, mean absolute deviation, and standard deviation). the information to report must be classified and properly organized in order to determine accurate values according to different days of the week and hours in the day, which imply different passenger demands and different traffic mobility patterns. the benefits of the proposed system for processing gps data are twofold: i) from the point of view of the users, the system provides useful information from both historical data (monthly, yearly) and the current status of the public transportation in the city, to aid with mobility decisions (e.g., choose a certain bus, move to a different bus stop, consider using a different line); this information can be obtained via intelligent ubiquitous software applications and websites; ii) from the point of view of the city administration, the statistical information gathered is useful for planning long-term modifications in the bus routes and frequencies, and also to address specific bottleneck situations in the public transportation system. a diagram of the proposed system for processing gps data in its is presented in figure 1. the system is based on buses that upload data reporting their current location (collected by the on-board gps unit) and ticket sales to a server in the cloud and a historical database which includes transport and socioeconomic data from the past. the server applies big data and streaming analysis techniques to the collected data. the results are then exposed to be consumed by mobile applications for end-users and also to be used in monitoring applications for the city government authorities. 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay figure 1. architecture of the proposed big data analysis for its the proposed system is useful for performing both on-line and off-line data processing. on the one hand, on-line processing applying streaming analysis techniques fulfill requirements in areas such as early warning and detection, and adaptive routing. the offline analysis on the other hand, is focused on the study of trends that allow identifying mobility patterns and creating predictive models that can be later used in conjunction with sensors that stream data in real-time. on-line its metrics and statistics. in order to handle real-time data the system relies on a streaming processing engine that enables high throughput ingestion from multiple concurrent data sources. the proposed system presents a set of expressive abstractions, such as join, map, and reduce, to apply transformations to the data before persisting the results into the storage subsystem. off-line its metrics and statistics. for computing offline mobility metrics, the proposed system demands processing a large volume of data in short execution time, thus leading to a classic big data problem. the system applies a parallel/distributed model to perform the data processing, where the original data is split and distributed across different nodes to be processed independently. finally, all the partial results from each node are combined to return the final solution. these data are used to derive metrics of the quality of the service that are later merged with socioeconomic indicators that are used to characterize the geographic area served by each particular bus line. the number of bus lines, bus stops, and individual trips completed every day constitute a relatively large volume of data. thus, even some of the more traditional geo-spatial analysis problems, such as deriving the isochrones for a fixed walking distance from the stops on a bus line–to determine the bus coverage area– becomes a candidate problem for parallel processing. the social dimension of the analysis is crucial to evaluate whether the services are being fairly delivered, benefiting all the communities irrespectively from their location or demographic characteristics. the concept of “equitable city” is one of the promises of urban informatics and it is a central premise of our research. 2.2. estimation of mobility patterns: demand and od matrices the second case of study proposes applying distributed computing techniques for estimating mobility patterns and od matrices in its systems. origin-destination (od) matrices are often not directly observable, because sensors or gps gadgets in buses typically measure traffic characteristics, which are the result of not just origin-destination trips, but also of route choices and traffic operations for certain types of vehicles. thus, od matrices have to be estimated from any available relevant data. this is a relevant problem for implementing the smart city paradigm. determining the mobility patterns to build demand and od matrices is crucial for analyzing the transportation system and the resulting outcomes are key for city administrators to take decisions that improve the quality of the system. the main challenge faced when generating demand and od matrices using data from gps and tickets sales is that in almost every system passengers validate their smart cards when they board but not when they alight a bus. therefore, while the origin of each trip is known with certainty, it is necessary to estimate the destination. furthermore, in many urban systems some passengers do not use smart cards to pay for their ticket and pay cash instead. therefore, there are sale records which do not provide information that can be used to track several trips made by the same passenger. specific big data processing algorithms must be designed and implemented for each case. data from gps, sensors, and traffic gadgets are gathered in many formats and with different granularity. this case of study focuses on a study of the its for the city of montevideo, uruguay. thus, the types of input data considered in this article for origin-destination estimation and prediction are the gps and ticket sales data from buses in montevideo. the city government in montevideo introduced in 2010 an urban mobility plan to redesign and modernize urban transport in the city [5]. under this plan, the metropolitan transport system (sistema de transporte metropolitano, stm) was created, with the 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio goal of integrating the different components of the public transportation system together. one of the first improvements in stm was to include gps devices on buses and allow passengers to pay for tickets using a smart card (stm card). additionally, the complex system of fares was simplified to allow only two different type of tickets: i) "one hour" tickets, allowing up to 1 transfer within an hour of boarding the first bus; ii) "two hours" tickets, allowing unlimited transfers within 2 hours from the moment the ticket is purchased. however, it is not compulsory to use the stm card to buy bus tickets, as passengers may pay with cash directly to the driver. in this case, the ticket is only valid for that trip and no transfers are allowed. using historical information gathered in the context of the stm transport system of montevideo, the goal is to accurately estimate demand and od matrices from gps bus location and ticket sales data (considering tickets payed with and without smartcards). the computed results are of significant value to the authorities at the city government in montevideo, since there is a serious lack of mobility information. traditional methods (e.g., passenger surveys, visual inspections) have proven to be expensive and offer outdated information while novel methods based on information already gathered by the its have not been explored by the city authorities yet. 3. related works this section reviews the related works on the two main topics addressed in this article: applying big data and distributed computing approaches for processing data from its and related systems in the context of smart cities, and processing data to estimate demand and od matrices. 3.1. distributed computing for processing traffic data several articles have proposed applying distributed computing approaches to process large volumes of traffic data with diverse goals. a brief review of related works is presented next. the advantages of using big data analysis for social transportation have been studied in a thorough manner in the general review of the field by zheng et al. [6]. the authors analyzed using several sources of information, including vehicle mobility (e.g., gps coordinates, speed data), pedestrian mobility (e.g., gps and wifi signals from mobile devices), incident reports, social networking (e.g., textual posts, address), and web logs (e.g., user identification, comments). in the review, the advantages and limitations of using each source of data are discussed. several other novel ideas to improve public transportation and implement the its paradigm are also reviewed, including applying crowdsourcing techniques for collecting and analyzing real-time or near real-time traffic information, and using databased agents for driver assistance and analyzing human behavior. a conclusion on how to integrate all the previous concepts in a data-driven social transportation system that improves traffic safety and efficiency is also presented. several other computational intelligence techniques have been recently applied to process its data in order to help the decision-making processes in smart cities. oh et al. [7] proposed a sequential search strategy for traffic state prediction combining a vehicle detection system and the k nearest neighbors (knn) nonparametric method for classification. an experimental evaluation was performed considering data from the performance measurement system from state route 78 highway in california, united states. the results demonstrated that the proposed system outperformed a traditional knn approach, computing significantly more accurate results while maintaining good efficiency and stability properties. shi and abdel-aty [8] applied the random forest data mining technique and bayesian inference to process large volumes of data from a microwave vehicle detection system, with the main goal of identifying the contributing factors to crashes in realtime. rear-end crashes were studied because they have a straightforward relation with congestion. the experimental evaluation of the proposed computational intelligence approach was performed considering traffic data from state routes 408, 417, and 528 in central florida, united states. a reliability model was also included in the analysis. the main results allowed the authors to conclude that peak hour, higher volume and lower speed at upstream locations, and high congestion index at downstream detection point significantly increased the probability of crashes. ahn et al. [9] applied support vector regression (svr) and a bayesian classifier for building a real-time traffic flow prediction system. data preparation and noise filtering are applied to raw data, and a traffic flow model is proposed using a bayesian framework. regression techniques are used to model the timespace dependencies and relationships between roads. the performance of the proposed method is studied on traffic data from gyeongbu, the seoul-busan corridor in south korea. the experimental results showed that the approach using svr-based estimation outperformed a traditional linear regression methods in terms of accuracy. chen et al. [10] proposed a model that aims to efficiently predict traffic speed on a given location using historical data from various sources including its data, weather conditions, and special events taking place in the city. to obtain accurate results the prediction model needs to be re-trained frequently in order to incorporate the most up-to-date data. the prediction model 4 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay combines the knn algorithm with a gaussian process regression. additionally, the results are computed using a map-reduce model, implemented under the hadoop framework. the experimental evaluation was performed over a real scenario using data from the research data exchange, a platform for its data sharing. the data used corresponds to the interstate 5 higway in san diego, california, united states. the processed information included speed, flow, and occupancy data measured using loop-detectors on the road, as well as visibility data taken from weather stations nearby. experimental results showed that the proposed method was able to accurately predict traffic speed with an average forecasting error smaller that 2 miles per hour. additionally, a 69% improvement on the execution time was achieved by using the hadoop framework in a cluster infrastructure when compared with a sequential algorithm running in a single machine. xia et al. [11] studied the real-time short-term traffic flow forecasting problem. to solve the problem, the authors proposed using the k nearest neighbor algorithm in a distributed environment, following the map-reduce model implemented over the hadoop framework. the proposed solution considered the spatial-temporal correlation in traffic flow, i.e., current traffic at a certain road segment depends on past traffic (time dimension) and on traffic situation at nearby road segments (spatial dimension). these two factors can be controlled using weights in the proposed algorithm. the experimental analysis was performed using data of trajectories of more than 12000 gps-equipped taxis in the city of beijing, china, during a period of 15 days in november 2012. the first 14 days of data are used as the training set and the last day is used for evaluating the computed results. the proposed algorithm allows reducing the mean absolute percentage error by 8.5% to 11.5% on average over three existing techniques based on the knn algorithm. additionally, a computational efficiency of 0.84 is reported for the best case. 3.2. estimation of demand and od matrices the estimation of demand and od matrices is a wellknown problem in the field of public transportation. this problem has had a renewed interest with the increasing availability of large volumes of data from modern its systems. many articles in the related literature have proposed applying statistical analysis for estimating od matrices and computing several other relevant statistics for its. some approaches applying parallel and distributed computing techniques have also been proposed recently. a review of the main related works is presented next. an analysis of the literature about using smart cards in its was presented by pelletier et al. [12]. the review covered all the details about hardware and software needed for deploying smart card payment solutions in urban transportation systems. in addition, privacy and legal issues that arise when dealing with smart card data were also reviewed. the authors identified the main uses for smart card data, including: longterm planning, service adjustments, and performance indicators of the transportation systems. finally, the review described several examples of smart card data utilization around the world. trépanier et al. [13] proposed a model for estimating the destination for passengers boarding buses with smart cards, following a database programming approach. two hypotheses are considered, which are also commonly used in many related works: i) the origin of a new trip is the destination of the previous one; ii) at the end of the day users return to the origin of their first trip of the day. based on the previous two assumptions, the authors proposed a method to follow the chain of trips of each user in the system. those trips for which chaining is not possible (e.g., only one trip in the day exists for a particular user) are compared with all other trips of the month for the same user, in order to find similar trips with known destination. the experimental evaluation was conducted using real information from the transit authority in gatineau, quebec. two datasets were used, with 378,260 trips from july 2003 and 771,239 trips from october 2003. results showed that a destination estimation was possible for 66% of the trips. it is worth noting that most trips for which its destination could not be estimated with the proposed approach take place during off-peak hours, where more atypical and non-regular trips are performed. considering only peak hours, the percentage of trips with their destination estimated improves to 80%. however, the real estimation accuracy could not be assessed due to lack of a second source of data (e.g., automatic passenger count) for comparison. wang et al. [14] proposed using a trip-chaining method to infer bus passenger origin-destination from smart card transactions and automatic vehicle location (avl) data from london, united kingdom. in the studied scenario, authors needed to estimate both origin and destination of trips. origins are accurately estimated by searching for the timestamp of each smart card transaction in the avl records to determine the bus stop of each trip. to estimate destinations, the authors used a similar methodology to that presented by trépanier et al. [13], chaining trips when possible to infer destinations. results were compared against passenger survey data from transport for london, performed every five to seven years for each bus route and including the number of people boarding and alighting at each bus stop. the analysis show that 5 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio origins can be estimated for more than 90% of the trips while origin and destinations can be estimated for 57% of all trips. when compared to the survey data, the difference on the estimated destinations were below 4% on the worst case. finally, two practical applications of the results are presented. the first one consists of studying the daily load/flow variation in order to identify locations along each bus route where passenger load is high, as well as underutilized route segments. the second application consists of a transfer time analysis, evaluating the average time that users need to wait for transferring between buses, based on the alighting stop and the avl data. later, munizaga et al. [15] presented a similar approach to the one applied by wang et al. [14] for estimating od matrices in the multimodal transportation system of santiago, chile. the scenario considered in the article by munizaga et al. is more general, because passengers can use their smart cards to pay for tickets at metros, buses, and bus stations. the proposed approach is evaluated using smart card datasets corresponding to two different weeks, with over 35 million transactions each. the origin of the trip is accurately determined for nearly every transaction while the destination and time of alighting was estimated for over 80% of the transactions. after extrapolating and post-processing, an estimated od matrix is presented to visualize the computed results at any given timespace disaggregation. several proposals have applied distributed computing approaches to process large volumes of traffic data, but few works have dealt with the estimation of demand or od matrices. early works on this topic applied distributing computing to gather traffic data. sun [16] proposed a client-server model developed in corba for collecting traffic counts in real time, to be used for dynamic origin/destination demand estimation. the proposed solution included a corba client to extract data from the traffic network, and a corba server for storing data in a centralized repository. all the information is processed to be later used in dynamic traffic assignment strategies for the traffic network studied, for the estimation of dynamic od matrices applying a bi-level optimization framework. toole et al. [17] propose combining data from many sources (call records from mobile phones, census, and surveys) to infer od matrices. the authors combine several existing algorithms to generate od matrices, assign trips to specific routes, and to compute quality metrics on road usage. furthermore, a web application is introduced to give simple visualizations of the computed information. the authors mention that computations are performed in parallel, but no parallel model is described and no performance metrics are reported. also using mobile phone data, mellegård [18] proposed a hadoop implementation to generate od matrices while keeping users’ privacy. however, the experimental analysis is done on synthetic data due to the difficulties on getting real data from mobile operators. furthermore, no performance metrics are reported, so the advantages of the hadoop implementation are unclear. huang et al. [19] proposed a methodology for offline/online calibration of dynamic traffic assignment systems via distributed gradient calculations. an adaptive network decomposition framework is introduced for parallel computation of traffic network metrics and for parallel simulation, in order to accelerate the computations. parallel origin-destination demand estimation is proposed as a line for future work, in order to deal with large-scale traffic networks with huge number of origin-destination pairs and sensors. 3.3. summary of related works the analysis of related works allows identifying several proposals for using big data analysis and computational intelligence methods to design improved its. computational intelligence and learning methods, such as regression, knn and bayesian inference are often used to identify traffic patterns and provide useful information for planning. however, there are few works focusing on improving the public transportation systems, especially considering the point of view of the users. furthermore, few works focus in the social justice, integrating into the analysis elements that provide insights into the fairness with which the service is delivered. in this context, the research reported in this article contributes with specific proposals to monitor and improve the public bus transportation, considering the point of view of both users and administrators, and providing objective metrics on the way communities receive these services in montevideo, uruguay. regarding demand and od matrices estimation, previous works have addressed the problem of estimating the destination by chaining trips where the destination is assumed to be near the origin of the following trip. this article expands that idea by also considering transfers between bus lines, which are specifically recorded in the smart card dataset used for the evaluation. additionally, a novel parallel/distributed computing approach is presented to allow solving a more complex and computingintensive data processing problem. to the best of our knowledge, this approach has not been previously proposed in the related literature. 4. the proposed solutions this section describes the proposed solutions for the two cases of study presented in this article. 6 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay 4.1. processing gps data from buses in the public transport system historical gps data processing applying map-reduce over hadoop. the first case of study is described next. design and architecture. the problem is decomposed in two sub-problems: i) pre-processing to properly prepare the data to be used as input for the processing in the next phase, and ii) statistics computation of the public transportation system, using a parallel/distributed approach. a master-slave parallel model is used to define and organize the control hierarchy and processing. figure 2 presents a conceptual diagram of the proposed solution. in the pre-processing phase, the master process filters the data, in order to select only that information that is useful to compute the statistics. the data processing phase applies a data-parallel domain decomposition strategy for parallelization. the available data resulting from the previous phase is split in chunks to be handled by several processing elements. the master process is in charge of controlling and monitoring the system, performing the data partition, and sending the chunks to slaves for processing. each slave process receives a subset of the data from the master. the group of slaves processes collaborate in the data processing, generating the expected statistical results. each slave performs the same task; therefore, a single program multiple data (spmd) parallel model is applied. strategy for data processing: algorithmic description. the input data correspond to the gps coordinates sent by each bus in operation, during each trip. every line in the input file represents a new position recorded by a certain bus during a given route and for a particular instant of time. the first column of the input file corresponds to the line number field, which is a unique identifier for each bus line. in turn, to distinguish different trips of the same bus line, the file has a self-generated numeric field, trip number, which identifies a particular trip of a bus line. pre-processing stage. the main goal of pre-processing is data preparation. this stage filters input data that do not contain useful information for the statistics to compute, and classifies/orders useful records. three phases are identified in the data preparation: 1. filtering: this phase filters the data according to the statistics to compute. two relevant cases are considered: i) discarding non-useful data, as the raw data files include information that is not useful for computing the statistics (e.g., when computing the accuracy of buses to reach remarkable locations, the gps information not related to remarkable locations is not needed); and ii) filtering ranges, as the system receives a time range as input and computes the statistic for that given period of time. 2. time range characterization: this phase identifies the time range of the timestamp of each record containing useful information. since traffic patterns vary significantly throughout the day, the time range must be taken into account when computing and analyzing the generated statistics. to compute and analyze statistics generated due to variations of this factor determines very different values to be processed. we consider three time ranges in the study: • morning, between 04:00 and 12:00, • afternoon, between 12:01 and 20:00, and • night, between 20:01 and 4:00. figure 2. conceptual diagram of the proposed application 7 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio 3. sorting: this phase sorts the records according to the bus line identification (line number) and the timestamp of the record. these fields define a processing key, which is needed to compute the time differences between the departing time for each bus and the time taken to reach each of the remarkable locations. after applying the pre-processing stage, the master process has the filtered data to be used as input data for the processing to be performed by each slave process. the data consist in a set of records containing the following fields: line number, trip number, timestamp, timerange, and bus stop. statistics generation stage. the statistics generation stage is organized in four phases: 1. data partitioning and distribution: the master process divides the dataset of useful gps records and distributes the resulting subsets among the slave processes. each of the resulting data subsets includes a group of records associated with the same line number, sorted according to the criteria applied in the pre-processing stage. statistics associated with the same line number are processed in the same slave. 2. computing temporal distances. in this phase, each slave processes the subset assigned by the master process, splitting each record into different fields, to create new data. for each bus line number, the distances between different points on the bus route are calculated iterating through a date-ordered list containing the distance values. the start of each trip is defined by the first new occurrence of a trip number found in the subset containing the gps data handled by each slave process. each slave uses that initial time to track each remarkable location or bus stop, by computing the time between the timestamp and the initial time (i.e., the relative time). the computed relative times are then filtered by timerange and by remarkable location. the generated results are stored in memory, grouped by the fields mentioned above, to be available for the next phase. 3. statistics generation. in the third phase, data are reduced into results and finally statistics are computed. for each occurrence, an iteration over the calculated distances is performed to compute several metrics, including: • the maximum differences between times (max time difference); • the minimum differences between times (min time difference); • the average time (time average); and • the standard deviation of time values (time standard deviation). these metrics are computed considering the relative time (accumulated time of the trip from the starting location) to reach each bus stop or remarkable location for each bus line, and filtering by the different time ranges considered. the output values are grouped and ordered by line number, remarkable location, and timerange. 4. return results to the master process. the slaves return the partial results to the master, who groups and prompts the final results to the user. implementation details. the proposed parallel/distributed system for traffic data processing is implemented using a map-reduce approach in hadoop. the application fits in the map-reduce model because no communications are required between slave processes and the only communications between master and slaves are performed for the initial phase of data distribution and the final phase to report the results. the map-reduce engine in hadoop is applied using one master node and several slave nodes. the master node uses the jobtracker process to send jobs to different tasktracker processes associated to the slave nodes. when the slaves finish processing, each tasktracker sends the results back to the jobtracker in the master node. the details for each stage are presented next. pre-processing stage. the pre-processing stage involves the traditional phases usually applied when using the hadoop framework: splitting, mapping, and shuffling and sorting. all these tasks are performed by the hadoop master process: • splitting. the splitting phase assigns records to the master process. two instances of the fileinputformat and recordreader classes in hadoop were implemented to filter useful data and generate the input data to be used by the mapper process. after that, all selected records are converted to appropriate datatypes to be used in the statistics generation stage (e.g., numerical data are converted to long or int, dates are converted to timestamp, etc.). • mapping. in the mapping phase, each mapper receives a subset of data (data block) to process. the number of mappers on execution is defined by x/b, where x is the size of the data to process and b the size of the data blocks. data filtering is applied by each mapper, using recordreader<keybuscompound,businfo> objects. keybuscompound and businfo are used as <key,value> pairs for records sent to mappers. keybuscompound is a compound key including the fields needed to identify a bus trip (line number, trip number, and timestamp). businfo includes values for remarkable locations, timerange, trip number, and timestamp, needed to apply a secondary sorting (see sorting). 8 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay the hadoop framework creates a number of filtering instances according to the number of input splits on the input file. each instance p operates on a data subset {l}p, where {l} is the set of input lines received in the splitting phase. several methods were implemented to define the filtering logic to return the next register to be processed by mappers. for each record on the input, an integrity check is performed to discard records without the expected format and those not included in the range to process. a two-field record <keybuscompound, businfo> is added to the resulting set for each record not discarded. the output is a list containing {t}p records, with the format <(line_number, trip_number, timestamp), info>. • shuffling and sorting. sorting, shuffling, and partitioning are applied after the map stage on a typical map-reduce application. the common practice is sorting keys, but we decided to apply a secondary sorting [20] to deliver ordered values to each reducer to compute temporary distances in the proposed system. the secondary sorting is needed to sort both keys and values (i.e., the wellknown value-to-key conversion procedure). statistics generation stage. this stage is performed by hadoop reduce processes, which correspond to slave processes in the conceptual algorithmic description. each process has three phases: • data partitioning and distribution. this phase corresponds to the data sent from map to reduce processes. by default, the hadoop framework distributes keys to different reducers applying a hashmap partitioning. this distribution mechanism does not guarantee an appropriate load balancing, because reducers do not receive equallysize subsets to process. furthermore, the results produced by reducers will not be ordered, as it is desirable for the reports to be delivered to the users of the proposed application. for these reasons, we implemented a specific partitioning method using a treemap [21] hash, so the reducer sends those records associated to a specific bus line number. the treemap structure is dynamically generated in the main program, taking into account the number of reducers and a csv file containing ordered unique keys (line number). • reduce. according to the procedure in the previous phase, each reducer receives records with the format: <(line_numberi), [infoi1, . . . , infoin ]>, related to a given bus line number, and all values associated to keys are ordered. a reduce function is executed on each key (line_number) on set {t}: the initial times are determined for each bus trip and the relative times between remarkable locations in the trip are computed. data is temporarily stored in a treemap structure, using keystatistics (line_numberi, control_pointi, timerangei) as key and longwritable representing the time differences, as values. • statistics generation. a second function on the reducer receives each <keystatistic, longwritable> pair and computes the statistic values from the previous partial results. in the cases of study reported in this article, we compute the maximum, minimum, arithmetic mean, mean absolute deviation, and standard deviation of times for each bus line number, control point, and timerange. the reducers output is <(line_numberi, timerangei, control_pointi), (min_timei, max_timei, meani, mean_deviationi, standard_deviationi)>. these pairs are represented as text, key, and value, to prompt results to user. fault tolerance. the proposed implementation applies the automatic fault tolerance mechanism included in hadoop. additionally, some features are activated to improve fault tolerance for the its application developed: i) the feature that allows discarding corrupt input lines is enabled, to be used in those cases where a line cannot be read (the impact of discarding corrupt lines is not significant, because the system is oriented to compute statistics and estimated values); and ii) the native replication mechanism in hdfs was activated, to keep data replicated in different processing nodes. characterizing the bus service zones using socioeconomic indicators. the main details on the procedures for defining and characterizing the bus service zones are presented next. data and methods. this part of the solution relies on a combination of geo-spatial analysis and traditional statistics. the bus service areas are based on isochrones which define equal travel times for a walking distance of ten minutes from each of the stops of a particular bus line. the bus lines and bus stops geometries to derive the isochrones were obtained from the open data available on the geographic information system (gis) site of montevideo city government [22]. these shapefiles were fetched using python scripts and manipulated using python packages including geopandas [23], fiona [24], and shapely [25]. the socioeconomic indicators were obtained from the national institute of statistics (instituto nacional de estadísticas, ine) in uruguay. for the purpose of this study, we used the continuous household survey (encuesta contínua de hogares, ech) [26]. this is a cross sectional survey, conducted uninterruptedly since 1968, that delivers the official indicators for 9 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio employment and income (for both household and individuals). ine also makes available shapefiles for the areas of analysis (the census sections and census segments) [27]. merging all these datasets and shapefiles we developed a combined geo-spatial and socioeconomic view of each area. figure 3 illustrates this approach presenting all the census sections and segments with an overlapped bus service area. figure 3. choropleth map of the serviced area for bus line 185 in montevideo. the divisions are census segments and the color represents household income (in uruguayan pesos per inhabitant) the bus line shapefiles are used exclusively to represent the bus trajectory on the maps. all the bus lines geometries are contained on a single shapefile that the gis publishes. from these files, the two relevant attributes for our analysis were: the bus stops shapefiles, which are used both on the visual representations and as input to derive the isochrones for the bus service zones. the stops are also contained on a single shapefile with similar attributes. in this case, the geometry contains the latitude and longitude for the point object that represents the stop. figure 4 displays the bus lines and the corresponding isochrones of their service areas for the city of montevideo. figure 4. map of montevideo with isochrones representing the bus coverage areas (light blue shapes). the map displays large areas of the city outside of the service coverage. the ech datasets and shapefiles are accessible from the ine websites [26, 27]. we created local copies of these datasets and used the geopandas package to perform the mapping and statistical manipulations. basic data wrangling was performed to merge the datasets in order to produce a consolidated geopandas geo dataframe containing both the relevant geometries and the indicators selected for the analysis (geometry, median household income, and number of inhabitants per household). we used the most granular census unit: the census segment. data extraction, manipulation, and generation of the datasets was scripted using python. we intend to update the computed results yearly, as new data from the ich is published. 4.2. mobility patterns and demand/od matrices estimation design and architecture. initial experiments confirmed that processing only a small portion of the ticket sales dataset requires a large computation time: studying only one month of ticket sales data demands over 18 days when using a sequential algorithm in a regular desktop computer (intel core i5 x2 processor with 6 gb ram and linux ubuntu 14.04 operating system). therefore, applying a parallel/distributed approach is fully justified to reduce the execution times. our proposal is based on executing the algorithms for demand and od matrices estimation in parallel, making use of several computing units. the main idea of the proposed parallel algorithm is to apply a data-parallel approach. the datasets of ticket sales and gps records are divided in chunks, following the bag-of-tasks paradigm [28]. in this case of study, the bag-of-tasks corresponds to a set of user trips records. since each set of trip records is independent, as they hold information of different citizens, the bag-of-tasks can be assigned to different slaves for processing. using a master-slave model for organizing the processes is an appropriate choice for implementing the estimation algorithm, since the slave processes do not need to share information with each other. a set of slave nodes are created and organized in a slave pool, to be used on demand. this decision reduces the overhead of thread creation and destruction, as every thread is used many times while there are records left to be processed. initially, the master process collects all the data to be processed and applies a pre-processing stage to filter inconsistent records. after that, the master builds the bags-of-tasks and sends the corresponding bags to each slave in the slave pool, which will perform the assigned computation task. afterwards, each slave node executes the destination estimation procedure. finally, the master receives the partial results, persists them, and join them together to create the final demand and od matrices. 10 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay strategy for data processing: algorithmic description. the main details of the proposed algorithm are presented next. data description. the bus companies that operate in montevideo are required to send bus location and ticket sales data to the city authorities. the bus network in montevideo is quite complex, including 1383 bus lines and 4718 bus stops. the case study described in this section considers the dataset of ticket sales and bus locations for january 2015, comprising about 200 gb of data. bus location data contains information about the position of each bus, sampled every 10 to 30 seconds. each location record holds the following information: • lineid, the unique bus line identifier; • tripid, the unique trip identifier for each single trip for a given lineid; • latitude and longitude; • vehicle speed; • timestamp of the location; and • stopid, the identifier for the nearest bus stop to the current bus location. ticket sales data contain information about sales made with and without stm cards. each sale record has the following fields: • tripid, the unique trip identifier for each single trip for a given lineid; • latitude and longitude, • stopid, as in location data; • number of passengers, since it is possible to buy tickets for multiple passengers at once; and • timestamp of the sale. additionally, tickets payed with stm cards have the following fields: unique stm card identifier (cardid) that is hashed for privacy purposes, number of transactions for that stm card (transactionid), and the last payed transaction (payedid). these data allow identifying when a passenger transfers between buses: transactionid increments while payedid remains unchanged. the number of transfers is equal to transactionid−payedid. methodology. the proposed methodology for estimating demand and od matrices takes into account the two kinds of transfer trips existent in montevideo (detailed in section 2.2). the proposed model is based on reconstructing the trip sequence for passengers that use a smart card, following a similar approach to that applied in the related literature [13–15]. we assume that each smart card corresponds to a single passenger, so we use the terms card and user in an indistinct manner. the proposed approach is based on processing each trip, retrieving the bus stop where the trip started, and identifying/estimating the stop where the passenger alighted the bus from the information available. therefore, two models for estimation are proposed: one for direct trips and one for trips including transfers: • transfer trips. in a transfer trip, passengers pay for their ticket when boarding the first bus by using a smart card identified by its cardid. later, they can take one or more buses within the time limits permitted by the ticket. for each ticket sold, transactionid and payedid) are recorded. these values allows detecting whether a smart card record corresponds to a new trip (payedid is equal to transactionid) or to a transfer between buses (transactionid is higher than payedid). we assume that passengers avoid excessive walking in transfers; we consider that a passenger finishes its first leg at the nearest bus stop to the bus stop where he boards the second leg, and so on. the boarding bus stop for the second leg is recorded in the system, thus we estimate the alighting point from the first bus by looking for the closest bus stop corresponding to that line. • direct trips. direct trips are those that have no bus transfers. we also consider the last leg of a trip with one or more transfers as a direct trip. in both cases, the difficulty lies in accurately estimating a destination point for these trips. to estimate the destination points we consider two assumptions, which are commonly used in the related literature: i) passengers start a new trip at a bus stop which is close to the destination of their previous trip; ii) at the end of the day, passengers return to the bus stop where they boarded the first trip on the same day. in order to estimate destinations it is necessary to chain the trips made by each passenger on a single day. a preliminary study performed on the sales dataset showed that the best option is to consider each day starting at 04:00, since the lowest number of tickets are sold at that time. this allows considering passengers with different travel patterns, such as those who commute to work during the day and those who work at night. the model for chaining direct trips of a specific passenger works as follows. we iterate through all the trips done in a 24 hour period (from 04:00 to 04:00 on the following day). for each new trip, we try to estimate the alighting point by looking for a bus stop located in a predefined range from the boarding bus stop of the previous trip. when no bus stop is found on that radius, the procedure is repeated using a larger radius (twice the original one) to search for bus stops. if no bus stop is found using the larger radius, the origin of the trip is recorded, in order to report the number of unassigned destinations. 11 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio estimation algorithm. we propose a specific methodology for reconstructing the trip sequence for passengers, by estimating the destination points from the information available. three phases are identified in the proposed algorithm, which are relevant for building the estimated demand and od matrices: 1. pre-processing. the pre-processing phase prepares the data, filtering those records with incoherent information and classifying records by month per passenger. the algorithm receives as input an unstructured dataset containing raw gps positions and ticket sales data. initially, the algorithm discards those sales records that have invalid gps coordinates; which are not processed for demand and od matrices estimation. a sale record has an invalid location when its coordinates are not within the route of the bus corresponding to the sale, with a tolerance of 50 meters. finally, trip records with consistent location information are separated into different files, according to their cardid and then ordered according to their date field. this allows processing the trips of each passenger independently. 2. core processing. in this phase the sales data are processed in order to generate demand and od matrices. data are iteratively processed: for each passenger, trips are analyzed considering 24 hour periods starting and finishing at 04.00. first, the origin of the trip is recorded. the trip destination is estimated depending on whether it is a transfer or a direct trip. once the origin and the destination are computed, the corresponding values are updated in the demand and od matrices. the process is repeated until all trip records are processed. in our study, we consider a distance of 500m for the search radius used when estimating destination of direct trips, as previously described. 3. output. after all records are computed the demand and od matrices are returned. two variants of the proposed algorithm were implemented, one for each of the two different estimation procedures presented in section 2.2. both variants follow the same general parallel approach previously described. the main implementation details are presented next. implementation details. the proposed algorithms were implemented using python 2.7.5. the crossplatform open-source geographic information system qgis [29] was used to manage geographic information corresponding to bus location and bus stops data. the dispy [30] software package was used for creating and distributing parallel tasks among several computing nodes. dispy is a python framework that allows executing parallel processes, supporting many different distributed computing infrastructures. the main features of the framework include tasks distribution, load balancing, and fault recovery. the dispy framework provides an api for defining clusters and schedule jobs to execute on those clusters. creating a cluster in dispy consists of packaging computation fragments (code and data) and specifying parameters that control how to execute the computations (e.g., which nodes can execute each computation). a number of parameters are needed to set a dispy cluster, including the program to execute in each node must, the list of nodes available to execute the jobs, and a list of dependencies needed for computation must be specified (in the proposed application there is only one dependency: the availability of the qgis software). once a cluster is created, jobs can be scheduled to execute at a certain node. dispy executes the job on an available processor in the defined cluster. after a job finishes, the information about the origin-destination pairs computed is used to build the od matrix. each slave keeps track of the index of the last file or line processed. therefore, in case of a system failure it is possible to resume the execution from the last processed record, without the need of starting the process from the beginning. in our approach, the master creates a set of bagof-tasks where each task corresponds to all the trip records of a single passenger. then, each bag-of-tasks is distributed using dispy across the different slaves to execute the estimation algorithms. it is important to choose the amount of passengers’ trip records to assign to each slave in order to optimize the execution time, avoiding costly communications between the slaves and the master. this parameter is configured in the experimental analysis presented in section 5. finally, the master node distributes tasks to slaves on demand, and obtains the results computed by each slave to gather them to return the final solution. 5. computational efficiency evaluation this section describes the experimental evaluation of the proposed system for generating statistics of public transportation based on its data. the setup for the experimental evaluation is described, including the computational platform used and the problem instances generated from the historical data. after that, the computational efficiency results are reported. finally, sample studies are presented from the data processed for a specific bus line. 12 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay 5.1. platform, instances, and metrics the main setup for the experimental analysis is described next. computational platform. the experimental evaluation was performed over the cloud infrastructure in cluster fing, the high performance computing facility at universidad de la república, uruguay [31]. the analysis was performed using amd opteron 6172 magny cours (24 cores) processors at 2.26 ghz, 24 gb ram, and centos linux 5.2 operating system. problem instances and data. the problem instances considered in each case of study are described next. gps and ticket sales data. several datasets are used to define different scenarios conceived to test the behavior of the system under diverse situations, including different input file sizes, different time intervals, and using different number of map and reduce processes. we work with datasets containing 10 gb, 20 gb, 30 gb, and 60 gb, and also different time intervals (3 days, and 1, 2, 3, and 6 months), with real gps data from buses in montevideo, provided by the local administration intendencia de montevideo. the input data file to use in each test of the experimental evaluation was stored in hdfs. to better exploit the parallel processing, more mappers than hdfs blocks must be used when splitting the file. considering an input file of size x mb and hdfs blocks of size y mb, the algorithm needs using at least x/y mappers. hadoop uses the input file size and the number of mappers created to determinate the number of splits on the input file. demand and origin-destination matrix estimation. for the experimental analysis of demand and od matrices estimation, the dataset corresponding to the its in montevideo for january 2015 was processed, including ticket sales and bus location information. this dataset holds the mobility information for over half a million smart cards (corresponding to more than 13 million individual trips). the total size of the dataset is 120gb. computational efficiency metrics. several metrics have been proposed in the related literature to evaluate the performance of parallel and distributed algorithms [32]. in the experimental analysis reported in this article we focus on two traditional metrics for performance evaluation: the speedup and the efficiency. the speedup evaluates how much faster a parallel algorithm is compared to its sequential version. it is defined as the ratio of the execution times of the sequential algorithm (t1) and the parallel version executed on n computing elements (tn ) (equation 1). the ideal case for a parallel/distributed algorithm is to achieve linear speedup (sn = n). however, the common situation for parallel algorithms is to achieve sublinear speedup (sn < n), due to the times required to communicate and synchronize the parallel/distributed processes. the efficiency is the normalized value of the speedup, regarding the number of computing elements used for execution (equation 2). the linear speedup corresponds to en = 1, and in usual situations en < 1. sn = t1 tn (1) en = sn n (2) 5.2. experimental results the results of the computational efficiency analysis for the two cases of study is presented next. gps data processing. we evaluated the computational efficiency of the proposed distributed solution and also the correctness to produce useful information for users and administrators. table 1 reports the computational efficiency results for the proposed application when varying the size of the input data (#i), days (#d), number of mapper (#m) and reducer (#r) processes. mean values computed over five independent executions are reported for each metric. all times are reported in seconds. table 1. results of the experimental analysis: computational efficiency of the proposed map-reduce implementation for processing gps data #i #d #m #r t1(s) tn (s) sn en 10 3 14 8 1333.9 253.1 5.27 0.22 10 3 22 22 1333.9 143.0 9.33 0.39 10 30 14 8 2108.6 178.0 11.84 0.49 10 30 22 22 2108.6 187.3 11.26 0.47 20 3 14 8 2449.0 351.1 6.98 0.29 20 3 22 22 2449.0 189.8 12.90 0.54 20 30 14 8 3324.5 275.6 12.06 0.50 20 30 22 22 3324.5 238.8 13.92 0.58 20 60 14 8 4762.0 300.8 15.83 0.66 20 60 22 22 4762.0 264.7 17.99 0.75 30 3 14 8 3588.5 546.9 6.56 0.27 30 3 22 22 3588.5 179.6 19.99 0.83 30 30 14 8 5052.9 359.6 14.05 0.59 30 30 22 22 5052.9 281.1 17.98 0.75 30 60 14 8 5927.9 383.4 15.46 0.64 30 60 22 22 5927.9 311.4 19.04 0.79 30 90 14 8 7536.9 416.6 18.09 0.75 30 90 22 22 7536.9 349.2 21.58 0.90 60 3 14 8 7249.6 944.0 7.68 0.32 60 3 22 22 7249.6 362.1 20.02 0.83 60 60 14 8 10037.1 672.6 14.92 0.62 60 60 22 22 10037.1 531.4 18.89 0.79 60 90 14 8 11941.6 709.6 16.83 0.70 60 90 22 22 11941.6 648.9 18.40 0.77 60 180 14 8 19060.8 913.7 20.86 0.87 60 180 22 22 19060.8 860.3 22.16 0.92 13 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio the results in table 1 indicate that the distributed algorithm allows significantly improving the efficiency of the sequential version, especially when processing large volumes of data. the best speedup value was obtained when processing the 60gb input file: 22.16, corresponding to a computational efficiency of 0.92. the distributed implementation allows reducing the execution time from about 6 hours to 14 minutes when processing the 60gb input data file. this efficiency result is crucial to provide a fast response to specific situations and to analyze different metrics and scenarios for both users and administrators. figure 5 graphically summarizes the computational efficiency results when using input data files with different size. and figure 6 when processing records from different numbers of days. 10gb 20gb 30gb 60gb 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0.49 0.66 0.75 0.87 0.47 0.75 0.9 0.92 size of the input data file c o m p u ta ti o n a l e ffi c ie n c y #m=14, #r=8 #m=22, #r=22 figure 5. computational efficiency for different input data files 3 60 90 180 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0.32 0.62 0.7 0.87 0.83 0.79 0.77 0.92 days c o m p u ta ti o n a l e ffi c ie n c y #m=14, #r=8 #m=22, #r=22 figure 6. computational efficiency results for different days using 22 mappers and 22 reducers allows obtaining the best efficiency, improving in up to 15% the execution time (9% in average) over the one demanded when using 14 mappers and 8 reducers. working on small problem instances causes data to be partitioned in small pieces, generating low loaded processes and not improving notably over the execution time of the sequential algorithm. the efficiency analysis also determines that the map and reduce phases have similar execution times and reach the max cpu usage (above 97% at every moment). these results show that the load balance efforts in the proposed algorithm prevents a majority of idle or lowloaded mappers and reducers. demand and origin-destination matrix estimation. the proposed master-slave parallel model requires defining the size of the bag-of-tasks assigned to each slave to compute. a proper bag size must be used in order to have an appropriate load balance and avoid excessive communication between the master and the slaves. experiments were performed varying the size of the bag-of-tasks as well as the number of cores used. the experimental results are reported on table 2. the number of cores (#cores) and the size of the bag-of-tasks (#bag-of-tasks) used in each experiment are indicated. then, for each combination of these values, the best (i.e., minimum), average, and standard deviation of execution time and speedup values are reported for both direct and transfer trips. execution times are reported in minutes and the results correspond to 5 independent executions of the algorithm using each configuration of #cores and #bag-of-tasks. the experimental results obtained suggest that the parallel approach is an appropriate strategy for significantly improving the efficiency of the data processing for demand and o-d matrices estimation. promising speedup values were obtained, up to 16.41 for the direct trips processing and using a bag-oftasks of 5000 trips and executing in 24 nodes. these results confirm that the proposed master/slave parallel model allows improving the execution time of the computational tasks by taking advantage of multiple computing nodes. furthermore, the computational efficiency results indicate that the size of the bag-of-tasks (i.e., the amount of passengers’ trip data given to each slave to process at once) has a significant impact on the overall execution time of the algorithm. execution times were reduced when using the smallest size for the bag-oftasks (5000). further experiments should be performed to assess if using a smaller size for the bag-of-tasks is still more efficient, and to determine the trade-off value before the communications between the slaves and the master become more expensive and have a negative impact on the execution time. 14 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay #cores #bag-of-tasks direct trips transfer trips avg. time±std. dev. best speedup avg. time±std. dev. best speedup 1 1 25920.0 25920.0 30240.2 30240.2 16 5000 2092.1±3.4 2089.6 12.40 2648.9±3.2 2645.5 11.43 16 10000 2372.4±1.8 2371.1 10.92 3068.8±3.5 3063.2 9.87 24 5000 1582.7±2.4 1579.4 16.41 2371.1±2.5 2368.1 12.76 24 10000 1858.2±2.1 1855.9 13.96 2617.9±3.3 2614.3 11.56 table 2. execution time results and performance analysis. using 24 cores and tasks with the trip data corresponding to 5000 passengers, the proposed strategy allows improving in up to 54.4% the efficiency when compared to using 12 cores and a bag-of-tasks size of 5000, and up to 57.9% against a sequential algorithm running on a single computing node. this efficiency allows processing the full information of gps and trip data for one year (more than 130 gb) in 33 days, a significant improvement over the 468 days demanded by a sequential algorithm. 6. two sample studies this section presents two sample studies performed using the proposed distributed system for its in montevideo: average speed/troublesome locations detection and performance of the public transportation across socioeconomic stratas. 6.1. average speed and troublesome locations the calculation of the average speed of buses and the analysis of troublesome locations is a relevant study for the public transport in montevideo. figure 7 presents the study of the average speed of the seven bus lines (100, 102, 103, 105, 106, d11, d8, d10 and ca1) traveling through 18 de julio avenue (the main avenue in montevideo) in four relevant time ranges (including peak hours). the speed analysis is a valuable input for decision making in order to improve quality of service and travel experience for users. figure 8 presents a report extracted from the analysis of delays of buses to identify troublesome locations in the city. results correspond to bus line 195 at night. delay values are computed according to six months of historical gps records, comparing the times to reach each bus stop against the scheduled times, as reported in the website of stm, montevideo [5]. these results can be obtained in real time using the distributed algorithm, allowing a fast response to specific problems. in addition, the information can be reported to users via mobile ubiquitous applications. 6.2. fairness of the public transportation service delivery the preliminary work in this area allow characterizing each of the bus routes using the median household income for the census segments covered by all the bus lines. using these indicators the bus line coverage area is defined as unit of analysis, deriving its socioeconomic characteristics from the census segments that are included on it. figure 9 shows an example of two different instances of the unit of analysis: the bus service areas for bus figure 7. average speed of buses in 18 de julio avenue. 15 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e sergio nesmachnow, sebastián baña, and renzo massobrio figure 8. average delay for bus line 195 in the night, using six months of historical data lines 121 and 195. the map shows that the service area for bus line 195 covers a significantly larger number of census segments, and its median household income is visibly lower than the average income of the service area for bus line 121. this example illustrates the type of contrasts that exists between different bus service areas across the city, which is worth further studying. the proposed methodology to assess the service fairness involves deriving quality metrics– such as the standard deviations of the total routes duration and the deviation from the original schedules– and measuring the correlation coefficient with the socioeconomic indicators that we use to characterize the service zones, such as the household median income. once this phase of the study is completed, we aim at delivering a novel data product that will provide researchers and policy makers with a new perspective on the matter of the fairness of public services delivery. in particular, we will be contributing to answer the question of whether or not certain neighborhoods or areas in the city are dis-proportionally affected by poor public transportation services. 7. conclusions and future work this article described our experiences on designing and building a platform for big data analysis for smart cities. this platform combines distributed computational intelligence and geo-spatial analysis to process historical gps data to compute quality-ofservice metrics for the public transportation system in montevideo, uruguay. furthermore, we presented two case studies that rely on the platform capabilities to answer relevant research questions related to two different urban problem domains: operational efficiency and equability. an intelligent system for data processing was conceived, applying the map-reduce paradigm implemented over the hadoop framework. specific features were included to deal with the processed data: the figure 9. maps of service areas for buses 121 and 195: the red areas correspond to census segments that display the highest household income (in uruguayan pesos per inhabitant) 16 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e a distributed platform for big data analysis in smart cities: combining its and socioeconomic data for montevideo, uruguay proposed implementation allows filtering and selecting useful information to compute a set of relevant statistics to assess the quality of the public transportation system. an application-oriented load balancing schema was also implemented. additionally, a method for accurately estimating trips’ destination based on smart card data is proposed, based on ideas presented in the related literature. this estimation allows computing demand and od matrices, which are crucial for transport planning and are difficult to obtain using traditional methods. the experimental analysis focused on evaluating the computational efficiency and the correctness of the implemented system, working over several scenarios built by using real gps and ticket sales data collected in 2015 in montevideo. the datasets comprise over 200 gb of data corresponding to over 1300 line services operating in the city. the main results indicated that the proposed solution scales properly when processing large volumes of input data, achieving a speedup of 22.16 when using 24 computing resources, when processing the largest input files. regarding demand and od matrices estimation, the experimental results suggest that the proposed platform is appropriate to increase efficiency, achieving speed up values of up to 16.41 when using 24 computing resources. as examples, we computed two types of metrics that provide insights relevant to both citizens and decision makers. one is a collection of average speeds for different segments of bus lines in montevideo using the available historical data. these averages allow to identify troublesome locations in the public bus network, based on the delay and deviation of the times to reach each bus stop. the second type of metrics are related to the bus routes service quality in relation to the socioeconomic characteristics of their service areas. both studies aim at providing authorities and policy makers with a better understand of the transportation system infrastructure. some of these insights can also be incorporated in mobile applications that might help improving the travel experience of the general population. the research reported in this article is based on processing the bus gps and ticket sales data gathered in 2015. however, the proposed distributed architecture would scale up efficiently when processing larger volumes of data, as shown in the experimental analysis. the city government collects the bus gps and ticket sales data periodically, so it is possible to incorporate additional data in order to get even more accurate statistics. furthermore, the uruguayan government handles several other its and non-its data sources (including gps data for taxis, mobile phone data, ticket sale data, special events in the city) which could be easily incorporated to the proposed model to get a holistic understanding of mobility in the city. the main lines for future work are oriented to further extend the proposed system, including the calculation of several other important indicators and statistics to assess the quality of the public transportation. relevant issues to include are the construction of od matrices for public transport, the evaluation of bus frequencies (and dynamic adjustment), etc. the proposed approach can also be extended to provide efficient solutions to other smart city problems (e.g., pedestrian and vehicle fleets mobility, energy consumption, and others). using other distributed computation frameworks (such as apache storm) is also a promising idea to better exploit the realtime features of the proposed system. references [1] deakin, m. and waer, h. (2012) from intelligent to smart cities (taylor & francis). [2] sussman, j. (2005) perspectives on intelligent transportation systems (its) (springer science + business media). [3] massobrio, r., pías, a., vázquez, n. and nesmachnow, s. (2016) map-reduce for processing gps data from public transport in montevideo, uruguay. in 2nd argentinian symposium on big data: 41–54. [4] fabbiani, e., vidal, p., massobrio, r. and nesmachnow, s. (2016) distributed big data for demand estimation in its. in high performance computing latin america, communications in computer and information science, springer 697: 146–160. [5] intendencia de montevideo (2010), plan de movilidad urbana: hacia un sistema de movilidad accesible, democrático y eficiente. [6] zheng, x., chen, w., wang, p., shen, d., chen, s., wang, x., zhang, q. et al. (2016) big data for social transportation. ieee transactions on intelligent transportation systems 17(3): 620–630. [7] oh, s., byon, y. and yeo, h. 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(1991) tree-maps: a space-filling approach to the visualization of hierarchical information structures. in proceedings of the 2nd conference on visualization: 284–291. [22] intendencia de montevideo (2017), sistema de información geográfica. capas de informacion vial, http:// sig.montevideo.gub.uy/. accessed: april 2017. [23] geopandas developers (2017), geopandas. url http: //geopandas.org. accessed: april 2017. [24] gillies, s. et al. (2011), fiona is ogr’s neat, nimble, nononsense api. url https://github.com/toblerity/ fiona. accessed: april 2017. [25] gillies, s. et al. (2007), shapely: manipulation and analysis of geometric objects. url https://github. com/toblerity/shapely. accessed: april 2017. [26] instituto nacional de estadística (2015), encuesta continua de hogares, http://www.ine.gub.uy/web/ guest/encuesta-continua-de-hogares1. accessed: april 2017. [27] instituto nacional de estadística (2011), mapas vectoriales, http://www.ine.gub.uy/web/guest/338/. accessed: april 2017. 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(1995) designing and building parallel programs: concepts and tools for parallel software engineering (boston, ma, usa: addison-wesley longman publishing co., inc.). 18 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e http://sig.montevideo.gub.uy/ http://sig.montevideo.gub.uy/ http://geopandas.org http://geopandas.org https://github.com/toblerity/fiona https://github.com/toblerity/fiona https://github.com/toblerity/shapely https://github.com/toblerity/shapely http://www.ine.gub.uy/web/guest/encuesta-continua-de-hogares1 http://www.ine.gub.uy/web/guest/encuesta-continua-de-hogares1 http://www.ine.gub.uy/web/guest/338/ http://qgis.osgeo.org http://dispy.sourceforge.net/ 1 introduction 2 big data processing for intelligent transportation systems in smart cities 2.1 analysis of the quality and equability of the public transportation system 2.2 estimation of mobility patterns: demand and od matrices 3 related works 3.1 distributed computing for processing traffic data 3.2 estimation of demand and od matrices 3.3 summary of related works 4 the proposed solutions 4.1 processing gps data from buses in the public transport system historical gps data processing applying map-reduce over hadoop characterizing the bus service zones using socioeconomic indicators 4.2 mobility patterns and demand/od matrices estimation 5 computational efficiency evaluation 5.1 platform, instances, and metrics 5.2 experimental results gps data processing demand and origin-destination matrix estimation 6 two sample studies 6.1 average speed and troublesome locations 6.2 fairness of the public transportation service delivery 7 conclusions and future work challenges of ehealth and current developments in ehealth applications: an overview 1 challenges of ehealth and current developments in ehealth applications: an overview saikumari v.1,* and arunraj a.2 1professor and head of the department, department of management studies, easwari engineering college, chennai 2assistant professor, department of management studies, easwari engineering college, chennai abstract healthcare sector is moving towards digitalization in every aspect including e-consultations, surveillance of health,and all other services in healthcare industry. ehealth ends in the remodel of conventional methods of imparting specialist healthcare offerings digitally through the use of technology aimed toward both fee-effectiveness and patient satisfaction who are the customers of health offerings. electronic health records has been maintained by developed countries which makes evaluating patient outcome easier. which makes evaluation of patient outcomes much easier. in the health sector, a variety of new icts are implemented to improve the efficiency of all levels of healthcare. ehealth—or digital health—is the use of ict to improve the ability to treat patients, facilitate behaviour change, and improve health. advances in information and communication technology (ict) and the dissemination of network data processing created a new environment of universal access to information and globalization of communications, businesses, and services ehealth applications were analysed to determine the brand new developments in e-health programs. in this paper, the stakeholders are identified who're accountable for contributing to a selected ehealth challenge. by analysing the current scenario of e-health, we identified the challenges faced by ehealth technologies. the factors influencing the challenges were identified and classified. the emerging trends in the field of e-health was studied and the applications and its benefits towards the patients was also analysed. the paper also elaborates on the role of mhealth in ehealth. keywords: ehealth, health informatics, management, ehealth programs, ehealth utility categories, smart city, artificial intelligence, mhealth. received on 29 july 2022, accepted on 05 september 2022, published on 20 september 2022 copyright © 2022 saikumari et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i18.2261 1. introduction e-health refers to the use of facts and verbal exchange technology to enhance or decorate fitness care. e-health is also referred to as health informatics. the development of e-health systems has expanded many folds over the past decade. over the beyond few years, the ehealth area has grown worldwide. furthermore, some emerging technologies have an immense capacity to transform certain areas of health and social care service. it is to be noted that technology plays a vital role in improving *corresponding author. email: dr.kumaris@gmail.com healthcare prices, affected person safety and excellent in medical care. e-health can play a critical function in facing the challenges within the field of health care. the use of fitness facts generation dates lower back to the mid-90s. areas supposed for ehealth • electronic health facts control; • networks and communication infrastructure • suspension of patient records; • data privacy and security • countrywide research and international cooperation. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e1 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:dr.kumaris@gmail.com saikumari v. and arunraj a. 2 some of the important benefits of ehealth applications are: • health care programs enhance useful resource usage (high-quality value effectiveness) • promoting better selection-making. • information and data: additional get right of entry to, availability, speed • professional impact: enhance performance (accuracy, records generation) • useful for evaluating crucial affected person identity data and scientific records. there are many ehealth programs evolved however many guarantees of ehealth research and development have not yet been fulfilled. the effective and green improvement of the ehealth gadget faces many challenges. the most crucial problems are a lack of commitment from fitness care authorities and a lack of interplay between exclusive health data systems. over the beyond decade, researchers have raised numerous challenges dealing with ehealth. it is vital to review those demanding situations and divide them into unique categories. the motive of this paper is to differentiate the ehealth demanding situations into broader classes via a complete review of articles posted on this location [1][2][3]. 2. smart cities and e-health the current population growth and urbanization have ignited a desire to create smart cities by integrating technology into the design of city services”. this renewed desire has resulted in the use of information and communication technologies (ict) to increase critical urban support for larger communities like crime sourcing, emergency response and transportation.[4] the general parameters like traffic conditions, pollution level, temperature, humidity, allergens, pollution and power grid status are perceived using the sensors in smart cities. the values of these different parameters provide information and context that helps the system to monitor and understand the state of a citizen at any given time. responding strategically to the sensed data makes heath care smarter. by gaining real-time access to this information, smart city services can respond immediately to urgent health needs and take critical decisions to avoid unhealthy situations by gaining real time access to the sensor data information [5]. electronic health records and personal health records were introduced in the early 2000 and even played a major role by influencing various decisions of the government regarding investments in healthcare fund. historical data like e-health data, data mining helps the doctors to understand the health condition of the entire population and also to understand the recent health trends. it is estimated that nearly 55% of doctors now make use of electronic health record. and personal health record sources different types of sources provide information to the smart cities. sensor data from the mobile sources and ambient sensor data are some of the sources. these include the information sources listed in the previous section such as mobile device sensor data and ambient sensor data. added to this, data like transportation grid status. vehicular networks, locations of emergency service providers, size of the population can be tapped from city wide sites throughout the region [6]. 3. current challenges in ehealth 3.1. detection of sickness at early stage detection of ailment at early level helps no longer most effective to reduce value of clinical treatment however it is also useful in saving precious lives of humans. for example, detection of cancer at early stage might also rescue man’s lifestyles as opposed to detection of disorder at later degree. the technologies related to e-health falter at identifying the sickness at an earlier stage [7]. 3.2. management of patient’s facts in an efficient manner capturing, storing and maintaining information and accessing information in green manner is likewise a massive venture. efficiently keeping ehr (electronic health report) is a large problem .there is need of clear information requirements to get greatest value in implementing ehealth systems and also reducing cost of health care through the usage of ehealth system. reducing cost of health care with assist of ehealth is a huge challenge. health care systems contain a module called health information exchange. this module aims to get 360 degree view of the treatment plans of the patients and the sufferers [7]. 3.3. effective usage of skills of hsr and it ehealth solutions are developed by expert health service researchers. the challenge lies in saving the time of the expert health service researcher and minimising his involvement in improvement of ehealth. so, combining abilities of each hsr and it expert in an effective way to achieve maximum gain is a highly challenging task [7]. 3.4. establish agreement with between hsr and it expert health service researchers are people who are actively involved in the improvement of the ehealth solutions and work in parallel with the it professionals so, there must be mutual admiration and co-operation among both the teams but troubles arise whilst both hsr and it professional are eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e1 challenges of ehealth and current developments in ehealth applications: an overview 3 interacting with each other. therefore, organising a mutual agreement among each health service researcher and it professional crew is a huge task [8]. 3.5. data privacy in sch programs, a large quantity of information is continuously gathered from and about patients. these data can be modified duplicated, accessed with ease via unauthorized parties through malicious assaults like tag cloning, radio frequency jamming, and cloud polling and spoofing. rfid tags which do not include password and also not protected by encryption over the air can be duplicated and cloned. a radio frequency jammer is a tool used for saving the received radio transmissions using a receiver applicable to its characteristic. this type of assault can interrupt the functionalities of existence-monitoring structures, now and again leading to loss of lives. in cloud polling, traffic is redirected, allowing unauthorized command infusions at once right into a device through a man-in-the-middle assault [7][9]. 3.6. exchange of data amongst different healthcare places patient’s facts interoperability among exclusive health care places like hospitals, private clinics is a key trouble. due to loss of interoperability, statistics stay fragmented, remoted and information analysis cannot be achieved. due to this problem, replacing statistics among exceptional structures is not feasible that's problem to perform fundamental goals of healthcare. who also advocated its members to adopt requirements for powerful exchange of statistics among ehealth implementations and fitness care practitioners. solution to this hassle is making records in a well-known form [8]. 3.7. health care infrastructure it is an uphill task to develop and maintain the healthcare infrastructure. healthcare infrastructure may be complicated because of distinct reasons. populated countries take active steps to increase the number of hospitals and also to provide better healthcare facilities. similarly, geographically dispersed regions have a welldeveloped health care infrastructure. such developed infrastructure should assist ehealth however the infrastructure provides insufficient support to ehealth. there are many factors for such problems to occur. factors ranging from lack of electricity to lack of internet connection. these troubles are extra not unusual in rural regions. however, mobile smartphone infrastructure is growing at a growing price provides opportunities to put into effect structures with much less assets). hence mhealth (part of broader telemedicine discipline) can be useful in presence of insufficient infrastructure. there are also other problems consisting of fragmented records and problems for project scalability. ehealth system infrastructure consists of both hardware and software. it is our fortune that now hardware fee is comparatively low than previous year. due to low fee of hardware developing and beneath growing international locations are in function to make initiative of distributing low cost computers. open source motion is helping constrained useful resource international locations in terms of software. postgresql (an open source dbms) and open mrs (helps to design custom designed ehrs) are two correct examples of open source software [10]. 3.8. shortage of ehealth experts professionals are fewer in this interdisciplinary region and there is also shortage of such experts in the e-health sector. this association laboured in growing countries like singapore and argentina to create a worldwide model tailored to cater to the ehealth requirements. another technique to counter this trouble is to use cellular and telemedicine devices to attach educated assets with population. it is especially useful in rural areas. such initiative is taken in india where in cell tools are being used to screen in retinopathy [10]. 4. recent trends in ehealth programs 4.1. artificial intelligence ai and machine learning are used in this area as solutions to gather, examine and exploit facts to be able to automate sure recurring responsibilities in order that docs can focus on different tasks with higher brought value. these technologies will attain maturity within the e-health area by means of 2030.the uses may be very numerous, inclusive of triage and orientation of sufferers, acceleration of drug improvement, diagnostic help through digital assistants, computer-assisted surgery or epidemiological prevention [11]. 4.1.1. applications of artificial intelligence a) support for clinical decision making it is highly essential for the health professionals to take each and every piece of information into consideration during diagnosis of the patients. if there's a mistake in keeping track of even a single relevant fact, the life of a patient could be put at risk. with the help of natural language processing doctors find it convenient to chart down all relevant information from patient reports. large sets of data could be stored and processed using artificial intelligence and it is useful in creating databases of the patients and enhance individual patient clinical support. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e1 saikumari v. and arunraj a. 4 b) primary care through chatbots people in general have the tendency to visit a nearby hospital or doctor immediately at the slightest medical issue which at times could be self treated or can be a false alarm. through artificial intelligence doctors can concentrate on more critical and deadly cases as artificial intelligence enables smooth flow of primary treatment and also automation of primary care. medical chatbots is based on ai and is incorporated with smart algorithms that provide instant answers to all the health-based queries and concerns of the patients. and also, chatbots guide them on how to deal with any potential problems. the availability of chat box is 24/7 and they can also handle multiple patients at the same time. c) virtual nursing assistants virtual nursing assistants are facilitated by artificial intelligence systems, and they can perform a variety of tasks like striking a conversation with the patients and guiding the patients to the effective care unit. the virtual nursing assistants can answer the queries of the patients’ and also examine them and provide instant solutions. the availability of virtual nurses is 24/7. nowadays using many ai powered applications virtual nursing assistants has enabled more frequent interactions between patients and care takers in between office visits to overcome any unnecessary visit to the hospital. the world’s first virtual nurse assistant care angel, can facilitate wellness checks through ai and also voice [12]. d) machine vision for diagnosis and surgery computer vision usually interprets the images and videos by machines at par or above human-level capabilities which involves recognising object and scene. image-based diagnosis and image-guided surgery are areas where computer vision is making a strong impact. 4.2. remote fitness remote health has experienced a first-rate increase in the course of the covid-19 health disaster. according to a mckinsey record, telehealth use has extended 38x from the pre-covid-19 baseline. in 2022, it's miles fairly possibly that the telemedicine and faraway fitness services advanced during the pandemic to control sufferers in the context of number one care may be extended to many different specialties and care paths, including intellectual health, tracking of chronic diseases or monitoring of sufferers recuperating from surgical treatment or serious infection. 4.3. internet of things the internet of things, allows an expansion of medical gadgets to be connected to the internet. thanks to those connected items, patients can end up increasingly involved of their fitness. they can use or wear these devices to check their body temperature, blood strain or coronary heart price, and transmit them to a medical doctor who can be able to remotely reveal the affected person’s fitness repute. this type of tool can help patients with chronic sicknesses better control their health and contribute to better care. with the information transmitted, healthcare professionals can, as an example, deliver recommendation to the patient or better prepare for an emergency management [12][13]. 4.4. applications for employee wellness as lifestyles amid a plague prolonged, it had a strong negative impact on the mental health. mindfulness applications like, liberate, headspace and calm weren’t only for the niche target market, as mainstream adoption drove download numbers within the wellbeing application market. employers are more and more spotting that wellness applications might be useful for their personnel. company had taken initiatives like corporate wellbeing retreats, place of job yoga, and crew-building events for many years, but the corporation-furnished wellbeing app is a fantastically new idea [14]. 4.5. virtual reality and augmented reality few years ago, virtual reality seemed like a novelty idea exceptional acceptable to video games. now, virtual reality and augmented reality generation offers a huge variety of sensible uses past gaming and leisure. in healthcare, virtual reality facilitates with surgical education and making plans, allowing both doctors and sufferers to get extra comfortable with procedures. there also are multiple reviews about the efficacy of virtual reality for supporting with chronic pain control and mental strength. markets and markets performed a study on the anticipated boom of ar and vr in healthcare, projecting a 30.7% annual boom charge between 2017 and 2025 [15]. 4.6. mobile health (m-health) one among the subsets of e-health is the usage of handheld devices like mobile phones, which is known as mobile health (m-health). the mobile phones prove to be the handiest tool nowadays, as it has become into a personal object that the most of the people use frequently and does not part with. mobile phones can be used for e-health in a different way: notification of the patient about the about their medication timings through messages that are automatically sent, their appointments that has been scheduled or reminding the pregnant women in detail about eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e1 challenges of ehealth and current developments in ehealth applications: an overview 5 different stages of pregnancy and advice on how to deal with unusual conditions [16]. 4.7. deep learning and medical image recognition “deep” relates to the multi-layered nature of machine learning amidst all deep learning techniques, convolutional neural networks has been the most promising in the field of image recognition. many features of an image are identified through image recognition. additionally convolutional neural networks requires a significant amount of training data that is in the form of medical images along with labels for what the image is supposed to be. convolutional neural networks can adjust the applied weights and filters at each hidden layer of training to improve the performance on the given training data [16][17]. 5.swot analysis on ehealth strength • the date can be collected at ease automatically. • personalised medicine could be given to the patients based on the ailment of the patients. • the patients can be monitored closely through the use of artificial intelligence and other ehealth applications. • the data collected is standardised and can be used as benchmark for further data collection. weakness • the infrastructure required for ehealth is highly underdeveloped • there are high chances of data privacy to be compromised • exchange of data could lead to data duplication and also other complications • the data available on active diseases is highly limited opportunity • the workload of the doctors, could be reduced • emergence of ehealth tools for drug development • the emergence of artificial intelligence also plays a vital role in ehealth • internet of things and usage of convoluted neural networks threat • widespread implementation of unvalidated ehealth tools • ehealth could lead to negative impact on the psychology of the patients • overinterpretation of the role of the patients 6. conclusion ehealth is a research area that is on the rise and has gained the interest of research people, industries, and also the governments throughout the world as it has the potential to transform the healthcare field into an ecosystem that is efficient and effective. the power of data obtained from multiple medical equipment, mobile devices, miniature sensors, and other sources can be harnessed by sch. secondary research was carried out for this study and it has been understood that e-health is facing lot of challenges like data privacy, management of patient’s data, lack of trained professionals, usability and accessibility and also lack of a connected and central patient database. it has been understood from the review of literature that artificial intelligence would play a vital role in ehealth with technologies like chatbot and virtual nursing assistants. through swot analysis some of the strengths of ehealth was found to be ease of data collection, and also close monitoring of the patient and personalised medication. it is suggested that more it professionals could be involved in e-health and proper training about e-health be given to them. despite challenges and weakness, it is incurred from the study that ehealth would play a major role in transforming healthcare industry in the future through the use of technology. references [1] m. carolyn clancy, ‘‘getting to ’smart’ health care: comparative effectiveness research is a key component of, but tightly linked with, health care delivery in the information age,’’ health affairs, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. w589– w592, jan. 2006. [2] smart and connected health (sch) program solicitation nsf 18-541, national science foundation, alexandria, va, usa, 2013. [3] k. taylor, ‘‘connected health: how digital technology is transforming health and social care,’’ deloitte, vol. 6, p. 40, apr. 2015. [4] m. chen, j. qu, y. xu, and j. chen, ‘‘smart and connected health: what can we learn from funded projects?’’ data inf. manage, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 141–152, 2018. [5] 5.r. vaishya, m. javaid, i. h. khan, and a. haleem, ‘‘artificial intelligence (ai) applications for covid-19 pandemic,’’ diabetes metabolic syndrome, clin. res. rev., vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 337–339, jul. 2020. [6] 6. r. k. r. kummitha, ‘‘smart technologies for fighting pandemics: the technoand human-driven approaches in controlling the virus transmission,’’ government inf. quart., vol. 37, no. 3, jul. 2020, art. no. 101481. [7] 7. k. kumar, n. kumar, and r. shah, ‘‘role of iot to avoid spreading of covid-19,’’ int. j. intell. newt., vol. 1, pp. 32–35, ja. 2020. [8] 8. r. shaw, y.-k. kim, and j. hua, ‘‘governance, technology, and citizen behavior in pandemic: lessons from eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e1 saikumari v. and arunraj a. 6 covid-19 in east asia,’’ prog. disaster sci., vol. 6, apr. 2020, art. no. 100090. [9] 9. m. h. chowdhury, m. n. i. shuzan, m. e. h. chowdhury, z. b. mahbub, m. m. uddin, a. khandakar, and m. b. i. reaz, ‘‘estimating blood pressure from the photoplethysmogram signal and demographic features using machine learning techniques,’’ sensors, vol. 20, no. 11, p. 3127, jun. 2020. [10] 10. a. u. haq, j. p. li, j. khan, m. h. memon, s. nazir, s. ahmad, g. a. khan, and a. ali, ‘‘intelligent machine learning approach for effective recognition of diabetes in ehealthcare using clinical data,’’ sensors, vol. 20, no. 9, p. 2649, may 2020. [11] 11. s. wang, ‘‘augmented reality as a telemedicine platform for remote procedural training,’’ sensors, vol. 17, no. 10, pp. 1–21, 2017 [12] 12. r. m. aileni, s. pasca, and a. florescu, ‘‘eeg-brain activity monitoring and predictive analysis of signals using artificial neural networks,’’ sensors, vol. 20, no. 12, p. 3346, jun. 2020. [13] 13. m. chand, n. ramachandran, d. stoyanov, and l. lovat, ‘‘robotics, artificial intelligence and distributed ledgers in surgery: data is key!’’ tech. coloproctol., vol. 22, no. 9, pp. 645–648, 2018. [14] 14. g. ciuti, r. caliá, d. camboni, l. neri, f. bianchi, a. arezzo, a. koulaouzidis, s. schostek, d. stoyanov, c. m. oddo, b. magnani, a. menciassi, m. morino, m. o. schurr, and p. dario, ‘‘frontiers of robotic endoscopic capsules: a review,’’ j. micro-bio robot., vol. 11, nos. 1–4, pp. 1–18, jun. 2016 [15] 15. s. mohammed, h. w. park, c. h. park, y. amirat, and b. argall, ‘‘special issue on assistive and rehabilitation robotics,’’ auto. robot., vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 513–517, 2017. [16] 16. protagon.gr. expansion of the national telemedicine network to another 22 aegean islands [internet]. 2020. available from: https://www.protagon.gr/themata/epektasitou-ethnikou-diktyou-tileiatrikis-se-akomi-22-nisia-touaigaiou-44342094422 [17] 17. detection and characterization of e-health research: a bibliometrics (2001–2016) written by zhiyong liu, jianjun su and lei ji submitted: december 24th eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e1 this is a title eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 open data in smart region o. kodym1,*, j. unucka2,3 and d. létavková4 1 college of logistics, palackého 25, přerov, czech republic 2 moravian–silesian region regional authority, 28. října 117, ostrava, czech republic 3 všb – technical university of ostrava, 17. listopadu 15, ostrava, czech republic 4 coordinator odis, na hradbách 16, ostrava, czech republic abstract putting together up to date particular technical and organizing solutions brings us significant spin-off effecting. with support of information and communication technologies we are able to accelerate innovations, new services in region and its municipalities. we can improve life of citizens, improve regional transportation and deliver unprecedented value in many other areas. industry 4.0 is not the goal but the means. topics and issues in field of public transportation are discussed and some examples of open data processing are presented. 1. introduction the moravian-silesian region today is a varied palette of natural and cultural monuments that inspire life with sporting events and social events of national importance. the interconnection of industrial history with current trends in architecture, education and tourism makes the region and the cities of ostrava a powerful magnet for tourists and visitors, as well as for entrepreneurs and investors. the moravian-silesian region is like a scaled model of the czech republic with mountains on the border and the river odra, which pours life into the whole region and beautifully contrasts with the "steel hradčany", who are witnesses to the history of the region. the region has the same ambitions in terms of sustainable development and the trend of improving the quality of the environment and the lives of its inhabitants. it wants to be a model region that will inspire other regions of the czech republic to implement the concept of a smart region. the moravian-silesian region has for a long time been focusing on improving the quality of life of its inhabitants. this effort is reflected in engaging in strategic concepts of sustainable development and concrete projects. *corresponding author. email:oldrich.kodym@vslg.cz the moravian-silesian region has simplified the definition of a smart region: such region employs modern technology to save time and money of people who live there. the reason for this simplification is the fact that the multitude of definitions makes it impossible to find the one that would be generally recognized and that would clearly express what a "smart city", "smart project" or "smart region" is. in most cases, the term "smart" refers to the application of new technologies, ict in particular, to improve the quality of services and the quality of life in cities and regions. the smarter region strategy should also initiate the emergence of a new industry that will develop and produce products for smart solutions with a high added value. the strategy should contribute to making the moravian-silesian region a leader in the use of smart solutions in the czech republic and an exporter of these solutions from the region itself. the smarter region strategy will be a dynamic process. it will evolve continuously and respond to the development of new technologies and the transformation of social processes, lifestyle, and preferences of people. keywords: smart region, industry 4.0, transportation, open data. received on 2 december 2017, accepted on 15 december 2017, published on 19 december 2017 copyright © 2017 kodym et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.19-12-2017.153480 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ o. kodym, j. unucka, d. létavková 2 the smarter region strategy of the moravian-silesian region will also draw on the european commission's working definition which is based on a mapping of smart concepts in european cities [1] and the smart city concept methodology [2]: • a smart city is a city seeking to address public issues via ict-based solutions on the basis of a multistakeholder, municipally based partnership. • it is one of the concepts of applying sustainable development principles to the city management that relies on the use of modern technologies to improve the quality of life and make governance more effective. this concept is most widely applied in the energy and transport systems which can be managed more effectively by deploying appropriate information and communication technologies (ict). nevertheless, it can also be applied to other fields, like waste management or e-government. the era we face as a society is not limited to revolutionary changes in the production and consumption of goods and services. it also relates fundamentally to how society and its institutions in this new context will understand and touch on important issues: what role will the individual, human being – as the proponent and subject of this phenomenon, play in this 21st century society? [4] see fig. 1. figure 1. evolution of embedded systems into the internet of things, data and services [6] 2. strategic management the relationship between characteristics and components of smart region is complex topic. it is very similar to smart cities [7]. in practice, components and characteristics are often difficult to distinguish; components, in particular, are not systematically identified. the central thesis of this section is that they cannot easily be separated and that they should therefore be analyzed together. components can be conceptualized as the building blocks of smart city initiatives. they comprise the inputs, technologies and processes of specific initiatives, as well as the norms or standards deployed. it is summarized in fig. 2. the outer ring shows the components, and the inner ring the characteristics. rather than each component mapping onto specific characteristic, a range of technological, human and institutional factors underpins all characteristics. figure 2. the relationship between components and characteristics of smart region/cities [7] (smart characteristics: eco: economy, env: environment, gov: government, peo: people, mob: mobility, liv: living) this allows us to understand the relationships between components and characteristics as both direct and indirect. in some cases, the characteristic fully describes the initiative by displaying what the initiative is about and the priorities of its participants and direct beneficiaries. the strategic management of the smarter region [5] will be linked to six general areas. infrastructure infrastructure = availability of an infrastructure for open data and information provision of a modern digital infrastructure offering secure yet open data and information to the inhabitants whenever they need access to it in quality that helps them make their decisions. inhabitans inhabitans = concentration of smart solutions on the needs of the inhabitants in the first place public services provided primarily for the benefit of the inhabitants. the needs and problems of the inhabitants are at the focal point in the smart city strategies and take precedence eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 open data in smart region 3 over organizational, institutional, or sectoral structures. the development of services is simplified in order to increase enduser convenience while reducing provider costs. agendas related to life events, such as an address change, service payment, as well as subsidy or regulatory agendas, aim at maximal simplification of the process for the inhabitants, while saving both time and costs on both sides. this means to minimize the need, for example, to make arrangements for one event at multiple places and communicate with multiple authorities, or to provide irrelevant information and undergo undue procedures to obtain a subsidy. this concept also includes providing internet services wherever possible in the simplest way for no or minimum fees. systems systems = smart infrastructure, the internet of things, 3e, and security smart systems or the internet of things enabling service providers to use the widest possible range of data to manage and provide services on a daily basis (e.g. air quality measurement), or to make decisions on strategic investments (e.g. collecting and analyzing data about the use of mass public transport for community planning of its modifications both on the city and the regional level). it is essential to provide real-time protection of personal and business data and implement security features to prevent cyberattacks on smart technologies and cases of data misuse, in compliance with the eu data protection law, namely the general data protection regulation (gdpr). this regulation shall apply from 25 may 2018, bringing the biggest revolution to date in the protection of personal data across the eu as well as astronomical fines for its violations. the management of public funds must follow the 3e principles, i.e. to ensure the attainment of the specific objectives set and the achievement of the intended results, to provide the best relationship between resources employed and results achieved, and to make resources available in due time, in appropriate quantity and quality and at the best price. [3] innovations innovations = innovative approaches and experimentation the openness of organizations and people to learn new things, learn from each other, experiment with new approaches, use new economic models, such as precommercial public procurement (pcp) to provide for the development of a new solution that meets the demands of the contracting public authorities (regions and cities) but is not available at the given time, or public procurement of innovation (ppi) to purchase innovative solutions that are not yet in the market or its availability is very limited (such solutions may be the results of the pcp model). opennes opennes = transparency of outputs and results transparency in results and performance reporting, such as “city dashboards” (online web applications with real-time information and data on the regional / city events), enabling comparisons and motivating authorities, organizations, neighborhoods, or municipalities to achieve improvements in specific monitored areas (e.g. measuring the cycling rate). leadership leadership = consistent vision, strategic management, partnership transparent and consistent leadership and strategic management in the field of smart solutions to provide benefits for the inhabitants of the region and the commitment to work on delivering necessary changes on a daily basis. this vision must be communicated in a clear and trusted manner and consulted with the inhabitants. an attractive environment must be created to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit of individuals and businesses and to attract new inhabitants to the region offering them as favorable living conditions as possible. it is necessary to initiate and support partnerships through networking of stakeholders which is a proven and effective way for the smarter region concept to mobilize them to carry out specific activities. 3. long-term objectives of the smarter region strategy the main objectives of the smarter region strategy are to save time and money, and to reduce negative environmental impacts through the use of ict technologies, innovative processes, and the support of a long-term systematic search for optimal solutions in partnership with relevant stakeholders in the moravian-silesian region. list of main topics is in table 1. table 1. main long-term topics objectives solutions t im e s a v in g s when commuting to work, schools, etc. when communicating and arranging issues with the authorities when searching for and using necessary information when managing and organizing public administration when marketing products and services to the end customers when visiting a doctor or a hospital m o n e y s a v in g s when paying for energy and fuel consumption, heating and cooling when communicating and arranging issues with the authorities when managing and organizing public administration when searching for and using necessary information eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 o. kodym, j. unucka, d. létavková 4 objectives solutions when running businesses and non-profit organizations when marketing products and services to the end customers when shopping h e a lt h y e n v ir o n m e n t due to reduced harmful emissions in the air due to air purification in heat recovery units due to better resource utilization and a more efficient circular economy due to a higher share of renewable energy use due to lower temperatures in the cities due to a more considerate and healthier lifestyle 4. strategic priorities for the smarter region for 2017–2023 there are total of 5 priorities in smarter region activities (see fig.3). each covers several sub priorities, as there should be at least basic overview or detailed specification. expected long-term benefits and measures for evaluation of achievements are mentioned in following chapters. transport (i) to build an infrastructure and smart systems to support smart mobility. (ii) to increase the use of mass transport and sustainable forms of transport (walking, cycling). (iii) to increase the share of electro mobility and hydrogen vehicles in transport. figure 3. strategic priorities and flagship projects for the smarter region for 2017–2023 [5] ict infrastructure (i) to build a backbone data infrastructure and a technology center capable of handling high capacity future demands for data, audio, graphics, and video. (ii) to cover public buildings and mass transport vehicles with wi-fi. (iii) to cover the region with networks for the internet of things (iot networks). savings (i) to reduce the costs for the supply of energy and maintenance of buildings and infrastructure in the region. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 5 (ii) to increase the share of renewable energy sources in the energy mix. (iii) to increase the efficiency of waste management and reduce energy consumption. healthcare (i) to improve the quality and availability of healthcare services. (ii) to foster responsible attitudes of the inhabitants towards health and improve the quality of social care. reducing bureaucracy (i) to remove bureaucratic obstacles while maintaining high quality of services provided by the regional authority and its associated organizations by means of electronic solutions. (ii) to maintain high quality and level of corporate governance and services of the moravian-silesian region. (iii) to provide information and open data to the region's inhabitants. 5. priority 1 – transport long-term benefits are expected as follows: • faster and more convenient public transport. • limiting the negative impact of individual car as well as public transport on the quality of the environment in cities and villages (especially with the aim of reducing air pollution caused by airborne dust and carbon dioxide, reducing noise caused by transport, and improving parking systems in cities and villages). • streamlining the coordination of regional transport and reducing infrastructure maintenance costs in the region. • flagship projects • smart parking – pilot projects of smart parking facilities and navigation systems for managing and organizing parking in selected cities. • support for building an infrastructure of charging stations for electric cars and electric bicycles – support for projects to extend the network of charging stations for electro mobility (cars, bicycles, urban maintenance vehicles) and stations for hydrogenpowered vehicles. provision of corporate organizations of the moravian-silesian region with electric buses, electric cars, electric bicycles, and hydrogen-powered vehicles. • intelligent traffic management systems – smart navigation and information systems, support for open data and traffic information, introduction of information boards and applications for faster and more convenient regional transport. • monitoring and evaluation of traffic flows (traffic research) – efficient collection and evaluation of data and information on transport demand and mass and individual transport volumes. • wi-fi in public transport – introduction of wi-fi on regional buses and trains to make public transport and sustainable mobility more attractive. 5.1. strategic objective 1.1 – free flow of traffic to build an infrastructure and smart systems to support smart mobility. examples of measures to meet so 1.1: • intelligent traffic management – managing traffic and providing passengers with information on the traffic situation to increase the free flow and safety of the road traffic without the need to build complex infrastructure. adaptive traffic management, providing real-time traffic information, developing parking information and navigation systems, customizing traffic light signalling. support for cooperation and exchange of experience among the cities of the region with implementing intelligent traffic management systems. • mobile traffic applications – developing and offering products and services for mobile devices that show the real-time traffic situation based on location and preferences, allow communication with the internet of things and car applications, and allow entering notes, traffic alerts, or detours to the car on-board management systems. • autonomous and cooperative transport systems – development and preparation for the transition to autonomous forms of individual, freight, mass, and air transport, and for the application of cooperative systems (vehicles communicating with each other and with the infrastructure) with the aim of better traffic management and the elimination of traffic collapses. 5.2. strategic objective 1.2 – sustainable transport to increase the use of mass transport and sustainable forms of transport (walking, cycling). examples of measures to meet so 1.2: • improving the attractiveness of public transport – promoting the use of public transport, improving its image. improving the convenience of travelling by the means of public transport – access for disabled passengers, faster services, safer boarding platforms, wi-fi on buses, vouchers, discounts, competitions, better and easier orientation in public transport options (unified fares, contactless payment), x+1 systems (one passenger pays, the other travels for free), public transport cultural programs, better vehicle design, etc. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 open data in smart region 6 • integrated travel planning systems – travel planning comparing time, costs, and emissions produced for each mode of transport for a given time of travel and route to encourage using modes of transport which are more environmentally friendly than individual car transport. limiting the negative impact of individual car as well as public transport on the quality of the environment in cities and villages (especially with the aim of reducing air pollution caused by airborne dust and carbon dioxide, reducing noise caused by transport, and improving parking systems in cities and villages including shared parking lots). • integrated transport systems – transport services for a particular area that accommodate multiple types of public transport (urban, regional, rail) and multiple carrier lines with unified schedules and ticket cards. these systems integrate various modes of transport and connect them with cycling, walking, and car transport. smart cards are used carrying various types of information, enabling contactless online payments, etc. see fig.4 for implementation of contactless payment bank cards in public transport. figure 4. terminal for contactless payment in public transport [https://www.dpo.cz/soubory/ aktuality/prirucky/platebni-karty-1.pdf] • smart stops – linking the functions of transport to social use, including environmental friendliness and enjoyable waiting at stops. examples of smart stop functions – charging mobile devices, wi-fi connection, generating power from alternative sources and physical exercise equipment, warming in winter, air purification, more comfortable (enjoyable) seats, attractive design and aesthetic appeal for the public space, information for both city inhabitants and visitors, emergency service calling 112. the role of the region can be primarily motivational, for example in the form of grants for municipal projects. • car sharing, ride sharing, bike sharing – creating conditions for sharing services that reduce the amount and use of individual car transport through shared cars or bicycles. an example of such service can be the provision of a fleet of electric cars and bicycles that will be available at a particular location, with the option of online reservation at flat rates or special tariffs. 5.3. strategic objective 1.3 – electro mobility and hydrogen vehicles to increase the share of electro mobility and hydrogen vehicles in transport. examples of measures to meet so 1.3: • support for building an infrastructure of charging stations for electro mobility – support for projects to extend the network of charging stations for electric cars and electric bicycles. connecting the network of charging stations with the internet of things, sharing information on occupancy and additional services with users. extending the network of charging stations for electro mobility (cars, bicycles, and urban maintenance vehicles) and stations for hydrogenpowered vehicles. provision of corporate organizations of the moravian-silesian region with electric cars. promoting the use of electric bicycles as an alternative option to individual car transport. 6. three basic smart criteria for smart projects the following three basic smart criteria will be the simplest fundamental measure of whether the proposed or implemented projects fit into the smarter region strategy and can be therefore considered smart. this assessment is purely indicative and is not intended to replace any complex standardization system developed at the national level of the czech republic. the condition for including a project in the strategy is meeting the smart 1 criterion, taking into account the 3e principles – economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of public investment. involvement of broader partnerships or innovative and experimental elements in the project will be considered as a higher added value, i.e. promoting the search for and implementation of solutions that go beyond standard procurement processes and rigid systems that do not reflect the specific conditions of the region and the needs of end users in the long term. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 o. kodym, j. unucka, d. létavková 7 smart 1 – application of ict and other technologies the project involves a development or application of technology which, in addition to a financial benefit, brings also a socio-economic benefit, such as a positive impact on the quality of the environment while respecting the principles of safety and 3e. smart 2 – partnership principles the project is managed and implemented in a partnership, not by a single organization only, in an open environment of information sharing and access to expertise, without the risk that the applied solution will be unavailable for further use. smart 3 – innovative and experimental elements the project includes innovative or experimental elements testing the application of new technologies or solutions in the market. 7. open data for analysis of transportation nowadays ict enable gaining a variety of types of information. for projects supported and often co-financed from public sources, it is often agreed that the outputs and the related data sources will be open for general usage. in order for the open data to be effectively used for subsequent analyzes, the data sources must meet several basic requirements. metadata each attribute must necessarily have a description assigned. this description differs slightly from the commonly used "metadata" concept in transactional databases. the content of such description resembles the simplified form of analytical part of metadata in data warehouses. in particular, it is the information on how the data originated, what is the sampling period, what are the measuring units, the position of the sensor with sensor data (gps coordinates). the most important part is a description of the exact meaning of the published data. lookup lists if the individual records refer to the lookup lists, the relevant lookup lists must be completely available. unless the meaning of the individual lookups is completely clear from the context, it must also be accompanied by a description. time stamps each record must contain a time stamp, because it allows the users to interconnect the individual datasets and also to create time series. we must take into consideration that the forecasting analytical procedures assume the time series to be complete, and that the sampling period is constant. for example, if we have daily records, we must adhere to the daily intervals and no single day should be missing. integrability of tables for open data, large amounts of data are expected from different areas (public and passenger transport, environment, tourism, waste management, medical care, hydro-meteorological data). analytical processing often utilizes combined data sets, such as combination of environmental and transport values, or tourism combined with the data on weather. it should be taken into account when loading data into the data platform. for example, if the data contents are related to different territorial units which are mutually incompatible, their subsequent integration for analytical purposes is impossible. as an example we may note the eurostat data and the data from the czech statistical office, which have a completely different territorial classification and therefore cannot be combined. unchanging collection methodology historical data must be available for forecasting purposes. if there is a change in the methodology of data collection, it often makes it impossible to analyze the time series as a single unit. we thus lose the possibility to observe changes in trends or irregularities, which may be very significant in content. data granularity deciding on the appropriate data granularity is absolutely crucial. from the basic granularity, a range of applicable analytical techniques is developed. on the one hand, there is a demand for most detailed values with the shortest sampling period, i.e. transaction data. one transaction is understood as a sequence of operations that are no longer divisible from the point of view of content. e.g. one ride of one passenger, cash withdrawal from an atm, one order of a plane ticket. on the other hand, we are limited by the technical and economic resources needed to manage such a large data volume. attention is also drawn to the risks of misuse of transactional data in connection with the public security. sensory data in tunnels, subways, etc. are particularly sensitive in this respect. intuitive, fast and easy to navigate a user-friendly environment will have a direct impact on the utilization of open data. selecting a suitable navigation system will not be easy, as data from different areas, with different granularity, related to different objects or territories, will be counted in the future. in some cases, it is possible to increase the clarity by mapping. predefined outputs and analyzes should the public data really serve the general public, it should contain a set of the most frequently used queries and outputs. it should be reflected that an ordinary citizen will not waste time searching for data, combining them and processing them. these can be simple questions like: find the nearest open emergency, show the trend of air pollution for the next day, find the optimal method of transport between the given points, and find the date of the next large-scale waste collection in the village. nonetheless, eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 open data in smart region 8 more sophisticated outputs or the possibility to use integrated analytical tools directly in the open data environment can be available. for example, eea european environment agency manages the european publicly available database on the environment and health of the population. clear navigation in the data sources, including metadata, is only one of the functionalities. in addition, users are provided with integrated data tools from olap analytics (figure 5) to interactive charts. therefore everyone can view data cubes, set up filters, change views, visualize and combine data quickly, comfortably and without any previous skills. simple work instructions are also integrated. there are sets of pre-prepared interactive graphs (figure 7), more complex analytical outputs (figure 6), professional literature, and a description of the indicators used. figure 5. olap gui – total emissions in the eu [8] open data in the smart city context should: • increase citizens' awareness and assist them in their both daily and occasional activities; • provide data base for analytical activities. as far as services for the general public are concerned, passenger transport appears to be a suitable initial application. at present, it is a burning problem for most large cities. participating organizations strive to publish up-to-date information on traffic intensity on critical roads, inform about planned and acute road repairs, congestions and traffic accidents, suggest preferable highway exits and detours, help plan routes, inform about paid parking areas, parking slots and free capacities of car parks, enable citizens to book and pay a parking space online. most applications offer the closest object search according to the current gps position of the user, or by selecting the area of interest in the map. examples of successful portal in the czech republic: • the road and motorways directorate of the czech republic publishes (at http://scitani2016.rsd.cz) interactive maps with focus up to the composition of the traffic flow, the amount of pollutants emitted, the intensity of traffic, etc. (in an annual aggregation). • the rodos project (rozvoj dopravních systémů – development of transport systems) publishes (at https://rodos.vsb.cz) current traffic situation on motorways and expressways in the form of simple graphics. the information is updated every halfminute, supplemented by meteorological data, bypass suggestions, statistical indicators, etc. • tsk prague operates a prague parking portal (at http://www.parkujvklidu.cz) where citizens can find not only interactive maps with parking zones, vending machines and parking, but also virtual parking. figure 6. exposure-response associations between temperature and mortality in two european cities, together with related temperatures distributions. the shaded grey area delineates the 95 % empirical confidence interval. solid grey vertical lines are minimum mortality temperatures and dashed grey vertical lines delineate the 2.5th and 97.5th percentile temperatures. [https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/ associations-between-temperature-and-mortality] eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 o. kodym, j. unucka, d. létavková 9 individual portals and applications are user-friendly, intuitive, functional and up-to-date. unfortunately, they always focus only on a selected section of the whole issue of public / passenger transport, and wider public often lacks awareness of their existence. a data platform that will have access to the relevant data sources will have a unique opportunity to integrate the individual sections into a common unit. an appropriate addition seems to be increased effort to motivate population for wider use of public transport and alternative modes of transport. a good start is creating an introductory interactive map comprised of several layers – passenger transport and parking, public transport, cycling and pedestrian traffic. figure 7. primary energy consumption and linear trajectories to 2020 targets, 2015 and 2016 [https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/ primary-energy-consumption-and-linear#tab-basedon-data] the cycling+pedestrian layer may provide information on pedestrian and cycling zones, bicycle stands and rentals, on-line booking of bicycles, location of parks and green areas, outputs from online cameras as well as meteorological outputs with forecasts for an upcoming time period. park+ride parking should obviously be included too. the p+r parking should encourage drivers for frequent usage not only with easy navigation and virtual parking slots. the offer should include real time departures of the nearest public transport links, including information on the impact of car traffic on the environment and possibly health.the following figure (figure 8) shows a proposal for information on a selected parking lot. the bar graph is based on the historical occupancy values of the car park, varying depending on the day of the week or possibly taking into account the difference between working day/weekend. drivers can easily recognize that from 1417 o’clock the parking lot is fully occupied, how many parking spaces are available (123 of 450), and how many tons of pollutants the car park has already saved over the week thanks to the people going by tram or walking instead of going by car. values are calculated based on the entrance barriers readers. the calculation formula was proposed by the european environment agency according to term 027 indicator and traccs 2013 database [9]. the formula is based on the average occupancy of 1.2 passengers per car, which may slightly differ; the data can be found for individual sections at (http://scitani2016.rsd.cz). the amounts of pollutants saved are really impressive, as in a single week it can be even several tons of greenhouse gas, if we count with the average saved driving distance of 5 km. figure 8. parking popularity on monday with additional informaton as far as the utilization of the data platform for analytical purposes is concerned, optimizing public transport is a suitable area of expertise. in order to modify the structure of the network of individual public transport lines and the frequency of connections, we need to trace the transport habits of the population. one of the possible methods is to analyse transaction data of public transport. the entry condition is, naturally, the technical capability to record boarding / exit stops of the passengers in vehicles. using analytical procedures, we can identify the utilization rates of individual lines and links, as well as the stops where passengers most often board and disembark the vehicles. with certain reservations we thus gain an overview of where to and from the inhabitants are transported by public transport. it is desirable to motivate passengers to use the contactless chip cards as much as possible. data usability will be multiplied. this will allow analysis of the passenger features (child, student, adult 15+, pensioner) (see fig. 5) and the fare type (type of long-term ticket, individual fare). we will get the background data for optimizing fare and fare rates, we can track how many times a week the individual groups use public transport, which payment method they prefer on which routes. another useful aspect of chip cards is the ability to identify the transfer eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 open data in smart region 10 passengers and to get a complete overview of where (from), when, how often, and on which lines they travel. detailed processing of transaction data enables the maximal utilization of the information contents of the data base. see example at figure 9. facts that have so far escaped our attention are often revealed. it is because in the aggregate data values of anomalies and small patterns of behaviour often simply disappear. looking at transaction or sensory data directly, even if there is a significant anomaly, we will probably not pay appropriate attention to it. only when we notice that the anomalies are periodically repeated or show some mutual relation, we try to find out their cause. transaction data have to be processed with all the details available, in different relations and variants. otherwise, the discovery of hidden information is more a matter of coincidence than the analytical activity. we cannot do without powerful technology, high-quality software and relevant analytical knowledge. figure 9. customer profile of public transport provider number of transactions in one week 8. compliance with major policies and strategies the smarter region strategy differs from other development and sectoral policies and strategies with an impact on the moravian-silesian region by the use of ict technologies and innovations along the lines of other smart policies and strategies. compliance with the objectives and general aims of these policies has been ensured during the drafting of this strategy and will be followed in the future as well. the smarter region strategy will not develop its own complex metrics and set of indicators. the strategy will be implemented by means of projects that meet the smart criteria in constant interaction with existing development, sectoral, and thematic strategies and sub-strategies, plans and action plans. the strategic framework of the smarter region strategy is primarily based on the following strategic policies and documents: europe 2020 strategy, partnership agreement for the 2014–2020 programming period digital agenda for europe: the goal of the europe 2020 strategy is to create a digital single market based on fast and ultra-fast internet and interoperability of applications: • by 2013: basic broadband coverage for all; • by 2020: next generation networks (ngn), 30 mbps or more for all; • by 2020: 50 % of households having 100 mbps subscriptions or higher. innovation union • focusing research, development, and innovation policy on the major challenges of the world today, i.e. climate change, energy industry, resource efficiency, healthcare, and demographic changes. • supporting each element of the innovation process, from basic research to product marketing. strategic framework czech republic 2030 (government of the czech republic, 2016) section 412 – (sub)urbanization and spatial mobility: "in their urban development, cities must seek the ways in which technological innovations can be combined, in particular finding the so-called integrated solutions (combining transport, energy, architecture, communication, or green technologies). however, the overall streamlining of urban systems, sought for example by the smart cities concept, must not be at the expense of preserving the identity of the city, created by monuments as well as other buildings, the public space, culture, and everyday life. planning at the local level must therefore also promote social cohesion and create living communities and viable cities. this goal should be aimed at with the smart cities concept prioritizing not only technological changes, but social and organizational innovations which are often of higher importance." smart city concept methodology (the ministry of regional development of the czech republic) the methodology includes, for example, the following definition of smart cities: "a city that holistically manages and follows its longterm development strategy which is based on qualitative and numerical indicators and serves to cultivate the political, social, and spatial environment of the city to enhance the quality of life and its attractiveness, and to reduce negative environmental impacts. by deploying appropriate ict technologies, it enables its citizens to engage in the city development and to materialize their ideas and suggestions through community programs or sharing economy in order to improve their communication with the city and revitalize the public space. the city encourages this process of transition to the culture of conscious behaviour by deploying suitable organizational and technological tools of the 21st century in a wide-spread, eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 o. kodym, j. unucka, d. létavková 11 integrated, and open way to ensure the interoperability of different systems and technologies and their synergies. the quality of life in the smart cities concept means the digital, open, and cooperative environment of the city that is healthy, clean, safe, and economically interesting for the citizens." strategic framework of the economic restructuring of the ústí, moravian-silesian, and karlovy vary regions in strategic objective g.2, this strategy sets the goal of "streamlining the management and performance of public administration for businesses and inhabitants, building the necessary ict infrastructure for this purpose and implementing additional investment projects using modern technologies for applications and services.” the required changes focus on the applications of the smart cities concept both in software and hardware. one of the changes should be the introduction of ict services and applications which address the most pressing needs of people and businesses in communicating and arranging issues with public administration authorities and implementing electronic solutions for the city agenda. these include, for example, open data and database sharing, faster communication with people and businesses by electronic tools, using electronic forms, empowering participatory management, and strengthening hardware capabilities for software solutions. development strategy of the moravian-silesian region for 2009–2020 (updated in 2012) the strategy states its mission: "we create our future in our heads and hearts!" "we perceive our region as a living organism, of which we all are active parts. our personal qualities rest in flexible minds and muscles trained by years of work on the transformation of the backbone economic, transport, and technical infrastructure. we search for smart solutions for the future and we will use our inner strength and motivation to implement them." other documents: • regional action plan for the esif 2014–2020 programming period • regional innovation strategy of the moraviansilesian region 2014–2020 (ris3 update to follow the smart specialization strategy – regional annex, may 2016) • joint declaration on the collaboration in drafting the smart city and smart region policies with the priority to improve the overall quality of life and the environment in ostrava and the moravian-silesian region • strategic development plan of the statutory city of ostrava 2017–2023 • the smart city concept "třinec i ty" of the city of třinec 9. conclusion the industrial heritage is an opportunity and a test for the future development of the region. achievements in traditional industries in the past do not automatically mean success in the present or future. rather, it seems that the future prosperity of the region will have to be built on new sectors, which are based on the traditional industries of the region. the automotive industry is to be complemented by new, dynamically developing sectors such as information and communication technologies, renewable energy sources, robotics and others that will provide job opportunities for the next generation as well as the competitiveness of existing businesses and sectors. reducing the product lifecycle, constant pressure on price and innovation are forcing companies to join the industry 4.0 initiative, which is one of the answers to the question of today's business going tomorrow. a similar challenge as businesses is also facing regions. they engage each other in attracting people and maintaining the optimal structure of the population. lack of workers in the industry can partially address companies by introducing digital technologies and robotics. however, the outflow of the region's inhabitants cannot be solved as easily. however, even in this case, the deployment of modern technologies can help. the moravian-silesian region has long been facing the population outflow. young, economically active people stay in college towns and cities after school. at best, in prague or brno, the worse they scatter around the world. the concept of a smart city and region is one of the ways to slow this negative trend and make life more attractive in so-called smarter cities and regions. acknowledgements this is the acknowledgement text. this is the acknowledgement text. this is the acknowledgement text. this is the acknowledgement text. this is the acknowledgement text. this is the acknowledgement text. references [1] d. f. i. p. european parliament: mapping smart cities in eu, brussels: european union, 2014. [2] transport research center, ministry of transport of the czech republic: methodology of the concept of smart cities (metodika konceptu inteligentních měst), ministry of regional development of the czech republic, brno, czech republic: 2015. [3] ministry of finance of the czech republic: public procurement methodology fulfilling 3e principles in public procurement practice (metodika veřejného nakupování – naplňování principů 3e v praxi veřejného zadávání), ministry of finance of the czech republic, prague, czech republic: 2016. [4] ministry of industry and trade of the czech republic: initiative industry 4.0 (iniciativa průmysl 4.0). ministry of industry and trade of the czech republic, prague, czech republic 2016. [on-line] https://www.mpo.cz/assets/ dokumenty/53723/64494/659339/priloha001.pdf eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 open data in smart region 12 [5] beepartners: smarter region – strategy of development of smart region 2017–2023 (chytřejší kraj – strategie rozvoje chytrého regionu 2017–2023). moravian–silesian region regional authority, ostrava, czech republic: 2017. [6] germany trade and invest: industrie 4.0 – smart manufacturing for the future. germany trade and invest gesellschaft für aussenwirtscaft und standortmarketing, berlin, germany 2016. [on-line] http://www.gtai.de/gtai/ content/en/invest/_shareddocs/downloads/gtai/broch ures/industries/industrie4.0-smart-manufacturing-for-thefuture-en.pdf [7] directorate-general for internal policies: mapping smart cities in the eu. 2014. isbn 978-92-823-4761-4. [8] the european environment agency: data and maps. denmark [on-line] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-andmaps [9] european environment agency: carbon dioxide emissions from passenger transport (emise oxidu uhličitého z osobní dopravy). [on-line] https://www.eea.europa.eu/cs/pressr oom/infografika/emise-oxidu-uhliciteho-z-osobni-dopravy/ image/image_view_fullscreen eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 12 2016 12 2017 | volume 2 | issue 5 | e5 o. kodym, j. unucka, d. létavková towards an iot-based system for monitoring of pipeline leakage in clean water distribution networks 1 towards an iot-based system for monitoring of pipeline leakage in clean water distribution networks tuyen phong truong1, giang thanh nguyen1 and luong thanh vo1 1can tho university, can tho city, vietnam abstract climate change-causing drought is wreaking havoc in the mekong delta, but water usage and management are still inefficient, resulting in a loss rate of more than 20%. this research is being carried out to contribute to lowering the rate of water loss and improving the management of the clean water supply. this suggested system makes use of wireless sensor networks, the internet of things, and cloud database storage technologies. the readings collected by the flow and water pressure sensors at the sensor nodes installed along the plumbing system will be relayed to the gateway through the lora wireless communication network. the gateway will aggregate the collected data, upload it to a cloud database, and then analyze it to detect and give an appropriate alert for water leaks if any occur. an application for the android smartphone assists in visually monitoring recorded data. the research results have been evaluated in operation, with initial results fulfilling the key requirements. keywords: internet of things, leaking pipe, lora technology, smart cities, water distribution systems. received on 10 december 2021, accepted on 31 march 2022, published on 31 march 2022 copyright © 2022 tuyen phong truong et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i17.230 1. introduction currently, the covid-19 pandemic has threatened cities and communities, endangering not only public health but also the economy and social fabric, directly affecting community health and quality of life, particularly the lack of clean water for daily life and production [1]. according to a 2015 global report, one in every ten people (roughly 2.1 billion people worldwide) lacks access to safe drinking water. according to interreg central europe [2-3], we lose 25–50% of clean water every day, causing many people to live in water scarcity. the shortage of clean water in daily life and production in vietnam, like in other affluent countries, is becoming increasingly significant. the average rate of revenue loss and loss of clean water in 2015 for the whole country was 30%, equivalent to about 5.5 billion vnd per day [4]. saigon water supply corporation (sawaco) has also created an online water supply management system with network management, incident management, and real-time updates. however, the system is still underutilized and the cost is still prohibitively high. even though it has been in use since may 2019, the drainage rate in the first nine months of 2020 at thu duc water supply joint stock company, where the system was installed, is still 12.85 percent [5]. a wide number of research studies regarding water leakage in water distribution networks have been carried out. some of them have been focused on developing algorithms for detecting and estimating leakage models and integrating them into a water distribution network hydraulic model. consequently, a lot of cad software has been proposed to detect the location and compute the leakage quantities of water for solving the network leakage flows [6–10]. on the other hand, there are some others focused on pipeline leak detection technology based on optical fiber sensing technology and a proposed algorithm for pipeline leakage detection [11]. the technique may use the frequency domain to discover leak spots by obtaining time-domain signal characteristics of pipeline leakage. there were also some research projects on building a leak detector for clean water supply pipes using the negative correlation method, which is based on the detection and measurement of the time deviation of the sound emitted from the leak point when handling the audio signal recorded at the two ends of the pipeline segment. however, because they are only zoning the problem area, they cannot pinpoint the precise location of the leak. in addition, the device has been unable to survey a long pipeline because the sensor is insensitive due to eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e5 mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ t. p. truong, g. t. nguyen and l. t. vo 2 environmental noise, and it cannot be connected to multiple sensors at the same time [12–13]. as a result, there are still some concerns that need to be addressed in current research, such as high cost due to having to spend money to deliver messages if using a mobile network, and centralized processing on a circuit board. these restrictions have implications in terms of geographical location, such as the inability to set up the system over a vast area and the difficulty of expanding it. therefore, the goal is to deploy the system over a large area using a wireless sensor network. because the measurement system is simple to set up and inexpensive, wireless sensor nodes are used to easily expand the system. the organization of this article is presented as follows. section 1 provides an overview of the current situation, causes, and solutions for water leaks in clean water supply systems. section 2 discusses the design and implementation of the proposed pipeline leakage monitoring system, which includes the hardware architecture and embedded software. section 3 presents experiments to evaluate the operation of the water leak monitoring system on the main pipeline before section 4 concludes the article by presenting a summary of the results and the research plans. 2. system design 2.1. system overview figure 1. the overview of the pipeline leakage monitoring system a lora wireless sensor network, depicted in figure 1, consists of one gateway and three sensor nodes that exchange data using long-distance, ultra-low power lora technology. the gateway, which acts as a link between the lora network and the internet, is in charge of data aggregation and real-time data updates to the firebase cloud. an android smartphone application allows for easy visual monitoring of recorded values obtained from sensors for detecting water pipeline leaks. in figure 2, the stm32 blue pill [14], which equips an stm32f103c8t6, an arm 32-bit cortex m3 architecture with high-performance and almost all the standard peripheral interfaces for reading sensor values, is used for control circuitry at the sensor node. the sensor node is designed to receive data from sensors using common peripheral communication standards such as uart, i2c, spi, and so on, and then transmit data to the gateway using lora wireless transmission, specifically the lora ra-02 module. the lora ra 02 module is a small lora transceiver that uses a semtech sx1278 chip and operates at 430–435 mhz. it has low energy consumption and a transmission range of around 15 kilometers [15–17]. the gateway used here is a raspberry pi 4, compact and highperforming [18]. the gateway in this case is a raspberry pi 4, which is small but powerful in performance. this is an embedded computer with an ethernet connector and wi-fi for internet connectivity that runs the operating system on a memory card for easy control programming. in addition, as can be seen in figure 2, the raspberry pi 4 also supports a standard spi interface connected to the ra-02 module to facilitate data transmission between the lora wireless sensor network and data upload to the cloud database. figure 2. system block diagram and communication between the gateway and a sensor node 2.2. hardware design to extend the lifetime of the proposed system the sensor node powered by a battery will be buried deep alongside the clean water supply pipeline system in the actual application conditions, so the power supply for the sensor node to operate is a concern. the investigation of energy-saving modes to determine the best method for assisting the sensor node in consuming less energy. the sensor node's hardware has two designs for this purpose: stop mode (the microcontroller power-down mode) and power off (see figure 3). the sensor node reduces power consumption while in use with energy-saving modes. as a result, a device capable of waking the microcontroller from sleep mode is required. the rtc ds3231 module, with two built-in alarms, a 32 khz temperature-compensated crystal oscillator, and a backup battery to maintain accurate timekeeping when the device's power source is disconnected, is one of the suitable choices [19]. the power-off method is an effective solution to save maximum energy for the sensor node. for this reason, lp5907, texas instruments' linear voltage regulator with low noise, output current up to 250 ma, high resistance to power fluctuations [20], is used to manage the power supply for the microcontroller and lora module. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e5 towards an iot-based system for monitoring of pipeline leakage in clean water distribution networks 3 figure 3. block diagram of two power-saving modes for sensor node under normal conditions, the data from 10 sensor readings will be stored at the sensor node before being sent to the gateway to save energy. unless a leak is detected, the data will be sent immediately. as a result, eeprom was used to ensure that the data stored at the sensor node is not lost when the power is turned off. cat24c128 is a 128kb serial eeprom that is internally organized into 16384 words and is divided into 256 pages with 64 bytes each for the write buffer, as well as write protection and error correction code [21]. figure 4. the electronic circuit board of the sensor node was inside a protective plastic box to avoid damage flow and pressure sensors are integral parts of the system to monitor parameters that aid in leak detection of water supply lines (see figure 4). the hall yf-05 dn20 measures water flow rates from 1 to 30 l/min. in the presence of flowing water, it generates square pulses that create a magnetic field to activate the hall sensor [22]. a pressure sensor (sku237545) generates an output signal when the applied force with 12-bit resolution, a pressure range of 0–200 psi, an accuracy of 1.5%, and a response time of fewer than 2 milliseconds [23]. a gps (global positioning system) module is installed to locate the location of the system's sensor nodes. because the sensor nodes are fixed, the board is designed with an extra slot for connecting the gps, allowing the gps module to be reused for multiple sensor nodes. the venus638flpx-l gps module operates in tracking mode by default, automatically responding to data at a frequency of 1 hz with a compact design and high accuracy [24]. figure 5. the electronic circuit board of the gateway 2.3. embedded software development in this system, a lora gateway (see figure 5) is often deployed at a high position, and it can thus establish direct communication with all sensor nodes. the gateway of the lora network is set up to operate in two phases. phase 1 performs the construction of the routing table and establishes the sensor network by sending a broadcast message and waiting to receive a response message, which is the identifier, from the sensor nodes operating in the coverage area. phase 2 is the process of collecting data from sensor nodes, processing data, uploading data to the cloud, and warning when there is a pipeline leak. the program on the gateway needs to perform phase 1 periodically to update the active sensor nodes after executing phase 2 n times. most of the time, the sensor network will collect data to satisfy the requirements of monitoring and warning, but still, ensure optimal connections in the network to help the system operate stably and long-term. figure 6. flow chart of process on the sensor node eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e5 t. p. truong, g. t. nguyen and l. t. vo 4 because the sensor node is permanently installed, the packet is divided into two types: a coordinate packet that contains the longitude and latitude of the sensor node's installation position, and a data packet that contains the sensor node's data. only when the gateway requests it is this packet sent. the data packet contains flow, pressure, date, and time values, as well as time synchronization between the gateway and the sensor node, which aids in the detection of water pipe leaks. during the system's operation, this packet is always sent to the gateway. to save energy, the sensor node only works for a set amount of time and then goes into the power-saving mode for the remainder of the time. the flow chart in figure 6 explains this in detail. 2.4. android app development an application for android smartphones has been developed to allow users to easily access and visually observe the system installation location, flow, and pressure parameters at each node, which are displayed on the map. when a leak in the pipeline is detected, users are notified. the graphs are plotted separately for each flow or pressure parameter per node and are automatically refreshed based on a real-time updated firebase database. details can be seen in figure 7. figure 7. measurement data is uploaded to a cloud database and updated to the application on an android smartphone in real-time 3. experiment 3.1. compare power saving modes according to the experimental results, the power consumption in run mode is 0.1476 wh. stop mode consumes 0.0145 wh, which is 10 times less than run mode, and power off consumes 0.0126 wh, which is 11 times less. in stop mode, the system consumes 0.0145 wh, which is 10 times less than in run mode, and its power off mode consumes 0.0126 wh, which is 11 times less. a 3.7v-2200 mah li-ion battery is used to power the sensor node, which reads data from sensors every 2 minutes. the data is aggregated and sent to the gateway after every 255 reads. as a result, the system's operating time is approximately 7.5 days. table 1 summarizes the power consumption of the stm32f103c8t6 in experimental measurements. table 1. power consumption of microcontroller working stages working time (t) electricity consumption stop mode power off reading sensor 30 s 0.0041 wh 0.0041 wh saving energy 530 s 0.0020 wh 0.0001 wh sending data 40 s 0.0084 wh 0.0084 wh 3.2. experiment to detect water leakage figure 8. a basic experimental study on leakage for the water supply pipe in figure 8, the water supply pipe system in the experiment consisted of two branches, which were fitted with two sensor nodes each at the two ends of the pipeline, about 5 meters apart. branch three was not fitted with sensor nodes and was fitted with a drain valve at the end of each branch. when there is a water leak in the pipeline at branch 1, the water flow at node 1 is greater than the flow at node 2. the pressure deviation at node 1 does not change much depending on the water supply flow into the pipeline, and the pressure at node 2 decreases (see cases 1 and 3 in table2). if the water valve at the end of branch 1 is opened, the pressure at node 2 will decrease due to dynamic pressure, and the flow at node 2 will be less than at node 1 (see cases 1, 2, and 4 in table2). when the water valve at branch 3 is opened, the pressure in node 1 and node 2 decreases together, but the flow does not change. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e5 towards an iot-based system for monitoring of pipeline leakage in clean water distribution networks 5 after completing pipe installation and supplying water to the pipes (assuming they are not leaking), calculate the "leak threshold" value using sensor references and consider the difference in received values at the beginning and end of each pipe. the gateway will issue an alert when the next data collection shows the calculated value exceeding the threshold. from case 1, the first collected values are viewed when the system is installed and the leakage threshold is determined as follows: pthreshold = 1.02989, fthreshold = 0. suppose the pipeline is leaking in case 3, p = 1.063736 > pthreshold and f = 33 > fthreshold, combine the two conditions on the gateway that raises the alarm. table 2. experimental measurements case studies node 1 node 2 flow (ml/min) pressure (bar) flow (ml/min) pressure (bar) 1. not leak and not open valve 0 1.181209 0 0.151319 0 1.147363 0 0.148901 0 1.142527 0 0.146484 2. not leak and open valve 100 1.533901 100 0.158571 100 1.526923 100 0.158571 133 1.188462 133 0.134396 3. leaking and not open valve 33 1.198132 0 0.134396 33 1.181209 0 0.129560 50 1.173956 0 0.127143 4. leaking and open valve 133 1.181209 116 0.134396 90 1.176374 73 0.137650 83 1.546264 66 0.156154 4. conclusion this paper presents the design and implementation of a leak detection system for clean water supply pipelines. the system established a lora wireless sensor network that allows the detection and warning when there is a leak in the water supply pipeline over a large area. an application on smartphones helps users to visually observe the flow rate and pressure parameters based on applying a real-time database service. in the experimental measurement, a lora network consisting of 4 sensor nodes and 1 gateway was deployed that collects and uploads data to the cloud in realtime through an internet connection. for electrical energy saving, power supply control circuitry and embedded programs were developed. experimental results show that the proposed hardware and software design help enhance system performance. for future work, we plan to improve the quality of the sensors used for more accurate and reliable measurements, continue to improve the hardware and software, and conduct more experiments and calibrations on the actual water supply pipeline system. references [1] kenth hvid nielse. using smart water in cities. new straits timers. october 22 2020. https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnists/2020/10/6345 04/using-smart-water-cities (accessed on 9 december 2021). [2] lam hong. warning about the risk of water shortage. nhan dan (people) newspaper. september 27 2019. https://nhandan.com.vn/tin-tuc-the-gioi/bao-dong-nguy-cothieu-nuoc-sinh-hoat-369008/ (accessed on 9 december 2021). [3] anh vu. thirst threatens the world. ministry of natural resources and environment (vietnam). june 21 2019. http://dwrm.gov.vn/index.php?language=vi&nv=news&op =nhin-ra-the-gioi/con-khat-de-doa-toan-cau-8216 (accessed on 9 december 2021). [4] decision no. 2147/qd-ttg of the prime minister (vietnam). national program to combat loss of revenue and clean water by 2025. https://vanban.chinhphu.vn/default.aspx?pageid=27160&d ocid=97899 (accessed on 30 march 2022). [5] quang dinh. water supply with smart technology in the industry 4.0 era. september 20 2020. tuoi tre news. https://tuoitre.vn/cap-nuoc-bang-cong-nghe-thong-minhthoi-40-20200926104940329.htm (accessed on 9 december 2021). [6] m. tesfaye, s. narain, h. k. muye. modeling of water distribution system for reducing of leakage. journal of civil & environmental engineering.2020; vol. 10: 6. [7] j. almandoz, e. cabrera, f. arregui, e. cabrera, r. cobacho. leakage assessment through water distribution network simulation. j. water resour. plan. manag. 2005; vol. 131:6. [8] m. maskit and a. ostfeld. multi-objective operationleakage optimization and calibration of water distribution systems. water (switzerland). 2021; vol. 13:14. [9] k. b. adedeji, y. hamam, b. t. abe, a. m. abu-mahfouz. leakage detection and estimation algorithm for loss reduction in water piping networks. water (switzerland). 2017; vol. 9:21. [10] a. adamuscin, j. golej, m. panik. the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities. 2016; volume 1, issue 1. [11] kazeem b. adedeji, yskandar hamam, bolanle t. abe, adnan m. abu-mahfouz. pipeline leak detection technology based on distributed optical fiber acoustic sensing system. ieee access. 2020; vol. 8:21. [12] pengxiang technology. acoustic emission monitoring of pipeline leakage. february 03 2014. https://www.ndttech.net/en/solutions/acoustic_emission_t esting/299.html (accessed on 9 december 2021). [13] tran viet chau. research and manufacture leak detector on clean water supply pipeline using negative correlation method on pc platform. project report at can tho university, vietnam. 2017. [14] stmicroelectronics. stm32f103x8-medium-density performance line arm-based 32-bit mcu. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e5 t. p. truong, g. t. nguyen and l. t. vo 6 https://www.st.com/resource/en/datasheet/stm32f103c8.pdf (accessed on 9 december 2021). [15] lora alliance. lora and lorawan: a technical overview.https://loradevelopers.semtech.com/uploads/documents/files/lora_an d_lorawan-a_tech_overview-downloadable.pdf (accessed on 30 march 2022). [16] semtech corporation. sx1276/77/78/79 137 mhz to 1020 mhz low power long range transceiver rev. 7, 2020. [17] h. mroue, g. andrieux, e. m. cruz, g. rouyer. evaluation of lpwan technology for smart city. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities. 2017; volume 2, issue 6. [18] raspberry pi trading ltd. bcm2711 arm peripherals. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/bcm2711/bcm2711peripherals.pdf (accessed on 30 march 2022). [19] maxim integrated. extremely accurate i2c-integrated rtc/tcxo/crystal, rev 10. https://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/ds3231.pdf (accessed on 30 march 2022). [20] texas instruments. lp590 250-ma, ultra-low-noise, low-iq ldo, snvs798o –april 2012–revised june 2020. [21] on semiconductor, eeprom serial 128-kb i2c cat24c128 rev. 17 https://www.onsemi.com/pdf/datasheet/cat24c128-d.pdf (accessed on 30 march 2022). [22] seeed technology co. ltd. water flow sensor. https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/water-flow-sensor/ (accessed on 30 march 2022). [23] rev robotics, “analog pressure sensor data sheet”, rev.11,2015, https://www.revrobotics.com/content/docs/rev-11-1107ds.pdf (accessed on 9 december 2021). [24] skytraq technology, inc. venus838flpx 50hz -165dbm low-power gps module. https://www.skytraq.com.tw/homesite/venus838flpx_pb _v1.pdf (accessed on 9 december 2021). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 10 2021 03 2022 | volume 6 | issue 17 | e5 recent trends and challenges in smart cities eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 recent trends and challenges in smart cities pooja g1, sundar r2, harshini r3,*, arjuna s4 and ram kumar c5 1masters in biomedical engineering, politecnico di milano milan, italy 2assistant professor, department of bme, dr.n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore 3ug student, department of bme, dr. n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india. 4ug student, department of bme, dr. n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india. 5associate professor, department of bme, dr.n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore. abstract smart systems are wanting for smart communities to adapt to restricted spaces and assets across the world. thus, smart urban communities arose mostly because of exceptionally inventive ict ventures and markets, and furthermore, they have begun to utilize novel arrangements exploiting the internet of things (iot), huge information and distributed computing innovations to lay out a significant association between every part and layer of a city. smarter solutions need to be executed to make digital services for economic and social advancement seamlessly reach the occupants in an easy and secure way and encourage them to continue using the amenities. a holistic development rather than just technological advancement is essential for the betterment of smart lifestyle of the present and future population. this paper attempts to analyze advancements, and the challenges involved in implementing them in various sectors should be executed to make computerized administrations for monetary and social headway flawlessly arrive at the tenants in a simple and secure manner and urge them to keep utilizing the conveniences. keywords: smart city, recent trends, challenges. received on 31 july 2022, accepted on 12 september 2022, published on 21 september 2022 copyright © 2022 pooja g. et al, licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i3.2273 1. introduction innovative headways and the blend of various advances, gadgets, and organizations have brought about the idea of shrewd urban communities. these urban communities use various electronic contraptions, advancements, and sensors to gather information and offer raised types of assistance and encounters to individuals. urbanization is expanding at a quick scale internationally with over 1.3 million individuals moving to the urban areas each and every day. it is assessed that more than 65% of the worldwide populace will live in the urban communities by 2040. associated and brilliant urban communities are turning into a stage for development for such a worldwide populace [1]. many governments across the world are taking up various drives towards brilliant medical care and computerized wellbeing. the public authority of india has incorporated the drives, for example, free diagnostics *corresponding author. email: mysteryprincess27@gmail.com service initiative (fdsi), portable clinical units, and so on to help its savvy urban communities mission. the interests in smart medical care appear to be paying off. the whole world was affected by the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. millions of people have died, and millions have been contaminated by the dangerous infection. numerous nations are hit continuously and third wave rushes of the infection. smart and digital technologies have been helpful in pandemic control and management [1]. artificial intelligence and big data technologies have been very helpful in drug revelation and antibody dispersion. far off wellbeing observing through iot-based medical care applications has empowered the patients and specialists to connect without visiting the emergency clinic/clinical focus. such measures have helped with guaranteeing the security of the patients and the clinical experts. similar mechanisms are important for successfully implementing the idea of smart cities [2]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e4 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:mysteryprincess27@gmail.com pooja g. et al. 2 2. smart cities a smart city is a technologically modern urban area that utilizes various kinds of electronic strategies and sensors to gather explicit information. data acquired from that information is utilized to oversee resources, assets and administrations proficiently; consequently, that information is utilized to further develop tasks across the city. this incorporates information gathered from residents, gadgets, structures and resources that is handled and analysed to monitor and manage smart cities and smart enterprises deal with the integration of artificial intelligence, web technologies, smart mobile platforms, telecommunications, e-commerce, e-business, and other technologies. fields of utilizations are related to services for users and citizens, like transportation, structures, ehealth, utilities, etc. which is shown in figure 1. smart cities use information and communication technologies (icts) to scale services include utilities and transportation to a developing population. progressing population development and urbanization are starting a renewed desire to integrate technology into the design of city services, in this way creating the essence of "smart cities" [3]. smart cities rely intensely on sensors to perceive parameters, for example, temperature, dampness, allergens, contamination, traffic conditions, and power matrix status. the values of these parameters provide a context that helps a system to understand the state of a citizen at some random time. figure 1. components of smart city 3. recent trends there are three layers to a smart city: an innovation base which incorporates cell phones and sensors associated by fast correspondence organizations, applications making an interpretation of crude information into bits of knowledge and utilization by urban communities and general society. the rising notoriety of 5g, overall entrance of cell phones and expanding reception of iot are completely expected to speed up smart city advancements and carry them into the standard. with this, there are new ways that innovation can change urban communities [4]. figure 2 describes the impact of innovations that happened in the latest trends. figure 2. impact of 10 smart city trends and innovations in 2022 3.1. smart health the pandemic has made obviously the local area an enormous part in establishing better wellbeing conditions for residents. smart developments can lessen burden on medical services natural systems by supporting finding and therapy, yet furthermore preventive dealing with oneself. this moves the concentration from individual-focused medical care to a local area model. directed by information examination, medical care can be custom fitted for people and their families. smart health can be grouped as a subset of e-health given s-health is comparable to the ict framework of the recognized a smart city. regardless, there is a differentiation between s-health and m-health. for instance, in s-health there is plausibility that the recognized key correspondence may not be portable or not. in reality, for a large portion of cases it could incorporate spread out fixed sensors the patient gets information or information from an interactive pole of information for checking the level of residue, dust, notwithstanding pollution for which individual has sensitivity. the information further aides patients in forestalling the regions that can end up being unsafe for their health conditions. the shaft of information helps in giving the patient with information about the best course or heading that they can take to arrive at an objective eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e4 recent trends and challenges in smart cities 3 and about the nearest pharmacies from where he can purchase antihistamine pills [4]. 3.2. smart infrastructure infrastructure frames the groundwork of each and every city, and development can upgrade existing connection focuses in more ways than one — from green structures to waste management systems to traffic guideline. singapore's green mark affirmation conspire, for instance, is presently pointed toward making 80% of the city's structures green. gartner predicts multiple billion associated iot gadgets in business shrewd structures by 2028, fuelled by broadcast communications frameworks, with 5g and high efficiency wi-fi alongside smart utilities like power, waste and water. moving advancements incorporate platform assessment frameworks, iot sensors for wastewater and obstruct checking, halting sensor applications, lighting sensors and fire identification frameworks. this could provoke more conservative, close sew metropolitan communities in the future [5]. 3.3. smart citizens finally, smart cities enhance the voices of their tenants. applications permit residents to momentarily report nearby issues, while local area network platforms permit people to pool together and share assets metropolitan communities are progressing as cooperative environments, with more investment and straightforwardness. open information and emerging developments are preparing for metropolitan communities to be more human-focused and multidirectional for government, associations and residents the same [6]. 3.4. smart energy besides investing in clean energy, metropolitan areas can utilize development to screen real time energy use and upgrade energy use. this includes the usage of supportable and moral materials, climate friendly and assets productive plans, renewables fuelled frameworks and advanced developments to change in accordance with use. the energy change adds to making a round economy, according to deloitte insights, through the decentralization of energy creation with inexhaustible sources. this is preparing for metropolitan communities to be independent in their energy usage [6]. 3.5. smart safety biometrics, facial recognition, smart cameras and video surveillance all have been building up some forward momentum with expanded use by policing. these advancements assist urban areas with recognizing examples and patterns in crime data, diminish reaction times and investigate crime prediction. yet, despite the fact that these innovations present alluring choices, residents' security, opportunity and common freedoms survive from foremost significance. urban communities should be mindful so as to explore going with moral and administrative issues of utilizing such innovations, and try not to oppress explicit areas or segment gatherings [7]. 3.6. smart mobility smart mobility use innovation to empower individuals and different types of transport to work in more proficient, strong, and maintainable ways. progresses in metropolitan portability rotate around further developed foundation, versatility as-a-administration, micro mobility, operations arrangements, and zero-emission transportation. intelligent traffic management, high level driving, and independent vehicles are making metropolitan mobility ecoaccommodating. novel vehicle choices, for example, hyperloop, robot axis, and water taxis likewise track down applications in brilliant city versatility [8]. 3.7. e-governance the e-governance pattern drives smart city actors to disclose administrations and choices more open, supportable, cooperative, and straightforward. to accomplish this, new businesses use blockchain and iotbased arrangements, to remember all partners for the dynamic interaction. computerized administrations, like web based casting a ballot, advanced visas, and hearty information security instruments, support resident cooperation and lead to the development of e-a majority rule government. further, web based retraining programs, nearby e-profession focuses, and digitalization of business capabilities like permitting and burden filling add to monetary development and a pioneering business climate [8]. 3.8. green urban planning because of environmental change and climatic conditions urban planning is confronting a huge challenge to make urban communities smart, economical, and strong. driven by decarbonization objectives, a green urban plan consolidates reasonable area approaches and 15-minute city models where most everyday necessities are reachable by walking or cycling. besides, smart farms for plant development and vertical miniature forests increases biodiversity. as ocean levels rise globally, new and sustainable alternatives like drifting urban areas, islands, ranches, schools, and riverbanks catch the world's consideration [9]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e4 pooja g. et al. 4 3.9. advanced waste management as urban populations and buyer culture consistently develop, waste production increases as well. advanced waste management systems use iot sensors to precisely monitor waste removal, advise inhabitants about their utilization, and energize them with monetary rewards. simultaneously, e-waste reusing permit individuals to trade electronics for money. smart containers sort uncategorized waste and manage amount of waste. artificial intelligence recycling robots exactly recognize the sort of materials during waste separation, which increases overall productivity and large efficiency by keeping away from human association. together, arising waste management solutions decrease the ecological effects of economic activities [10]. 4. challenges in smart city healthcare smart city utilizes ict to provide smart medical services and that can in turn more efficiently channel city assets to help occupants speedily as required. while scientists and city originators have made significant first strides towards coordinating smart ict and medical services, which can scale further by turning out to be all the more completely associated 4.1. cyber security and privacy surely the advances in unavoidable registering and ai open up opportunities for smarter medical care using smart city development. simultaneously, these advances depend on information being both gathered and shared. security issues frequently deflect information sharing. truly, security and protection are the issues that are most often featured in conversations about boundaries to integrating advancement into medical services. concerns about protection and security are not unsubstantiated. smart homes offer enormous advantages for wellbeing observing and intercession, yet reports are oftentimes delivered about ways for into hack into these homes. this new variety of criminals might get insights regarding occupant residing pattern which enables efficient break out into a house, jeopardizing both the inhabitant's possessions and their wellbeing. different types of security hazard might rise in any event, when there is no vindictive aim. for instance, wellbeing checking gadgets that don't adhere to endorsed programming guidelines can imperil lives by not giving basic data at the required time. sharing mobile application data can likewise be hazardous, on the grounds that the gathered data may distinguish the client as well as track their ongoing area and foresee future areas [10]. while information is believed to be encoded before transmission and limit, the force of the information lies in sharing the information to break down patterns over whole populaces. while the primary line of protection that is utilized by scientists preceding sharing information is to displace names with randomized identifiers (derecognizing the information), this isn't adequate. in the space of security protecting information mining, information examination strategies ensure specific degrees of protection while endeavouring to support the utility of the information. this is alluded to as the protection utility trade off. three kinds of privacy-ensuring information mining strategies are being explored that might offer affirmation for smart city inhabitants. to start with, information can be "camouflaged" as it is gathered by annoying the information. second, in situations where the first gathered information will be delivered to outsiders, an objective of protection saving information mining is to guarantee the anonymity of the information [86]. this alludes to the confirmation that the recognizable properties for some random clients are undistinguishable from basically k-1 different clients. k-anonymity can be accomplished through strategies that incorporate eliminating delicate traits, expanding variety of touchy characteristics, or adding manufactured information to jumble the genuine qualities, subsequently permitting delicate information to "conceal in the group". on account of versatile information, an option in contrast to relegating a solitary consistent identifier for every client is to occasionally change identifiers. this change makes following clients over the long run and space difficult. an ideal opportunity to change the identifier is the point at which a client enters a space with k-1 different clients so old and new ids won't be quickly connected. third, the result of information mining computations can be adjusted to try not to leak of delicate information. for instance, the reasonability of a gathering computation can be downsized enough with the objective that it meets execution restricts yet restricts the gamble of being utilized to recognize people. whichever blend of methods is utilized, it is important that all gatherings including city creators, strategy producers, and tech suppliers settle on security ensures and depict to city tenants the potentially delicate information sharing that could happen with smart city advancements [11]. 4.2. accessibility and usability healthcare is a keyword that appears in many smart city efforts. nonetheless, cost is at this point a hindrance for inescapable reception of developments that can be utilized at an individual and nearby local area level. in the long haul, integrating technology into huge medical care can lessen costs for the city and its citizens. temporarily, regardless, the expense of the genuine development could keep networks from embracing the advancement [12]. metropolitan communities can take on a comparative strategy as insurance agency to not simply balanced the momentary expense of wellbeing development yet likewise address one more check of health care technology, which eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e4 recent trends and challenges in smart cities 5 is cutting out a potential open door to learn and embrace the advancement. lately, some insurance agencies have offered limits to clients who consent to introduce telematics in their vehicles that screen driving. the expected guide for deciding to introduce the gadgets, as well as cutting down expense rates, is that the information can further develop street security considering the way that the protection application can illuminate drivers when they are driving too carelessly. comparative rousing forces may be presented in the future by health care coverage associations to introduce ict in homes. the development will maintain quality medical care in a monetarily smart way to citizens when and where they need it [13]. 4.3. connection with other smart city services smart cities utilize information and communications technologies in multiple ways. the objective of smart city platforms is to work with fitting and-play smart items that can be conveyed anyplace with a capacity to mix in to their environmental elements. the items ought to help wellbeing checking as well as design observing, climate observing, security, and insightful transportation. the smart urban communities will likewise possibly use streetlights as the spine for citywide remote organizations. meshing sensors into existing city highlights addresses an illustration of the steadily expanding availability of information that can assist scientists with understanding the association between city plan and wellbeing. by observing air quality also as conduct, we can see the effect of our standards of conduct as well as plan decisions on air quality. also, we can screen the effect of air quality on wellbeing and we can plan mediations, for example, changing city plan or giving continuous data to inhabitants to remain inside during seasons of unfortunate air quality [13]. 4.4. multidisciplinary research and interaction explored areas in this field are generally being studied all around the world by different practitioners as well as researchers. in any case, it is especially uncommon for the analysts to direct review or work in same establishment or associations; consequently, this makes it very difficult for them to share their data for commonly prompting a coordinated arrangement. since ideas in this field are exceptionally new, there is a rising necessity for joint effort, collaboration and communication among different entertainers including specialists, professionals, states, doctors, and so on for characterizing a typical common ground all along, and thus, forestalling excess upgrades as well as over-spending [14]. 4.5. educating & engaging the community for a smart city to truly exist and prosper, it needs "shrewd" residents who are participated in and successfully dynamic in new advances. with any new sweeping tech project, a piece of the execution cycle ought to redetection paradigm for smart cities. ember showing the local area for its benefits. this ought to be conceivable through a movement of in-person civil focus style get-togethers and email crusades with elector enlistment, as well as an electronic preparation stage that keeps awake with the most recent. exactly when a local area wants to have an effect in the overall options impact everyday presence, and is being passed on to in a sensible and shrewd manner, it's more ready to use the development and urge others to include it as well. this is indispensable to a smart city's success [14]. 4.6. being socially inclusive smart travel programs that give riders ceaseless updates are really smart for a clamouring city. regardless, imagine a scenario where a piece of the number of occupants in that city can't bear to take mass travel or uber. the thing may be said about a developing older populace that doesn't utilize cell phones or applications? how should sagacious development reach and advantage these gatherings? it's pivotal that smart city orchestrating includes the prospect, everything being equal, notwithstanding the rich and mechanically progressed. development should continually be attempting to unite people, instead of separation them further considering pay or preparing levels. contemplating these networks, related to different issues tended to in this article, will advance the general outcome of an answer past the space of educated clients [15]. 5. conclusion it can be viewed as a prime contribution to the development of empirical research to get a superior comprehension of the ongoing peculiarities of smart cities. to this end, six principal spaces and the related sub-domains of smart city sending have been classified i.e., natural resources and energy, transport and mobility, infrastructures, government, as well as economy and individuals. a dataset of logical factors has been gathered and relapse examinations have been directed to comprehend the connection between different geological, metropolitan, demographical, human resources, ecological and innovation related factors. the consequences of this study have uncovered that there is no worldwide definition of smart cities, and that the latest things and development examples of any singular smart cities rely generally upon the neighbourhood setting factors. city strategy producers are in this manner asked to attempt to comprehend these variables to shape fitting techniques for their smart cities. this study is specifically founded on a system that could likewise be applied to make a superior determination of eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e4 pooja g. et al. 6 speculation open doors in times of restricted financial assets and to focus on smart cities drives in the different spaces and sub-spaces of expected execution, taking into account their capacity to boost the benefits related with the specific cutthroat trait of a smart city. the smart cities idea has acquired a great consideration lately and it will probably keep on doing as such from here on out. urban communities are distributing smart plans, related gatherings are moving and that's just the beginning and more books are being composed regarding the matter. smart innovations can give answers for urban communities by assisting them with setting aside cash, decrease fossil fuel by products and oversee traffic streams. yet, the intricacy of the plan is hindering its progress. it includes an enormous number of stakeholders (nearby specialists, residents, innovation organizations and scholastics) each having their own vision of what a smart city ought to be; the majority of the discussion gets impeded on attempting to comprehend what 'smart' signifies instead of focusing on how it can assist urban communities with meeting their objectives. additionally, since the market for brilliant advances is moderately new, it needs new plans of action and approaches to working which are yet to be created and carried out. references [1] yin c, xiong z, chen h, wang j, cooper d, david b. a literature survey on smart cities. science china information sciences. 2015 oct;58(10):1-8. [2] al nuaimi e, al neyadi h, mohamed n, al-jaroodi j. applications of big data to smart cities. journal of internet services and applications. 2015 aug;6(1):1-5. [3] harrison c, donnelly ia. a theory of smart cities. inproceedings of the 55th annual meeting of the isss2011, hull, uk 2011 sep 23. [4] chourabi h, nam t, walker s, gil-garcia jr, mellouli s, nahon k, pardo ta, scholl hj. understanding smart cities: an integrative framework. in2012 45th hawaii international conference on system sciences 2012 jan 4 (pp. 2289-2297). ieee. [5] pacheco rocha n, dias a, santinha g, rodrigues m, queirós a, rodrigues c. smart cities and healthcare: a systematic review. technologies. 2019 aug 16;7(3):58. [6] ghazal tm, hasan mk, alshurideh mt, alzoubi hm, ahmad m, akbar ss, al kurdi b, akour ia. iot for smart cities: machine learning approaches in smart healthcare— a review. future internet. 2021 aug 23;13(8):218. [7] hossain ms, muhammad g, alamri a. smart healthcare monitoring: a voice pathology multimedia systems. 2019 oct;25(5):565-75. [8] pramanik mi, lau ry, demirkan h, azad ma. smart health: big data enabled health paradigm within smart cities. expert systems with applications. 2017 nov 30;87:370-83. [9] poongodi m, sharma a, hamdi m, maode m, chilamkurti n. smart healthcare in smart cities: wireless patient monitoring system using iot. the journal of supercomputing. 2021 nov;77(11):12230-55. [10] tripathi g, abdul ahad m, paiva s. sms: a secure healthcare model for smart cities. electronics. 2020 jul 13;9(7):1135. [11] umair m, cheema ma, cheema o, li h, lu h. impact of covid-19 on iot adoption in healthcare, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, transportation and industrial iot. sensors. 2021 jun 1;21(11):3838. [12] alghamdi a, hammad m, ugail h, abdel-raheem a, muhammad k, khalifa hs, el-latif a, ahmed a. detection of myocardial infarction based on novel deep transfer learning methods for urban healthcare in smart cities. multimedia tools and applications. 2020 mar 23:122. [13] sanghavi j. review of smart healthcare systems and applications for smart cities. iniccce 2019 2020 (pp. 325331). springer, singapore. [14] baba sm, banday mt. application development for wearable internet of things using hexiwear. in2020 7th international conference on signal processing and integrated networks (spin) 2020 feb 27 (pp. 542-548). ieee. [15] murthy bs, peddoju sk. iot-based patient health monitoring: a comprehensive survey. ict analysis and applications. 2021:349-56. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e4 medical data analytics and wearable devices 1 medical data analytics and wearable devices iswarya manoharan1,*, jeslin libisha j2, sowmiya e c3, harishma s4, john amose5 1pg scholar, masters in industrial bioengineering, university of naples federico ii, italy 2assistant professor, department of biomedical engineering, dr. n.g.p institute of technology, coimbatore, india 3assistant professor, department of biomedical engineering, karpaga vinayaga college of engineering and technology, chennai, india 4assistant professor, department of biomedical engineering, kalaingar karunanidhi institute of technology, coimbatore 5assistant professor (sr.g), department of biomedical engineering, kpr institute of engineering and technology, coimbatore, india abstract clinical decision-making may be directly impacted by wearable application. some people think that wearable technologies, such as patient rehabilitation outside of hospitals, could boost patient care quality while lowering costs. the big data produced by wearable technology presents researchers with both a challenge and an opportunity to expand the use of artificial intelligence (ai) techniques on these data. by establishing new healthcare service systems, it is possible to organise diverse information and communications technologies into service linkages. this includes emerging smart systems, cloud computing, social networks, and enhanced sensing and data analysis techniques. the characteristics and features of big data, the significance of big data analytics in the healthcare industry, and a discussion of the effectiveness of several machine learning algorithms employed in big data analytics served as our conclusion. keywords: wearable technology, decision making, rehabilitation, artificial technology, data analytics. received on 30 july 2022, accepted on 05 september 2022, published on 11 october 2022 copyright © 2022 iswarya et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i4.2264 *corresponding author. email: iswaryamanoharan1997@gmail.com 1. introduction with the introduction of new instruments for biomedical research and healthcare digitalization, data in current biomedical practise and research have been rising substantially. recent advances in wearable and big data technology have made it possible to collect and transform biomedical data in real time. by reducing the risk of damage, boosting doctor-patient communication, and exposing previously unseen scanning and sensory aspects, this has the potential to greatly improve healthcare services [1]. analyzing raw datasets for trends, conclusions, and improvement opportunities is the process of data analytics. healthcare analytics employs both recent and old data to produce macro and micro insights to help business and patient decision-making. improved patient care, quicker and more accurate diagnoses, preventive measures, more individualized treatment, and better decision-making are all made possible by the application of health data analytics. it can reduce expenses; streamline internal processes, and other things at the corporate level. health information is any information pertaining to a patient's or population's health. the many health information systems (his) and other technical tools utilised by government organisations, insurance companies, and healthcare practitioners are where this data is obtained. to obtain, store, communicate, and analyse health data, a number of technologies and systems are employed. every second, more and more health care data are available for analysis due to digital data collecting. there is a substantial amount of data being collected in real time due to the growth of electronic record keeping, applications, and other electronic ways of data collecting and storage. because of the complexity of these data sets, conventional eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:iswaryamanoharan1997@gmail.com iswarya manoharan et al. 2 processing tools and storage techniques cannot be utilized. dealing with "big data" necessitates the use of cloud storage. cloud storage is designed to be secure, which is essential when working with private patient data. additionally, it is incredibly economical and has contributed to bringing down the rising cost of healthcare. wearable biosensors, often known as "wearables," have been used as part of a larger, interdisciplinary health care initiative to leverage mhealth to improve data collection, diagnosis, treatment monitoring, and health insights [5, 6]. among the key elements of smart cities is smart healthcare. the area of intelligent healthcare was created in order to better manage the healthcare industry, make better use of its resources, cut costs, and maintains or even raises quality levels. consumable and nonconsumable resources can be broadly categorised in the healthcare industry. consumable resources are those that degrade and run out over time, such as all tools and medical equipment. on the other side, non-consumable resources are those that do not deplete over time. human resources like doctors, nurses, registered nurses, and all other human capital involved in the healthcare process are included in the non-consumable resources. data is growing quickly by several orders of magnitude because of the promise of a smart city. as a result, the iot services are built around these enormous volumes of data, often known as "big data." a bluetooth-enabled in-home patient monitoring system is suggested by cheng and zhuang in [28], making it simpler to identify alzheimer's disease in its early stages. a medical professional can tell whether a target patient is getting alzheimer's disease based on the way they move. they have created a study that demonstrates the viability and practicability of the suggested in-home patient monitoring system. 2. why data analysis in medicine? anyone and everyone can see the effect covid-19 has had on the healthcare sector. the influence covid-19 has had on health care data analytics, however, is something that most people fail to see. according to health it analytics, "big data tools are now used more frequently in healthcare decision-making". big data analytics and predictive models are being used by politicians, academics, and healthcare practitioners to assist manage resources, forecast demand, enhance patient care and results, and implement preventive measures. the fight against covid-19 has benefited greatly from big data and health data analytics. the rate of data entry is almost constant. a greater understanding of how to react and treat patients has been made possible by the analysis of such health data. in recent years, the process of gathering data in healthcare settings has been streamlined. in addition to assisting in bettering daily operations and patient care, the data may now be used more effectively in predictive modeling. we can utilize both datasets to track trends and make forecasts rather than just focusing on historical or present data. we can now take preventative action and monitor the results. in medicine and healthcare, big data analytics can be used to examine huge datasets from hundreds of patients, and data mining techniques can be applied to build predictive models and discover correlations and clusters between datasets [2, 3]. a wide range of reasonably priced technologies has made it possible to continually or frequently monitor physiological parameters and follow changes in a patient's health state or across patient populations. numerous consumer wearables collect information on physiological characteristics like heart rate (hr), skin temperature, and peripheral capillary oxygen saturation in addition to location, physical activity, and other ambient environmental elements [7]. 3. data management in the healthcare an extensible big data architecture was created with the ability to handle a variety of situations, including the early diagnosis of diseases and the identification of emergencies [13]. her for electronic health records. it is made up of a variety of medical data that describes the patient's health state, including the patient's characteristics, prescriptions, diagnoses, lab results, doctor's notes, radiological records, clinical data, and payment notes. it also contains a complete patient medical history that has been digitally stored. for the aim of healthcare analytics, the ehr is a rich source of data. ehr also enables data exchange within the community of healthcare professionals [14]. the healthcare cloud is in charge of storing and retrieving this data. security manager and the health data store are two overlapping components of the healthcare cloud [15]. large-scale health data is typically challenging to manage and store using conventional tools and approaches. as a result, we require a system that can manage the volume and variety of such data. the proposed method accomplishes this by utilising a health data management system that has been deployed using a distinctive cloud database management system architecture [16]. edgecare is a safe and effective data management system for mobile healthcare systems. local authorities are set up to schedule edge servers for processing healthcare data and enabling data trading. a collaborative, multilevel structure is created for the practical implementation of edgecare. following that, a system-wide investigation into safe data exchange and streaming was conducted. in order to try and come up with the optimum incentive system for a consumers and information gathered in the ethical decentralised data trade, the stackelberg game-based optimization technique was also used. in order to show that edgecare provides effective solutions to safeguard healthcare data and facilitate effective data exchange, numerical results accompanied by security analysis are presented. in various circumstances, edge servers can carry out local network administration operations. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first medical data analytics and wearable devices 3 for instance, they are employed to boost decentralised electric car charging and discharging management and to achieve distributed reputation management in vehicular networks [17], [18]. in order to create personal health records, wearable sensors and medical iot devices have lately started to collect personal life-long data (phr) [19]. real-time healthcare analytics enabled by patients, physicians, pharmaceutical researchers, and payers will all receive artificial intelligence (ai) in return. blockchain technology is an additional practical option for managing individual ehrs. for providing their health information to doctors and their research partners, patients can receive tokens as payment through the use of so-called "smart contracts." for instance, health wizz is testing a mobile ehr aggregator app with blockchain and fhir support, which tokenizes data using blockchains, allowing individuals to safely collect, organise, exchange, give, and/or sell their individual health information. in order to improve fostering interaction between healthcare organisations and caregivers and laying the groundwork for improved care, the goal is to give people the same simple control over personal health information as much control over your online financial accounts [20]. with the help of this platform, patients regain control over their personal information. in order to achieve security, accountability, and integrity, the main objective of this study is to retain patient's personal data on the blockchain. patients will have complete control over the blocks that will house their data. the lack of pseudonymity in current healthcare systems is addressed by our platform. "medibchain" will revive people' interest in healthcare while preserving the responsibility, authenticity, anonymization, privacy, and confidentiality that ehr systems are losing. in a smart city, big data applications can assist various industries by enhancing consumer experiences and providing services that make firms run more efficiently (e.g., higher profits or increased market shares). healthcare can be enhanced by enhancing patient care, diagnosis and treatment techniques, medical record management, and preventative care services. big data may assist transportation networks in becoming more environmentally friendly, adjusting to changing demand, and streamlining schedules and routes. 4. data analytics techniques 1. cluster analysis the term "cluster" refers to the activity of grouping a set of data components so that they are more comparable (in a certain sense) to one another than to those in other groupings. clustering is frequently used to discover hidden patterns in the data because there is no goal variable involved. the method is also applied to offer more context to a trend or statistic. 2. cohort analysis this kind of data analysis technique employs historical data to study and contrast the behaviour of a chosen subset of users, which can then be compared to that of other users who have similar traits. with the use of this methodology, it's possible to obtain a thorough understanding of a larger target market or a wealth of insight into customer wants. cohort analysis may be particularly helpful for marketing analysis because it can let you know how your efforts are affecting particular client demographics. consider sending an email campaign inviting users to register on your website as an example. you construct two copies of the campaign for this purpose, each with unique designs, ctas, and ad copy. later, you may follow the effectiveness of the campaign over a longer period of time using cohort analysis to learn which kinds of content are encouraging your customers to sign up, make repeat purchases, or take other actions. 3. regression analysis regression makes use of historical data to analyse how changing or remaining constant values of one or more independent variables affect the value of a dependent variable (linear regression or multiple regression). you may predict potential outcomes and make better judgments in the future by understanding the relationship between each variable and how they evolved in the past. 4. neural networks the neural network serves as the foundation for machine learning's clever algorithms. it is a type of analytics that makes an effort, with little assistance, to comprehend how the human brain would produce insights and forecast values. neural networks change and improve over time because they gain knowledge from each and every data exchange. 5. factor analysis the factor analysis, often known as "dimension reduction," is a method of data analysis that is used to express variation among seen, correlated variables in terms of a possibly smaller number of unobserved variables termed factors. here, the goal is to find independent latent variables, which is a great way to streamline particular parts. a customer review of a product is a useful example for comprehending this data analysis technique. the initial evaluation is based on a variety of factors, including colour, shape, wearability, modern trends, materials, comfort, location of purchase, and frequency of use. based on what you wish to track, the list could go on forever. 6. data mining a technique for analysing data that serves as a catch-all for engineering metrics and insights to provide value, focus, and context. data mining uses exploratory statistical analysis to find relationships, relations, patterns, and trends in order to produce advanced knowledge. adopting a data mining attitude is crucial to success when thinking about how to analyse data; as such, it is a topic worth exploring in more detail. 7. text analysis large collections of textual data are organised in a way that makes them manageable for text analysis, commonly known as text mining in the industry. you will be able to extract the data that is actually pertinent to your organisation and use it to create eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first iswarya manoharan et al. 4 actionable insights that will advance you if you carefully follow this purification process. 8. time series analysis a group of data points gathered over a predetermined time period is analysed using the time series method. the time series analysis is not the only technique used by analysts to gather data over time, even though it allows for more frequent monitoring of the data points than just intermittent monitoring. instead, it enables researchers to comprehend if variables changed over the course of the investigation, how the many variables are dependent, and how the study arrived at its conclusion. 9. decision trees making wise and strategic decisions can be supported by using the decision tree analysis. researchers and business users may quickly assess all the relevant aspects and determine the best course of action by visualising probable outcomes, effects, and costs in a tree-like model. decision trees can be used to examine quantitative data and improve decision-making by allowing you to identify chances for improvement, save costs, and increase operational effectiveness and production. 10. conjoint analysis the conjoint analysis is the last but certainly not least. this strategy is one of the most efficient ways to identify consumer preferences and is frequently used in surveys to discover how people value various characteristics of a good or service. conjoint analysis can be used to identify your customers' preferences, regardless of whether they are more concerned with pricing, features, or sustainability when making purchases. in this way, businesses can specify pricing plans, packaging choices, subscription plans, and more. 5. data analysis in iot iot sensor systems are constrained by their network bandwidth and processing speed. smart apps, on the other hand, a significant amount of information and processor speed are needed for dl-based research. to overcome these limitations, modern smart applications use deep learning (dl) research at the gateway or cloud [10]. applications demand input from users or other smart devices capable of bidirectional communication. the processing time needed by a computational intelligence (ci) algorithm that processes input is also greater than is available on constrained hardware [8]. the aged at home are susceptible to falling due to a variety of issues, including heart attacks, physical impairments, low blood pressure, etc. as a result, the rate of elderly falls also rises with age. in the modern world, elderly people utilize smart phones to call or text someone in an emergency. it is preferable to have an automatic fall detection system that can detect falls with accuracy and transmit an emergency message. in order to detect falls accurately, the system is built with accelerometer and gyroscope sensors. k-nearest neighbors (k-nn) and decision trees, two well-known machine learning algorithms, are used to categorize old people's daily behaviors into sleeping, sitting, walking, and falling [9]. a smart house is one that provides a variety of automated services based on internet of things (iot) gadgets equipped with sensors, cameras, and lighting. these devices can be remotely handled via remote controllers like those available on smartphones and smart speakers. in a smart home, iot devices collect and analyse data on motion, temperature, lighting control, and other variables. they also store more intricate and varied user data. although different smart home devices employ different methods for storing data, this information might be useful in forensic investigations, but it might be challenging to recover valuable information. as a result, it is crucial to gather data from different smart home devices as well as to recognise and examine data that might be used in digital forensics [11]. fog computing is a specialised software enhancement that isolates a few key operations and sends them to the consumer's edge. because of the unique circumstances surrounding the bulk of iot installations, many of these concerns brought by cloud computing are further addressed [12]. the sensor hub framework, which combines a number of technologies, is designed as a tool chain to support the creation of iot-related projects. sensor data is gathered, sent, processed, analysed, and supported for use in a variety of ways. the server side development, including data administration and processing, reporting, push notification, and data monetization, are available via a web browser because the framework is designed to be accessed through the platform as a service (paas) model. the solution's core strength and distinctiveness are found here. integrated development environments (ides) frequently only cover a small piece of the total data management process that the sensor hub handles, and they still need to be installed and maintained. 6. wearable devices the smart healthcare system (shs) uses wearables and implantable medical devices to continually monitor a patient's various vital signs and automatically identify and treat life-threatening medical disorders [24]. however, these expanding shs capabilities raise a number of security issues, and attackers can take advantage of the shs in a number of ways, including by interfering with its regular operation, injecting false data to alter vital signs, and tampering with a medical device to alter the course of a medical emergency [27]. the wireless body area network (wban), made up of wearable electronics, has as its primary objective the collection of physiological data from the human body. variable standards for various system components cause a significant problem at this stage in the communication process between a wireless sensor network (wsn) and wearable technology. one eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first medical data analytics and wearable devices 5 the one hand, zigbee or ieee 802.15.4 technology is used by sensor nodes to communicate. on the other hand, wearable technology typically utilises the bluetooth interface. this stage has been crucial because it is establishing a truly complete connection of diverse iotrelated specificities is essential. the development of a smart, comprehensive medical monitoring system with semi devices that can assess oxygen saturation and acceleration (spo2), and ekg was described by wanyoung et al. in [29]. figure 1 shows the data acquisition and transmission from the people to the physician and server storage. figure 1. data transmission a wearable device with minimum electrocardiogram, a motion sensor, and a blood oxygen saturation sensors board was integrated for user health monitoring. the technology sends physiological data to a base station connected to a computer to make it possible for access to the data across third party apps [30]. smart interactive watch together physical and learning data from school students. physical data includes heart rate, exercise intensity (number of steps taken while walking), frequency of activity, and learning data includes the number of times students raise their hands and respond to questions as well as the corresponding response time in personal or group competitions. it is also accountable for reporting such data to the cloud-based system and teacher-side application for additional analysis. the study is designed to determine the effect of the pupils' participatory outcomes from the proposed methodology on their academic performances. the interactive results are based on the data that the suggested system has gathered from the students' touch responses, team contests, incredibly quick answers, etc. 7. smart healthcare by establishing new healthcare service systems, it is possible to organise diverse information and communications technologies into service linkages. this includes emerging smart systems, cloud computing, social networks, and enhanced sensing and data analysis techniques. by incorporating individuals, procedures, cultures, norms, standards, metrics, and predictions, such systems may generate added features. electronic health records (big data), new mobile solutions, and cloudenabled smart healthcare systems all hold out unprecedented promise for providing efficient, smart, and affordable health care (such as innovative biosensors, wearable tech, and intelligent software agents) [21]. numerous stakeholders must be accommodated by healthcare services. in addition to assisting physicians, caregivers, and patients, services must also assist clinics, pharmacy, specialized suppliers, research universities, insurance, and service users. along with advocacy groups, research facilities, government agencies, state and local governments, and device makers, pharmaceutical, biotech, and it businesses are also present. consequently, collaboration between interdisciplinary teams is necessary for the greatest healthcare services. compared to the conventional software product development cycle, the product development cycle in healthcare is substantially longer, more regulated, and more expensive. to keep prices down, adhere to laws, and maintain timeliness, healthcare product companies must be cautious about their innovation strategy and product offers. information systems are positioned to produce, capture, store, process, and send timely information to all value partners for better healthcare coordination in addition to the inherent function of it in clinical and diagnostics equipment. the two primary areas of intelligent healthcare research are those that relate to patients and those that relate to processes. the research that focuses on wearable technology for patient data collection to be reported to medical institutions is included in the patient related category, although it is not restricted to it. the improvement of policies to guarantee many elements of the healthcare industry is a focus of process-related research. among these are a variety of process definition and management-related factors, such as resource scheduling, quality of service, and resource usage [22]. integration of all smart systems, including smart healthcare, is crucial for the delivery of a smart city. the use of cloud and edge computing is essential for the effective implementation of smart healthcare services. the suggested smart healthcare system's workflow and resource pools are established on the cloud, where the process is carried out and resources are allocated. each resource has a unique edge node that reports when a task eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first iswarya manoharan et al. 6 has been finished. the cloud scheduling algorithm will then redistribute the resource [25]. the suggested approach distinguishes between three emotional states: satisfied, dissatisfied, and indifferent. they used the one versus the rest strategy in the svm. there were several experiments performed. they tested the system utilising the speech signal alone, the picture signal alone, and the combined signals in several sets of experiments. during system training, the optimization and kernel parameters of the svm were fixed. they looked into the rbf and polynomial kernels of two svms. 8. conclusion big data analytics are widely used in the healthcare industry. data formats and big data aspects are described. big data includes a number of properties that require analysis using improved algorithms, something that regular algorithms cannot do. these types of more effective algorithms are discussed. the characteristics and features of big data, the significance of big data analytics in the healthcare industry, and a discussion of the 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(2016). a deep learning approach to on-node sensor data analytics for mobile or wearable devices. ieee journal of biomedical and health informatics, 21(1), 56-64. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first current practices and limitations in e health informatics 1 current practices and limitations in e health informatics umamaheshwari k.1, manju r.2,*, vivekitha v.2 and dinesh t. n.3 1associate professor, kebri dehar university, ethiopia 2assistant professor, department of bme, dr. n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india 3ug student, department of bme, dr. n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india abstract e-health is a field which as seen tremendous growth in the recent times especially after the covid-19 outbreak. e-health offers the potential to provide patients with high-quality care at a reasonable cost in the ease of their own homes. e-health has a wide range of application that includes rehabilitation, cognitive disorder, behavioural therapy, defence application and many more. e-health as a technology is changing tremendously and always been evolving to meet the demands of the current practices. but still, it has certain challenges in implementing such as ethical issues, patient contest etc. artificial intelligence framework capable of using non-consultancy, reinforcement learning, and all three. controlling the processes within the m-health application, choosing the best processes that can be used to alter the user's existing conditions, or selecting the best diagnosis-solution from an array of choices are all supported by intelligent optimization algorithms that can offer faster feedback. keywords: e-health, cognitive disorder, therapy, healthcare. received on 31 july 2022, accepted on 16 september 2022, published on 21 september 2022 copyright © 2022 umamaheshwari k. et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i3.2271 *corresponding author. email: manjufeb62@gmail.com 1. introduction e-health stands out the prospect of being an economical and effective technique of administering healthcare at a reasonable price to patients who would otherwise be underserved or excluded. the viability of e-health could be hampered if a number of ethical and legal issues are not resolved before it is implemented. changes to the patienthealthcare professional connection, the need for informed consent, and responsibility allocation are among the issues that are raised. in addition, their privacy issues, which affect both service providers and health informatics specialists’ positions. it has never been easier to see how digital technologies are transforming the healthcare industry. health care is moving further toward personalized and preventative paradigms by leveraging pervasive technologies that facilitate real-time self-care or monitoring with the introduction of wearable and other internet of things (iot) devices [2]. 2. challenges in health informatics 2.1. early detection of diseases early disease detection not only helps to lower the expense of medical care, but it also serves to save important lives of individuals. for instance, early cancer detection rather than disease discovery at a later stage may save a man's life. one critical challenge is that there is no framework accessible for discovery of illness at its early stage. intuitively health communication applications (ihcas) can be used to get past this barrier. in creator talked about algorithm, which might be applied in early location of parkinson’s diseases [1]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e2 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:manjufeb62@gmail.com umamaheshwari k. et al. 2 the quality of services today and people's lifestyles have altered as a result of information systems and online technologies. among these technology and systems, electronic health is a fresh and effective way to deliver medical and healthcare services to the public while also fostering relationships between doctors, patients, and all other users of the healthcare system. unfortunately, despite the fact that e-health is not a new process and has been used in the majority of specialized medical fields, this technology is still not widely accepted as part of the standard delivery of healthcare. particularly in the area of healthcare and medical services, developing nations face a number of challenges including a lack of physicians and other healthcare professionals as well as financial and resource constraints. capturing, putting away and keeping up information and getting to data in productive way is additionally a huge challenge. effectively keeping up ehr (electronic health record) a huge issue. they require of clear information of benchmarks to urge ideal esteem in actualizing health informatics systems (who, national e-health methodology toolkit, 2012) [1]. patient privacy is a challenge while creating online medical platforms. enforcing privacy and maintaining confidentiality in public are two major privacy concerns that were mentioned. they also convinced that privacy is a key issue in gcc (gulf cooperation council) countries. to overcome this issue, lawful direction is required something else resistance will confront to embrace e-health system. we must make sure that the patient has faith in the system ability to safeguard their personal data. 2.2 complexity of wellbeing care foundation it is complex to manage healthcare infrastructure. for a variety of reasons, healthcare infrastructure can be complex. china, india, and other populated countries in developing nations need to build numerous hospitals and health care facilities. similarly distributed geographic areas have very complicated health care infrastructure. e-health should be supported by such a complex infrastructure, but the current support is insufficient and poorly distributed. such challenges are caused by a variety of circumstances. for illustration in adequate support of power, destitute quality or not accessibility of web access. these issues are more common in rustic ranges [1]. be that as it may, versatile phone foundation is creating at an expanding rate gives openings to execute frameworks with fewer assets. because of this, mobile health can be helpful when there is an inadequate framework in certain places. in any case these arrangements can lead to other issues such as divided data and troubles for venture adaptability. 2.3 neighbourly government scheme nearby healthcare informatics strategies are not developed in most of the world. since approach creators in japan have limited exposure to internet medicine teaching and the potential advantages of this area, e-health appealing techniques are not being implemented. moreover, in jordan, government approaches are not appropriate for improvement of e-health. there is a need to require advancement of medical informatics framework system for way better advancement as well as supportability of e-health ventures. it is supported by legitimate worldwide organizations such as joined united countries (un), world health organization (who). 2.4 ethical challenges there are several ethical concerns raised by the growing digitalization of healthcare and the development of portable and iot devices as data collecting tools. one topic that is frequently brought up again and again is the precise makeup of the segment of consumer tech giants that have all joined the advanced prosperity field, including amazon, apple, google, facebook, and samsung. these businesses provide methods for gathering and analysing economic data, which raises concerns about data security, data veracity, and informed permission. as well as the issues said over of privacy, security, and consent, ethical concerns relating to data proprietorship are frequently talked approximately inside the composing. the development of apps and improvements made for a customer's display help to bridge the gap between therapeutic and non-medical devices and present moral dilemmas regarding how to regulate such advances. the rate of advancement and expanding globalisation of healthcare solutions increase this problem [2]. 2.5 patient consent these ideas are relatively new in the patient-physician relationship, along with information disclosure and informed consent. they have a lot of positive practical benefits and are primarily founded on the autonomy principle. however, there are several barriers that must be overcome in order to carry out the moral duty of beneficence, some of which may hurt the patient or prevent the requirements from being put into practice. this is in particular true when physicians disclose facts and obtain informed consent in a defensive manner out of concern about malpractice claims. the method that adheres to the highest standards of ethics is to sensitively and empathically modify and direct the information in accordance with each patient's unique requirements and preferences. it is important that both parties take responsibility for the informed consent process. there are various sorts of ask almost considers counting or not human subjects. no matter the sort of consider, any ask around tradition need to involvement a thorough ethical assessment. concerning considers approximately counting human subjects, prior support by the committee embraced by the prosperity benefit is required. for considers not counting human subjects, support by a direction overview board is unequivocally endorsed. in development, any collection of person data ought to comply with the french eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e2 current practices and limitations in e health informatics 3 law on data security and opportunity of information as well as the european common data security heading [3]. the process of obtaining a patient’s informed consent includes educating them of the advantages, disadvantages, and possible alternatives to a certain procedure or intervention. in order to voluntarily decide whether to undergo the operation or intervention, the patient must be competent. informed consent, this is a moral and legal duty for medical personnel in the us and originates from the patient's right to determine what transpires to their body. giving informed consent entails evaluating the patient's comprehension, making a real recommendation, and documenting the procedure. all aspects of informed consent must be documented, according to the joint commission. the nature of the procedure, its benefits and drawbacks, and viable alternatives are some of the elements that must be recorded during the informed consent process [4]. 2.6 confidentiality it is essential for all healthcare professionals and institutions to ensure the security, privacy, and protection of patient’s medical information. this is true more than ever in our fastchanging information technology era. in the past, healthcare professionals frequently gathered patient data for research purposes and typically just withheld the names of the patients. this is no longer allowed for access as before instead, protected health information (phi) must be redacted before being used for research if it contains information that might be used to identify a patient or the patient's family, friends, employers, or household members. in order to maintain the confidentiality and security of patient medical documents, the federal government adopted the health insurance portability and accountability act, public law 104191 [5]. the law is divided into two main parts: the privacy rule, which regulates how people's health information is used and disclosed, and the security rule, which establishes federal standards for safeguarding the privacy, integrity, and accessibility of electronically protected health information. the privacy rule lists 18 components that make up phi (protected health information). these identifiers comprise demographic data as well as additional details pertaining to a person's past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition, or the provision or payment of healthcare to a person [5]. inadequate legal protections and a lack of rules have left management's ethical problems unresolved. there isn't just any regulation, but also no explanation of why secrecy isn't always guaranteed. all health care professionals can access patient information even though it is stored in electronic documents by using their own password; however, if they forget it, they can use the default password. although maintaining patient confidentiality is not necessarily mandatory in clinical practise, there is no set policy or legislation that specifies when it is appropriate to violate patient confidentiality without their agreement or that names the individual who should be held accountable for disclosure. there are monitoring systems with fewer facilities to control who has access to patient information, but there are no rules defining the level of password protection [6]. 2.7 flexibility and security all healthcare facilities have access to a useful and adaptable framework for putting security measures in accordance to the hipaa (health insurance portability and accountability act) security rule. some of these requirements must be followed, but others are optional, giving the institution the freedom to implement security and privacy safeguards that are appropriate for its resources, infrastructure, and operation. 2.8 hardware and software in medicine the hardware and software solutions used in hospitals only address a narrow set of needs. they nevertheless produce sensitive patient data, necessitating the use of management healthcare solutions. health portals are an alternative to medical database software for simplifying electronic prescriptions or supplying the medical personnel with the medical knowledge base when needed. these technologies not only improve employee collaboration but also ease operational and financial issues for the hospital. there has recently been a buzz about the impact of ai, ar, and vr in the healthcare software sector. we also have software for medical researchers and scientists that were created specifically to help in the process of finding and analyzing of new drugs [7]. 2.9. provision faced patients can profit from the deployment of innovative technology by receiving high-quality care. all of your medical personnel must, however, be trained in the right use of these equipment. if not, people can be hesitant to use them or uncertain of how to make the most of their features. offering ongoing training and instruction is one method to solve this difficulty. you can either do this internally or by employing a third-party trainer. this helps your staff to stay keep informed of all medical technology advancements. users of cloud-based applications can access data via a variety of devices. for instance, it could be challenging to pinpoint the source of changes if one of a user's two devices is compromised and both devices simultaneously modify the application data or service. the difficulties in obtaining such proof are still unknown, given the rise in potential for credential breach and identity theft in a cloud-based system. as we may mitigate this problem by putting in place a system that enables you to control the actions of all your medical staff from a single location. as a result, it will be simpler to determine the procedures that require automation and to keep track of your team's performance in real time [8]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e2 umamaheshwari k. et al. 4 2.10 interoperability of medical data in healthcare informatics accessing and transferring safe health data has always been difficult. the nature of health data creates a paradox: it's challenging to share since it's delicate and needs a high level of privacy and security, but the inability to access it when necessary could result in serious injury. interoperability and data transfer will become even more essential for providing good healthcare as the world's population’s age and individuals live longer. figure 1 shows the stages of interoperability. figure 1. interoperability health data interoperability benefits businesses in the healthcare sector in addition to assisting doctors and other healthcare professionals in getting a fuller picture of their patients. health plans would have a better knowledge of their utilization rates and demand for services if health information systems were more interconnected. access to demographic data would allow government service providers to identify trends and address the needs of their constituents. furthermore, life science firms would be able to use substantial datasets to facilitate quicker, more accurate research. healthcare organizations frequently encounter certain difficulties as they attempt to make their data and systems more interoperable, despite the fact that many experts and leaders in the field of healthcare agree that doing so would benefit healthcare as a whole. not many businesses are provided with the financial or technical resources necessary to purchase the technological components required to create a system that is genuinely interoperable. organizations should determine their eligibility before updating their health record systems since there may be government grants available. numerous cloud companies also provide pay-as-you-go payment options, which may lower and better anticipate technical costs. healthcare firms with older legacy systems must simultaneously meet interoperability requirements while also updating their systems. healthcare businesses with older legacy systems confront the combined challenges of upgrading their systems while also satisfying interoperability requirements. organizations can achieve both goals by extracting data from ancient systems and making it more available for current applications and programmes. using a hybrid cloud strategy to extract data from ancient systems and make it more available for contemporary apps and programmes, organizations can achieve both objectives. 3. recent trends in e-health 3.1 e-health in smart cities medical healthcare plays a crucial role in both people and planet. despite the fact that our health systems are frequently created around the needs of individuals, the pandemic demonstrated how interrelated we are as people and how our personal health and wellbeing are influenced by the health and wellbeing of the communities in which people survive. the emergence of smart health communities re-imagine public health, and well-being into pro-active address the drivers of medical care in cities. when systems and data are integrated and interoperable across core health and other services, such as safety of public, environmental health, social and emergency services, are digitally connected "smart city" can make health care smarter. cities can promote public health in a variety of ways, not just by integrating digital technologies or even by expanding access to conventional healthcare. cities that are planned and built for people, with "green sidewalks" and public areas serve a healthy atmosphere. smart cities necessity is increasing exponentially over the globe. thus, they fulfill the requirements for public by the various application facilities like internet of things, smart mobility, smart grid and not the least as smart healthcare. given that e-health is a subset of smart health, the specified smart city's ict infrastructure and s-health are related. however, there are distinctions between s-health and m-health [9]. 3.1.1 mobile health informatics as a result of two nih big data to knowledge centers, mhealth focus is on expediting the use of data obtained from mobile and wireless devices, such as wearable sensors, in clinical research and care, even though it covers a wide range of issues. figure 2 shows the traits in m-health in which the largest new possibility is in using m-health informatics is to directly measure and enhance patient health and health conditions outside the conventional constraints of the hospital and clinic due to the personal omnipresent nature of mobile devices. these informatics solutions have been developed for a range of demographics, but due to a interoperability employers registries healthcare associations application providers health plans laboratories eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e2 current practices and limitations in e health informatics 5 lack of advancements and user engagement, they may easily lose their novelty over time. the creation and implementation of technology can be problematic for a number of reasons, including high costs, continuously shifting schedules, and challenges creating compliant data storage systems [10]. figure 2. traits in m-health artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have been widely used in the domains of autonomous driving, recommender systems in social media and online commerce, natural language understanding, and questionanswering software. additionally, the conduct of medical research is increasingly changing due to artificial intelligence. in areas including patient deterioration, readmissions, mortality, enhanced documentation, illness diagnosis, end-of-life care, patient transportation, and chronic care management, predictive modelling in healthcare has been driven by digital transformation. the emergence of cloud computing, big data, and the internet of things has made it possible to connect and exchange data using gadgets equipped with sensors, software, and other technologies. these advancements have also made it possible to perform large-scale computations, store shared resources, and compile data from a variety of sources [11]. 3.2 e-health trend in battlefield to receive a virtual visit before recently a patient had to be present at the patient centered medical home. veterans and those in the military have particular difficulties in accessing behavioral healthcare. it also includes barrier to receiving treatment due to concerns associated with the privacy and the stigma about behavioral healthcare. in addition to these military officials are subjected to frequent relocation and deployment cycle which basically leads to a life style where they are frequently separated from their families and irregular access to healthcare professional. e-health being one the unique technology which has the potential to support the general wellbeing, fitness status of the active-duty service members. these types of services in e-health can named as e-health behavior which refers to the use of internet (or) mobile devices for health related activities such as looking up health information online, virtual communication with clinical teams and use of health management tools like patient portals etc.-health behavior analysis is built upon the following factors such as • individual characteristics such as gender, age, race and marital status. • environment variable such as income and education and socio economics. • military branch • finally the health status of the person these factors combined will be able to understand the behavioral model as shown in the figure 3. figure 3. general health factors research has stated that incorporating these factors along with artificial intelligence and deep learning methodologies e-health will be able to meet the tremendous demands of the soldiers in the battlefield. it also states that virtual interaction is found to be very effective as that of the face to face interaction and will help in the behavioral improvement of the soldier. it will also reduce the major barrier such as transportation, distance between the battlefield and healthcare professional. e-health has the capacity to provide continuous monitoring of the soldiers vital in the battlefield via proper telehealth infrastructures which is termed as virtual health. virtual health involves the usage of medical device like glucose monitor, electrocardiogram etc. that can transmit information to the healthcare service providers via internet along with high resolution video for better diagnose of the community health intelligence multitasking environment conciousness eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e2 umamaheshwari k. et al. 6 problem. the use of virtual healthcare reduces the need for evacuation of the soldiers because based on the consultant’s suggestion, the practitioners are frequently able to treat or manage the medical problem at the deployed location. for an instance if a soldier is injured on a battlefield he or his fellow troops will able to communicate with a frontline medic to stabilize the injured solider with the help internet using some communication device until he can receive more advanced care. another scenario is when a soldier to attached to various vital monitoring sensors which, when attached the soldier sends all his vitals to the healthcare professional screen. this will help in understanding that which soldier needs immediate care by comparing their vitals such as heart rate and blood pressure. these will also help us in identifying the exact geographical location of the soldier which helps in communication and also in identifying the causalities. use of e-health in army medicine enables the soldiers enables the patient to receive best healthcare service regardless of where they are stationed. 3.3 e-health trends in serious games gamification is always on trend since engages audience at a large scale by injecting fun and improving the cognitive skill of the user. in recent days many industries such as elearning, marketing and many more has seen to use games for its advantage. similarly, for its simplification and benefits healthcare is also evolving by incorporating games in its certain therapy, monitoring and diagnoses of diseases. the commonly accepted definition for gaming was proposed by sebastian deterding who stated as “gamification is the use of game design element in non-game content”. serious games are nothing but games with purpose especially for non-recreational purpose with focus on areas like business, economics, industry, military and healthcare. challenges, levels, badges and loops are some of the design structures of games which keep them engaged. by using the above mentioned structure serious games in healthcare can be designed with pleasant activities with long term engagement task that are otherwise thought to be demotivating. depending on the objective of the e-health service to be provided they are classified as either patient based service or non-patient based service as shown in the figure 4. based on the patient service as shown, they are classified as follows • rehabilitation • treatment • detection • health monitoring • education/training based on the non-patient service they are classified based on wellness as follows • exercise • sleep pattern • maintaining a healthy body weight • limiting alcohol use • training of healthcare professional figure 4. classification of serious game for e-health based on player some major serious e-health games are mainly aimed towards patient centered games especially cognitive disability. the development e-heath games towards cognitive disorder not requires software but also hardware interface with it such as smart phone and virtual reality which may provide a better gaming experience. by using games such as neuro-orb research demonstrates that there is a significant improvement in the working memory of the patient with cognitive disorder such as alzheimer's disease. other most popular application of e-health in games is especially for rehabilitation. video games are specially designed which requires the movement of physical body to interact with the game which can be used as a form of exercise in rehabilitation medicine. through such games it is also possible to monitor the performance of the patient with functional impairment which may be caused due to stroke and paralysis. some game involves peculiar movement of limb and body parts to perform action games such as dance games, step games, games balance training and games for hand training to improve the motor action of the patient. with right software and hardware setup for the serious game in e-health it is possible track the improvement of the patient from any location. with many advancements in technology e-games may be also used in training of healthcare professional in performing surgery, home based elderly patient monitoring etc. are some other areas of improvement 4. conclusion the development of tools that can significantly improve the lives of people struggling with physical and mental health disorders will be made possible through m-health research [11]. understanding the field strengths and shortcomings eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e2 current practices and limitations in e health informatics 7 through a map of its history can help guide future advancements. the requirement for a mobile application that boosts individual productivity and helps us in a crucial from this vantage point, it is possible to claim that the m-health application provides a solution that satisfies the requirements. although similar applications have been described in the literature, m-health differs from these ones in that it makes use of technologies like expert systems, intelligent optimization, signal-image processing, and data mining. framework in artificial intelligence that is competent of using reinforcement learning, nonconsultancy, and all three. intelligent optimization algorithms that can deliver faster feedback are also supported in processes like controlling the processes within the m-health application, choosing the best processes that can be used to change the user's current status, or choosing the best diagnosis-solution among diverse alternatives [12]. reference [1] christensen h, hickie ib. using e‐health applications to deliver new mental health services. medical journal of australia. 2010 jun;192:s53-6. 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[7] onik mm, aich s, yang j, kim cs, kim hc. blockchain in healthcare: challenges and solutions. inbig data analytics for intelligent healthcare management 2019 jan 1 (pp. 197-226). academic press. [8] lohiya r, john p, shah p. survey on mobile forensics. international journal of computer applications. 2015 jan 1;118(16). [9] vel'asquez w, munoz-arcentales a, salvach'ua ji. e-health services role in a smart city-a view after a natural hazard. engineering letters. 2019 dec 1;27(4). [10] das a, rad p. opportunities and challenges in explainable artificial intelligence (xai): a survey. arxiv preprint arxiv:2006.11371. 2020 jun 16. [11] shariful im. theories applied to m-health interventions for behavior change in low-and middle-income countries: a systematic review. telemedicine and e-health. 2018 oct 12. [12] afrah ia, kose u. mhealth: an artificial intelligence oriented mobile application for personal healthcare support. arxiv preprint arxiv:2108.09277. 2021 aug 18. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e2 efficient substitution box design with chaotic logistic map and linear congruential generator 1 an efficient substitution box design with a chaotic logistic map and linear congruential generator for secure communication in smart cities muhammad asim hashmi 1,2,* , noshina tariq 3 1 department of electronics, quaid-i-azam university, islamabad, pakistan (e-mail: mahashmi@ele.qau.edu.pk) 2department of electrical and computer engineering, air university, islamabad, pakistan 3 department of avionics engineering, air university, islamabad, pakistan (e-mail: noshina.tariq@mail.au.edu.pk) abstract the study provides a unique method for creating an efficient substitution box (s-box) for advanced encryption standards using a chaotic logistic map (clm) and a linear congruential generator (lcg) (aes) for secure communications in a smart city. the pseudo-random number generator (prng), which is further examined, is constructed using an extensive search of reasonable possibilities for the initial seed and set parameters. using statistical testing, the performance analysis of the new s-box is assessed. additionally, the resilience of differential, as well as linear cryptanalysis, is shown. it is derived using other features, including nonlinearity, the bit independence criterion (bic), and the strict avalanche criterion (sac). the suggested s-box has good potential and is usable for symmetric key cryptography, according to the features of the new s-cryptographic box. keywords: security, smart city, cryptography, encryption, aes, s-box received on 07 november 2022, accepted on 19 january 2023, published on 23 march 2023 copyright © 2023 muhammad asim hashmi et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v7i1.2845 *corresponding author. email: mahashmi@ele.qau.edu.pk 1. introduction irrevocable protection of both a transmitter and a receiver is essential for a secure communication network in smart cities. for all modern techno-driven smart automation, the security of the communication between the application and the controlling network is one of the major concerns. for this considerable problem both encryption and decryption are practical answers to this significant issue. encryption makes communication unintelligible for any unauthorized user or intruder. to make communication networks in smart cities, modern encryption schemes provide a solution for secure information flow. some markedly essential applications for which security and privacy are topmost concerns include (but are not limited to) raspberry pi-based automation systems for smart homes and smes that primarily need secure communications [1]. communications in smart cities meal preparation [2], and waste management [3] needs end-toend security. all protocols and architecture presented in [4] require secure communications. the modern standards for data encryption, which are known as advanced encryption standards (aes), were first released by nist in the year 2000 and comprised four primary operations, which are substitution byte, shift rows, add round key, and mix columns [5] [6]. this algorithm's replacement step, essential to encryption, is carried out via a 256-element array known as the substitution box (s-box). the design of this s-box in aes eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 mailto:mahashmi@ele.qau.edu.pk mailto:noshina.tariq@mail.au.edu.pk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ muhammad asim hashmi and noshina tariq 2 is crucial since it makes the algorithm difficult to break and causes confusion and dissemination [7]. plain and encrypted text in a cryptogram that uses a simple substitution approach is identical. substitution and permutation are the two fundamental conditions for a nonlinear encryption method that must be met for a system to be impermeable to frequency analysis [8]. for this reason, the s-box is tested for additional cryptographic features and intended to resist cryptanalysis. bit independence criterion (bic), nonlinearity, strict avalanche criterion (sac), bijectivity, linear and differential approximated probabilities, and sac-bic analysis all contribute to the s-box robustness. most researchers employed chaotic maps to create new s-boxes last year to solve this research problem; some of the most prominent ones are covered in the literature review. this paper presents a simple and quick approach to creating a cryptographically efficient s-box for aes. it offers a circular shift approach and develops an s-box with many iterations for a single output at the level of random number generation. additionally, the approach permutes the intended vector to enhance statistical tests used in cryptography. with the help of this technique, the suggested s-box is further statistically assessed for the cryptographic application by the needed cryptographic features, demonstrating the method's broad applicability. the following is a list of the suggested model's key contributions: 1. a novel and fast method is proposed to design a cryptographically efficient s-box for aes. 2. more than one iteration is used to generate a single output at a random number generation level while designing the proposed s-box. 3. a robust s-box has been presented by introducing the circular shift technique. 4. a permutation matrix of 256 entries-based maps is presented based on simple programming. the next sections of the paper are as follows: section 2 provides the literature review. section 3 gives some insight into the background. section 4 presents the proposed model to design an s-box for aes. the statistical testing and performance of the proposed s-box are analyzed, and discussions are presented in section 5, while section 6 is the conclusion section. 2. literature review from classical data security requirements to modern applications like energy efficient routing protocols [30], unmanned aerial vehicles [31], block chain technology [32], efficient operations in data storage [33], mobile communication networks [34], the cryptographic algorithm plays a vital role in data security. by examining the effects of the chaos base approach on block ciphers, jakimoski et al. [9] produced a chaos-based s-box. this s-box is significantly nonlinear and appropriate for cryptography applications where encryption is needed, and substitution is part of the encryption technique. grouping tang et al. [10] developed a technique for designing s-boxes that yields dynamically powerful cryptographic substitution box. it used a two-dimensional (2d) discretized chaotic baker map cryptographically superior to jakimoskie’s s-box. gondal et al. [11] introduced a novel approach for s-box design that was significantly nonlinear. the approach relied on a chaotic bakers map and a scaled-down version of an 8-bit block cipher. the behavior in a chaotic logistic map renders the algorithm incomprehensible, adding to the unpredictability. iqtidar et al. [12] applied a chaotic logistic map's output to a linear functional transformation. they presented a novel method for creating a considerably nonlinear s-box with all the cryptographic features. zhongyun et al. [13] suggested a unique strategy equivalent to previous relevant s-boxes using the entire latin square method. qing et al. [14] developed a more extensive chaotic range and many chaotic features utilizing the logistic-sine system. akram et al. [15] suggested a novel approach for designing an s-box based on a chaotic sine map. the approach utilized to create this s-box is straightforward to apply. this method secures the permutations and maps generated values with a permutation matrix of 256 entries. the map used (in this method) is based on simple programming and does not have solid mathematical roots. using credibility complex fuzzy sets (ccfs), yahya et al. [28] proposed a novel scheme for designing an s-box for the encryption of images and discussed the results for the suitability of the proposed s-box for image encryption. 3. background the methods, which are chaos-based pseudo-random number generators (prngs), played a vital role in designing robust cryptographic algorithms in the previous two decades. some markedly on the top are included in section 1.1. we took two different prngs to design a novel s-box. the structure of the aes algorithm for a single round of encryption is shown in figure 1 [29]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 efficient substitution box design with chaotic logistic map and linear congruential generator 3 figure 1. aes encryption process except for these four steps, all other steps, such as adding a round key, mixing columns, and shifting rows, are linear operations [12] [15]. that is why the s-box is the only factor that introduces nonlinearity in an algorithm. the substitution operation is described in figure 2. figure 2. substitution in aes in the substitution process, the entry or plain text gets changed according to the value of the location in the sbox. for example, if the value of the plain text is "3f," then the value at the 63rd location of the s-box will be substituted accordingly. the number of rows and columns is equal (16x16) for aes, whichfulfills all the required substitution possibilities in the american standard code for information interchange (ascii) [5]. this substitution is possible only if a randomly permuted unique string of [0-255] elements exists. an unpredictable random number generator is required to generate this string unintelligibly and robustly [13]. a chaotic logistic map is a well-known chaos-based random number generator for its sensitive output upon a slight change in initial conditions. a good prng means highly unpredictable output for miner input values change. for all prngs, there are some fixed parameters and seed values. in our experiment for both prngs, which are chaotic logistic maps and linear congruential generators, we have some fixed parameters and a seed value, as described in tables 1 and 3 of section 3. 4. proposed architecture the design scheme is presented by division into two subsections. subsection 4.1 elaborates on the scheme of random permutations with the help of clm, while subsection 4.2 describes the mapping vector. finally, a novel s-box is generated using both vectors, as shown in fig. 3. figure 3. proposed architecture 4.1. chaotic logistic map a logistic map is highly sensitive to initial conditions and is an efficient chaotic map [12]. mathematically clm is defined in equation 1. xn+1 = xn(1 xn) (1) in equation 1, xn+1 refers to the output of the seed and initial conditions for the nth iteration. the xn defines the seed value for the first iteration or the output of previous iterations. in this study, values ranging from 0-255 are extracted from gf (28), and a proportional gain f is applied to make the output suitable for usage with gf (28). following a significant amount of trial and error, the initial values that were established for seed, modulus, and constant variable are shown in table 1. table 1. initial values for chaotic logistic map variable value f 19731 xn 0.167 create a string using a hundred thousand iterations, then reformat it into a 100x1000 matrix. following that, a circular shift of ten columns and ten rows, respectively, is applied to the matrix. now, choose just the tenth or its multiplier part of this string to generate an s-box, which will provide us with an array containing 10000 items. after removing any instances of duplication from this array, the resultant matrix (g) will consist of the 256 items presented in the following order. figure 4 presents the matrix in its entirety, designed using matlab. p ro p o se d a rc h it e ct u re 1. chaotic logistic map 2. linear congruential generator eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 muhammad asim hashmi and noshina tariq 4 algorithm 1 clm random permutations required: permuted unique random values in gf(28) 1: parameters: prng equation, scaling factor, seed 2:int seed xn (xn = seed value) 3: int scaling factor s (s = 19731) 4: int modulus m (m = 256) 5: for iteration 1:1000000 6: x(i+1) = x(i+1)* (1-x(i+1)) mod m 7: output = circular shift (output,10,10) 8: fori = 1:100000 9: clm (i) = output (i*10) 10: end figure 4. the figure presents the initial 16x16 matrix designed by applying initial conditions to the chaotic logistic map. the simulations are made using matlab. 4.2. linear congruential generator the quickest random number generator is a linear congruential pseudo-random number generator (lcg) [17]. equation 2 mathematically defines the lcg. x(n+1) = (axn+ c) mod m (2) the values of both multiplicative factor a and additive factor c lie between 0 and the value of modulus m. x(n+1), which refers to the output value of the nth iteration. in contrast, x(n) refers to the seed value for the n th iteration. in our experiment, we employ lcg as a mapping vector. table 3 shows the beginning values for lcg in this experiment. table 2. initial conditions for linear congruential generator variable value multiplicative factor (a) 11 addition factor (c) 7 modulus (m) 19731 since the values of both the multiplicative and additive factors are less than 19731 and greater than 0, it fulfills the primary requirement of lcg. the output vector is confined to modulus n using these starting values, as shown in equation 3. m(i) = x(i) mod n (3) using this pseudo-random number generator, this work creates an initial string after 10000 iterations. it builds a vector from them by defining them in mod 257 and generates a vector of (1-256). in this regard, table 4 shows the permutation matrix (p). algorithm 2 lcg permutations required: permuted unique random values from (1-256) 1: parameters: prng equation, additive factor, seed 2:int seed xn (xn = seed value) 4: int multiplicative factor “a” (a = 7) 5: int multiplicative factor “c” (c = 11) 6: int modulus m (m = 256) 7: int modulus m (n = 257) eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 efficient substitution box design with chaotic logistic map and linear congruential generator 5 8: for iteration 1:10000 6: x(n+1) = (axn+ c) mod m 8: fori = 1:1000 9: lcg (i) = output (i*10) mod 257 ; unique 10: g(i) = lcg (i); 11: end this vector specifies the permutation positions for the matrix g. figure 4 depicts the planned s-box. this mapping vector leads to the final design of the substitution box. the proposed s-box is presented in figure 6. row 1 and column 1 in figure 5 determine the locations of entries. s(p(i)) = g(i) (4) algorithm 3 mapping 1: int p, g 2: for i=1:256 3: s(p(i)) = g (i) 4: end figure 5. figure shows the mapping functions for initial clm permutations. the matrix is designed using linear congruential generator with initial conditions figure 6. the resultant substitution box after mapping locations of clm with the function of lcg. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 6 5. performance analysis the suggested s-cryptographic box's features are subjected to a statistical analysis in which the probability of nonlinearity, bic, bijectivity, sabic, sac, differential approximation, and linear are considered. 5.1 bijectivity the s-box is bijective [14] if and only if every input has a unique mapping on the output and correspondingly unique values in gf (28). figure 7. proposed steps in performance analysis 5.2 nonlinearity high nonlinearity is the most crucial statistical feature of an s-box. this feature reveals a shift in the bits between two successive encrypted sentences [19]. a nonlinear boolean function g(x) may be represented by its walsh spectrum [20]. figure 8 depicts the suggested s-box nonlinearity from a function perspective. figure 8. proposed s-box nonlinearity 5.3 bit independence criterion for this reason, webster and tavares [22] developed the bit independence criteria. analyzing the s-box's strength using this technique is standard practice. it indicates that any shift in the bits sent out does not affect any other pairs. that is to say, during nonlinearity in sequence or the avalanche effect, if a single bit in the input is altered, its behaviour at the output is unrelated to any preceding bits. the bic-sac and bic nonlinearity are calculated, shown in figure 9 and figure 10, and a comparison is given in table 4. figure 9. bic-nl comparison bijectivity non-linearity bit independenc e criterion strict avalanche criterion linear approximati on probability muhammad asim hashmi and noshina tariq eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 efficient substitution box design with chaotic logistic map and linear congruential generator 7 figure 10. bic-sac comparison 5.4 strict avalanche criterion the strict avalanche criterion (sac) was developed by webster and tavares [22]. by this definition, if a single bit of input is complemented, then all bits of the output will change with probability half. thus the function satisfies the sac. half of the encryption bits will be reversed if one bit of plain text is inverted. table 6 presents the results of the sac analysis; figure 11 provides a visual comparison. whereas table 4 compares the value to that of other well-known coded s-boxes. table 3. strict avalanche criterion results sac maximum 0.59 sac minimum 0.41 average value 0.498 variance 0.042 . figure 11. sac comparison table 4. comparison table of results 5.5 linear approximation probability linear approximation probability (lap) is the most significant value of an event's imbalance. in order to provide an equal number of output and input bits, the mask selects the parity of the bits [23]. the proposed sbox show the lap values better than ref [ 20, 24, 25, 26] and comparable to ref. [15, 27]. the graphical comparison of laps is in figure 12, and the comparison is given in table 4. figure 12. lap comparison 5.6 differential approximation probability an s-box's differential approximation probability (dap) measures differential uniformity [23]. the dap method ensures that each differential at the input is uniquely mapped at the output. it is ideal for making this approximation probability as low as possible. the optimal value of this probability is 0.062. the comparative analyses of lap and dap are provided in table 4. it scheme nl bic sac sacbic lap dap proposed 104 102 0.498 0.503 0.132 0.0390 anees et al.[24] 102 103 0.507 0.502 0.141 0.0468 khan et al.[25] 100 101 0.481 0.496 0.171 0.0625 khan et al.[26] 102 102 0.517 0.479 0.164 0.210 wang et al.[20] 104 103 0.485 0.0.476 0.141 0.0390 balezi et al. [15] 105 105 0.500 0.500 0.125 0.0468 kim et al.[27] 104 104 0.503 0.503 0.109 0.0468 hussain et al.[12] 112 112 0.504 0.504 0.062 0.0156 optimal 120 120 0.500 0.500 0.062 0.0156 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 8 shows that the proposed method has dap values better than ref. [15, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27]. the graphical comparison of daps is shown in figure 13, and the comparison is given in analysis table. figure 13. dap comparison the comparison table shows that the nonlinearity of the proposed s-box is 3.921% better than khan et al. [25] and 1.942 % better than anees et al. [24] and khan et al. [26]. the bic values are 0.985% better than khan et al. [25]. the difference in sac from the optimal value is 4.27% better than the lowest value [25] in table 4. lap values are lower than anees et al. [24], khan et al. [25], khan et al. [26], and wang et al. [20]. similarly, the dap values are better than anees et al. [24], khan et al. [25], khan et al. [26] and balezi et al. [15], and kim et al. [27]. the results show that the proposed method for designing the s-box is prominently applicable to cryptographic applications. 6. conclusions this article presents a basic but effective way of creating s-boxes. a chaotic logistic map and a linear congruential pseudo-random number generator create a reliable s-box architecture. the created s-box is compared to the codified s-box to assess its resistance to cryptanalysis assaults. the effectiveness of the created s-box demonstrates the tremendous potential of this aes s-box for cryptographic applications. for all applications in smart cities where encryption is required, this is a vital part of the algorithm on application level uses. future applications of this technique include the encryption of still images and moving video by breaking a movie down into individual frames and encrypting each one in turn. the cryptographic properties of this work show that the method fulfills all required properties for secure communication between a transmitter and a receiver. references [1] tirumala, s. s., nepal, n., & ray, s. k. (2022). raspberry pi-based intelligent cyber defense systems for smes and smart-homes: an exploratory study. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities, 6(18), e4-e4. [2] namasivayam, b. (2022). ai for healthy meal preparation in smart cities. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities, 6(4), e1-e1. [3] mccurdy, a., peoples, c., moore, a., & zoualfaghari, m. (2021). waste management in smart cities: a survey on public perception and the implications for service level agreements. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities, 5(16). [4] sajid, a., shah, s. w., & magsi, t. (2022). comprehensive survey on smart cities architectures and protocols. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities, 6(18). [5] daemen j, rijmen v. the design of rijndael: aes the advanced encryption standard.springerverlag: berlin, 2002. [6] khan, m., azam, n. a. (2015). right-translated aes gray s-boxes. security and communication networks, 8(9), 1627-1635. [7] ferguson n, schroeppel r, whiting d. a simple algebraic representation of rijndael. in selected areas in cryptography sac01, lncs2259, 2001; 103?11. [8] shannon, c.e., 1949. communication theory of secrecy systems. the bell system technical journal, 28(4), pp.656715. [9] jakimoski, g., kocarev, l.: chaos and cryptography: block encryption ciphers based on chaotic maps. ieee trans. circuits syst. 48(2), 163 (2001) [10] g. tang, x. liao, y. chen, a novel method for designing s-boxes based on chaotic maps, chaos solitons fractals 23 (2005) 41319 [11] muhammad asif gondal, abdul raheem, iqtadar hussain, a scheme for obtaining secure s-boxes based on chaotic baker map, 3d res. 5 (august)(2014) 17 [12] hussain, i., shah, t., gondal, ma and mahmood, h., 2013. an efficient approach for the construction of lft sboxes using chaotic logistic map. nonlinear dynamics, 71(1), pp.133-140. [13] hua, z., li, j., chen, y., and yi, s., 2021. design and application of an s-box using a complete latin square. nonlinear dynamics, 104(1), pp.807825. [14] lu, q., zhu, c. and deng, x., 2020. an efficient image encryption scheme based on the lss chaotic map and single s-box. ieee access, 8, pp.25664-25678. [15] belazi, a. and abd el-latif, a.a., 2017. a simple yet efficient s-box method based on chaotic sine map. optik, 130, pp.1438-1444. [16] radwan, a.g., 2013. on some generalized discrete logistic maps. journal of advanced research, 4(2), pp.163-171. [17] marsaglia, g., 1972. the structure of linear congruential sequences. in applications of number theory to numerical analysis (pp. 249-285). academic press. [18] zamli, k. z., kader, a., din, f., alhadawi, h. s. (2021). selective chaotic maps tiki-taka algorithm for the s-box generation and optimization. neural computing and applications, 1-18 [19] javeed, a., shah, t. (2020). design of an s-box using rabinovichfabrikant system of differential equations perceiving third order nonlinearity. multimedia tools and applications, 79(9), 6649-6660 muhammad asim hashmi and noshina tariq eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 efficient substitution box design with chaotic logistic map and linear congruential generator 9 [20] wang, y., xie, q., wu, y., du, b. (2009, june). a software for xbox performance analysis and test. in 2009 international conference on electronic commerce and business intelligence (pp. 125-128). ieee [21] pedro miguel sosa. calculating nonlinearity of boolean functions with walsh-hadamard transform. 2016 [22] a. webster, s. tavares, on the design of s-boxes advances in cryptology: proc. of crypto?5, santa barbara, usa. lecture [23] m. matsui, linear cryptanalysis method of des cipher advances in cryptology, proc. eurocrypt?3. lncs, vol. 765, springer, berlin, 1994, pp. 386 [24] anees, a. and ahmed, z., 2015. a technique for designing substitution box based on van der pol oscillator. wireless personal communications, 82(3), pp.1497-1503. [25] khan, m., shah, t. and batool, s.i., 2016. construction of s-box based on chaotic boolean functions and its application in image encryption. neural computing and applications, 27(3), pp.677-685. [26] khan, m. and asghar, z., 2018. a novel construction of substitution box for image encryption applications with gingerbreadman chaotic map and s8 permutation. neural computing and applications, 29(4), pp.993-999 [27] kim, j., phan, r. c. w. (2009, june). a cryptanalytic view of the nsa's skipjack block cipher design. in international conference on information security and assurance (pp. 368-381). springer, berlin, heidelberg [28] yahya, m., abdullah, s., almagrabi, a. o., & botmart, t. (2022). analysis of s-box based on image encryption application using complex fuzzy credibility frank aggregation operators. ieee access, 10, 88858-88871. [29] heron, s. (2009). advanced encryption standard (aes). network security, 2009(12), 8-12. [30] hassan, m. abul, et al. "energy efficient hierarchical based fish eye state routing protocol for flying ad-hoc networks." indonesian journal of electrical engineering and computer science 21.1 (2021): 465-471. [31] hassan, muhammad abul, et al. 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"new trends and advancement in next generation mobile wireless communication (6g): a survey." wireless communications and mobile computing 2021 (2021). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e6 artificial intelligence is changing health and ehealth care 1 artificial intelligence is changing health and ehealth care akshaya avr1, vigneshwaran s2, and ram kumar c3,* 1associate professor, department of mba, dr. ngp institute of technology, coimbatore, india. 2assistant professor (sr.gr), department of bme, sri ramakrishna engineering college, coimbatore, india. 3associate professor, department of bme, dr. ngp institute of technology, coimbatore, india. abstract artificial intelligence (ai) will be used more and more in the healthcare industry as a result of the complexity and growth of data in the sector. payers, care providers, and life sciences organisations currently use a variety of ai technologies. th e main application categories include recommendations for diagnosis and treatment, patient engagement and adherence, and administrative tasks. although there are many situations in which ai can execute healthcare duties just as well as or better than humans, implementation issues will keep the jobs of healthcare professionals from becoming extensively automated for a substantial amount of time. the use of ai in healthcare and ethical concerns are also highlighted. keywords: artificial intelligence, clinical decision support, electronic health record systems. received on 31 july 2022, accepted on 19 september 2022, published on 21 september 2022 copyright © 2022 akshaya avr et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-ncsa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i3.2274 1. introduction role of ai in the 1950s, artificial intelligence (ai) was primitively visualized and gestated to authorize a computer or machine to make it think and learn like humans. ai is extensively utilized by organizations like facebook (for example recognizing who is in a photo), and google (for example availing search ideas or giving the quickest route to drive). in spite of the fact that, inside the medical care area, ai has just continued little strides toward a tremendous and multifaceted open door [1]. 1.1 usage of ai in healthcare there are numerous capacities where ai is coming into view as a game-changer in healthcare sectors. below are some samples in use today which include: *corresponding author. email: profcramkumar@gmail.com in radiology to automate picture examination and diagnosis ai arrangements are being created. this will assist with finishing the field of interest on a sweep to a radiologist, to portable proficiency and decrement human blunder [1]. opportunities are likewise available for completely automated answers for all the while read and decipher an output without human oversight that could assist with entitling prompt translation in dismissed geologies. most recent showings of upgraded growth recognition on mris and cts are extending the development towards new opportunities for the counteraction of cancer. for the occasion, a partnership in the usa has previously presented on fda leeway to examine and decipher cardiac mri pictures for an ai-fuelled stage [2]. in drug discovery to detect new potential therapies from enormous databases of information or data on currently existing medicines that could be recreated to spot severe threats ai solutions are being developed. an example could be taken for the ebola eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e3 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:profcramkumar@gmail.com akshaya avr, vigneshwaran s and ram kumar c 2 virus. it improves the efficiency, performance, and success rate of drug development, in response to deadly disease threats by energizing the method to introduce new drugs throughout the market [3]. risk identification in patient ai arrangements can supply constant help to clinicians to help with distinguishing the gamble of patients overwhelmingly of patient information from history. a new center integrates re-entrance gambles, and highlighting patients who have a raised chance of getting back to the emergency clinic in no less than 30 days of release from the medical clinic [4]. many organizations and healthcare areas are creating arrangements relying upon the information in the patient's electronic health record (ehr), by hoisting pushback from payers on wrapping hospitalization costs connected with re-confirmation as of now. the possibility to foresee the gamble of sickness connected with cardiovascular relies simply upon a still picture of a patient's retina was shown in ongoing work. in primitive care/triage numerous associations are performing direct-to-patient answers for emergency and they give exhortation through voice or visit based communications. it gives quick, adaptable admittance to major inquiries and clinical issues [5]. it could likewise aid in keeping away from superfluous excursions to the gp, diminishing the rising requirement for crude healthcare suppliers for a succession of conditions, and giving basic direction which wouldn't be available to the number of inhabitants in individuals living in remote dismissed regions. however, the idea is exact and clear, these arrangements actually request significant free approval to show patient wellbeing and viability [6]. 1.2 challenges of ai in healthcare to make ai successful, it requires a tremendous measure of information of the patients to train and streamline the performance of calculations. in healthcare, getting to these data sets has wide issues: patient privacy and the ethics of data ownership is getting to clinical records of the patients exceptionally safeguarded. lately the information dividing among medical clinics and ai organizations has made numerous issues and raised a few moral inquiries: • who owns and controls the patient data and what is need to develop ai solution? • whether hospitals be allowed to continue to provide vast quantities of their patient data even it is accessed by the 3rd party ai companies? • how can patient’s privacy can be protected according to the patient’s rights? • what are the consequences should there be a security breach? • what will be the impact of new regulations, like the general data protection regulation (gdpr) in europe. this explains the sometimes the patient data may be deleted, this creates trustless among patients and the required organisation should pay multimillion dollar penalty. quality and usability of data is very important consideration, in industries all the data are reliable and accurately measured. but, in healthcare the data may be subjective and inaccurate with issues including: • clinician’s notes in electronic medical records are difficult to understand and may not written or typed in order. • data inaccuracy: the data of a patient may be wrongly entered. for example, the patient may be a smoker but, the data entered inaccurately that patient is nonsmoker. • data sources are isolated across many services providers, so the patient’s full profile may not be accessible, so that it creates consequence on monitoring the health of the patient. developing regulations for cloud based technology and constantly evolving obvious challenges. • what are the ways to protect the patients? • how will you provide adequate oversight of a solution that is learning and evolving on medical devices? • ai solution involve direct patients’ interaction with oversight of the clinician, it makes the question, whether the technology is the “practitioner of medicine”, rather than device. • in this case, will it need to operate on license and would a national board will agree to grant this licence? • this will lead to the question that who is liable should anything go wrong? • if diagnosis or treatment is controlled by this technology, does ai companies give assurance for patient’s health? • will insurance companies ever underwrite an ai tool? user adoption is another barrier to utilisation. • the human touch of interacting with a doctor can be lost with these types of tools. it raises the question that, whether the patients trust the software than humans? this makes a trust issues on doctors. • meanwhile are clinicians willing to embrace these new solutions? • in an industry that still widely uses the fax machine, it may be unrealistic to expect rapid adoption rates beyond proof of concept studies. 2. ai in healthcare healthcare is consistently taking on the computerized reasoning (ai) advances that are unavoidable in current business and daily life. computerized reasoning in eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e3 artificial intelligence is changing health and ehealth care 3 healthcare can possibly help suppliers in numerous areas of patient consideration and functional methodology, empowering them to expand on current arrangements and take care of issues all the more rapidly. most of ai and healthcare advances are exceptionally pertinent to the healthcare business, yet clinics and other healthcare associations might utilize altogether different methodologies. despite the fact that a few articles on the utilization of man-made reasoning in healthcare claim that it can perform similarly as well as or better than humans at certain methodology, such as diagnosing illness, it will be a lot of time before ai in healthcare replaces humans for a large number of clinical undertakings [7]. yet, it's as yet a secret to many. what is man-made brainpower in medication, and what are its benefits? what will future utilizations of ai in healthcare seem to be? how could it be presently utilized? will it in the long run supplant individuals in basic activities and healthcare administrations? we should inspect a couple of the different utilizations of man-made consciousness and the benefits that the healthcare area stands to gain from its application. 2.1 types of ai of relevance to healthcare a gathering of innovations all in all alluded to as man-made consciousness. albeit most of these innovations are quickly pertinent to the healthcare business, there is a huge reach in the specific methodology and occupations they help. the definition and portrayal of some particular ai advancements that are critical to healthcare follow [8]. 2.1.1 machine learning one of the most common sorts of man-made reasoning in the clinical field is ai. there are various varieties of this wide procedure, which is at the groundwork of different ways to deal with ai and healthcare innovation. accuracy medication is the most broadly utilized utilization of customary ai in the field of man-made brainpower in healthcare. it is a major step in the right direction for the vast majority healthcare associations to have the option to gauge which treatment approaches would be best with patients in light of their qualities and the treatment system. ai and accuracy medication applications, which make up most of ai in healthcare, require information for training with known results. we call this directed learning [9]. profound learning-based man-made brainpower in healthcare likewise utilizes discourse acknowledgment by means of regular language handling (nlp). profound learning models frequently incorporate not many highlights that have importance to human eyewitnesses, making it challenging to assess the model's result. 2.1.2 natural language processing since the 1950s, ai specialists have pursued grasping human language. nlp includes applications for discourse acknowledgment, text examination, interpretation, and other language-related goals. semantic nlp and factual nlp are the two main strategies. the exactness of acknowledgment has as of late superior thanks to a limited extent to measurable nlp, which depends on ai (especially profound learning brain organizations). it needs a sizable "corpus" or collection of language to be gained from. the age, cognizance, and arrangement of clinical documentation and distributed research contain most of nlp's purposes in the healthcare area. nlp frameworks are equipped for leading conversational ai, investigating unstructured clinical notes on patients, making reports (for instance, on radiological tests), and deciphering patient exchanges [10]. 2.1.3 rule-based expert systems during the 1980s and succeeding many years, master frameworks based on data sets of "in the event that" rules overwhelmed the field of computerized reasoning. throughout recent many years, they have been widely utilized in the healthcare business for "clinical choice help" purposes, and they are still regularly utilized today. today, a ton of providers of electronic health records (ehrs) furnish a bunch of rules with their framework. a bunch of rules in a certain information domain should be worked by human specialists and information engineers for master frameworks. they are easy to comprehend and work well to a certain degree. be that as it may, they regularly fail when there are a ton of rules (normally north of a couple thousand) and when the guidelines begin to struggle with each other. furthermore, it tends to be testing and tedious to refresh the principles assuming that the information domain does. more methodologies in light of information and ai calculations are progressively supplanting them in the healthcare business [11]. 2.1.4 physical robots actual robots are now notable, with in excess of 200,000 modern robot establishments happening every year around the world. they perform present undertakings including lifting, moving, welding, or gathering things in areas like manufacturing plants and distribution centers, as well as shipping supplies in clinical offices. all the more as of late, robots have become simpler to instruct by having them do an ideal undertaking, and they have expanded their ability to work helpfully with individuals. also, as more ai capacities are incorporated into their "brains," they are turning out to be more keen (actually their working frameworks). apparently sensible that over the long haul, actual robots would remember the very progressions for knowledge that we have seen in different parts of computerized reasoning [12]. careful robots give specialists "superpowers," upgrading their vision, ability to make exact, insignificantly intrusive cuts, close injuries, and other surgeries. they were first supported in the usa in 2000. notwithstanding, huge decisions are as yet made by human specialists. gynaecologic medical procedure, prostate medical procedure, and head and neck a medical eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e3 akshaya avr, vigneshwaran s and ram kumar c 4 procedure are among the normal surgeries performed with mechanical medical procedure [13]. 2.1.5 robotic process automation this innovation executes coordinated computerized organization errands — those including data frameworks — as though they were being completed by a human client who was adhering to a bunch of directions or rules. they are more affordable, less complex to program, and more straightforward than different sorts of ai. mechanical cycle robotization (rpa) principally utilizes server-based programming as opposed to genuine robots. to act as a semi-wise client of the data frameworks, it relies upon a mix of work process, business rules, and 'show layer' combination. they are utilized in the healthcare business for routine obligations like charging, earlier approval, and patient record refreshes. they can be utilized to remove information from, say, faxed photographs and feed it into value-based frameworks when paired with different advances like picture acknowledgment [14]. in spite of the fact that we have just talked about these advancements separately, they are continuously being joined and coordinated. for instance, robots are gaining ai-based "brains," and rpa and picture acknowledgment are being consolidated. maybe these advances will turn out to be so entwined later on that composite arrangements will turn out to be more conceivable or down to earth. 3. diagnosis and treatment applications for the beyond 50 years, illness diagnosis and treatment have been at the focal point of ai in healthcare. indeed, even while early rule-based frameworks been able to really analyze and treat infection, clinical practice didn't completely embrace them. they weren't recognizably more precise at diagnosing than humans, and the communication with doctor work processes and health record frameworks wasn't perfect. in any case, whether rules-based or algorithmic, it can habitually be trying to coordinate clinical cycles and ehr frameworks with the utilization of man-made reasoning in healthcare for analytic and treatment plans. when contrasted with idea precision, combination concerns have been a greater barrier to the mainstream sending of ai in healthcare. figure 1 shows the cutting edge time of healthcare industry in ai [15]. clinical programming providers offer an enormous number of free ai and healthcare capacities for diagnosis and treatment that are centered around a solitary discipline of medication. while still in the beginning phases, a few ehr programming suppliers are beginning to incorporate fundamental ai-fuelled healthcare examination capacities into their item contributions. healthcare suppliers who utilize independent ehr frameworks will either have to set out on huge mix projects themselves or utilize outsider sellers who have ai capacities and can associate with their ehr to profit from the utilization of ai in healthcare completely [16]. 3.1 administrative applications computerized reasoning has a few regulatory purposes in the healthcare business. in contrast with patient consideration, the utilization of computerized reasoning in emergency clinics doesn't change the game very so a lot. be that as it may, involving man-made reasoning in medical clinic organization can bring about huge expense reserve funds. claims handling, clinical documentation, income cycle the board, and clinical records organization are only a couple of the uses of ai in healthcare. ai is one more utilization of computerized reasoning in healthcare that is pertinent to the organization of claims and instalments. matching information from a few databases can be utilized. a great many claims are presented consistently, and guarantors and suppliers should affirm that they are exact. time, cash, and assets are undeniably saved when code issues and bogus claims are found and revised [17]. 4. ai and robotics are revolutionizing healthcare ai is ending up being more fit at completely finishing human-like positions even more quickly, capably, and sensibly. both mechanical innovation and ai have huge likely in the field of healthcare. like in our daily lives, our healthcare eco-structure is ending up being progressively more subject to ai and mechanical innovation. figure 1 shows the eight models that show the current status of this shift have been highlighted. figure 1. modern era of healthcare industry in ai one of ai's most prominent potential benefits is to keep individuals healthy so they don't require specialists as regularly, if by any means. individuals are now profiting eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e3 artificial intelligence is changing health and ehealth care 5 from purchaser health utilizations of computerized reasoning (ai) and the web of clinical things (iomt). applications and applications for innovation support proactive maintenance of a healthy way of life and urge people to take on healthier ways of behaving. it gives clients command over their health and prosperity. also, ai further develops healthcare laborers' ability to understand the ordinary examples and prerequisites of the patients they care for, empowering them to offer unrivalled criticism, course, and backing for maintaining health [18]. ai is as of now being utilized to all the more definitively and early analyze illnesses like cancer. the american cancer society claims that an enormous level of mammograms gives deluding results, letting one know in two healthy ladies they have cancer. mammogram audits and interpretations utilizing ai are currently multiple times quicker and 99 percent exact, which takes out the need for inconsequential biopsies. ai is likewise being utilized related to the development of shopper wearables and other clinical gadgets to screen beginning phase coronary illness, permitting specialists and different parental figures to all the more actually screen and distinguish possibly lethal episodes at prior, more treatable stages. healthcare organizations are involving ibm's watson for health to send mental innovation to open gigantic volumes of health information and empower diagnostics. watson can survey and store dramatically more clinical information than any human, including each clinical distribution, side effect, and contextual investigation of a treatment's viability around the world. to address squeezing healthcare issues, google's deepmind health teams up with specialists, researchers, and patients. the method joins frameworks neuroscience and ai to make brain networks that intently look like the human brain and contain strong broadly useful learning calculations [19]. prescient examination can uphold clinical independent direction and activities and assist with focusing on authoritative exercises. further developing treatment includes the arrangement of huge health information with reasonable and opportune decisions. one more region where ai is beginning to flourish in healthcare is the utilization of example acknowledgment to recognize individuals in danger of getting a condition or seeing it deteriorate inferable from way of life, ecological, genomic, or different factors. ai can help clinicians in adopting a more thorough strategy to sickness the executives, better direction care plans, and assist patients with bettering oversee and conform to their drawn out therapy programs, as well as assisting suppliers with recognizing persistently sick people who might be in danger of an unfriendly episode. for over 30 years, clinical robots have been being used. they range from fundamental research facility robots to very complex careful robots that can figure out close by a human specialist or convey strategies all alone. they are utilized in medical clinics and labs for redundant positions, restoration, exercise based recuperation, and backing for individuals with long haul issues notwithstanding a medical procedure. as we close to the furthest limit of our lives, sicknesses like dementia, cardiovascular breakdown, and osteoporosis are making us die in an alternate and more slow way than earlier ages. moreover, it is a phase of life where forlornness is a typical issue [20]. robots can possibly totally change end-of-life care by empowering patients to maintain their autonomy for longer and diminishing the requirement for inpatient care and nursing offices. ai is making it workable for robots to go much further and communicate socially with humans to continue to mature personalities sharp through "discussions" and other social associations. it requires a long investment and cash to get from the examination lab to the patient. a medication should go from an exploration lab to a patient for a normal of 12 years, as per the california biomedical exploration affiliation. of the 5,000 drugs that start preclinical testing, just five arrive at human testing, and only one of these five is at any point approved for use in humans. moreover, from the exploration lab to the patient, fostering another treatment will run an organization a normal of us $359 million. one of the later utilizations of ai in healthcare is drug disclosure. it could be feasible to decisively diminish an opportunity to showcase for new drugs as well as their costs by applying the latest advancements in ai to automate the medication disclosure and medication reusing processes. ai makes it workable for trainees to encounter sensible reenactments in a manner that is preposterous with straightforward pc driven calculations. a trainee's solution to an inquiry, decision, or suggestion can be trying in a way that an individual can't due to the improvement of regular discourse and an ai pc's capacity to draw momentarily from a huge data set of situations. also, the training system can consider the trainee's earlier reactions, permitting it to ceaselessly adjust the assignments to accommodate their learning prerequisites. moreover, training should be possible anyplace because of the force of ai coordinated in cell phones, making it conceivable to do brief get up to speed meetings following testing cases in a facility or while voyaging [21]. 5. ethical implications finally, there are such a large number of moral ramifications around the utilization of ai in healthcare. before, healthcare responsibility was made totally by humans, and the usage of savvy machines for helping with those claims’ issues of liability, clarity, approval, and confinement. perhaps the mass basic issue to recognize in the present advancements is straightforwardness. the vast majority of the ai calculations explicitly profound learning calculations used for picture investigation are essentially unrealistic to decipher. a patient will liable to be need to know why he/she has prompted a diagnosis of cancer with a piece of picture data. albeit, the doctors who are for the most part acquainted with their activity, might not be able to explain profound learning calculations [22]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e3 akshaya avr, vigneshwaran s and ram kumar c 6 ai frameworks will make blunders without a doubt in patient diagnosis and treatment and setting up responsibility for them may be hard. numerous episodes were experienced in which patients as opposed to getting from a sympathetic clinician get clinical data from ai frameworks. ai frameworks in healthcare are likewise connected with algorithmic predisposition, they might be not foreseeing illness in view of an easy going component, and anticipating it relying upon orientation or race gives more prominent occupation. many changes including moral, clinical, word related, and mechanical changes are anticipated to be experienced with ai in healthcare. it is vital for set up systems to screen major questions, act capably and set up administration components to put down a boundary to negative ramifications in healthcare organizations, as well as legislative and administrative bodies. that would be viewed as the most vivacious and consecutive innovation to influence human social orders, subsequently it will require smoothed out consideration and insightful standards and strategy for additional years [23]. 6. future of ai in healthcare finally, there are such a large number of moral ramifications around the utilization of ai in healthcare. before, healthcare responsibility was made totally by humans, and the usage of savvy machines for helping with those claims’ issues of liability, clarity, approval, and confinement. perhaps the mass basic issue to recognize in the present advancements is straightforwardness. the vast majority of the ai calculations explicitly profound learning calculations used for picture investigation are essentially unrealistic to decipher. a patient will liable to be need to know why he/she has prompted a diagnosis of cancer with a piece of picture data. albeit, the doctors who are for the most part acquainted with their activity, might not be able to explain profound learning calculations [24]. ai frameworks will make blunders without a doubt in patient diagnosis and treatment and setting up responsibility for them may be hard. numerous episodes were experienced in which patients as opposed to getting from a sympathetic clinician get clinical data from ai frameworks. ai frameworks in healthcare are likewise connected with algorithmic predisposition, they might be not foreseeing illness in view of an easygoing component, and anticipating it relying upon orientation or race gives more prominent occupation. many changes including moral, clinical, word related, and mechanical changes are anticipated to be experienced with ai in healthcare. it is vital for set up systems to screen major questions, act capably and set up administration components to put down a boundary to negative ramifications in healthcare organizations, as well as legislative and administrative bodies. that would be viewed as the most vivacious and consecutive innovation to influence human social orders, subsequently it will require smoothed out consideration and insightful standards and strategy for additional years [25]. 7. conclusion there are a lot of issues to defeat which are driven by proven and factual variables which incorporate a maturing populace of individuals and raised paces of ongoing illness and the necessity for cutting edge creative arrangements in healthcare is clear and exact. ai fueled arrangements took little drives towards naming central points of contention, yet it needs to arrive at a huge gross activity on the worldwide healthcare area, regardless of the significant media perception adjoining it. it could assume a main part in how healthcare frameworks representing things to come work, enlarging clinical assets and guaranteeing ideal patient results in the event that few key difficulties can be tended to before very long. references [1] hechler e, oberhofer m, schaeck t. deploying ai in the enterprise. it approaches for design, devops, governance, change management, blockchain, and quantum computing, apress, berkeley, ca. 2020. [2] lee si, celik s, logsdon ba, lundberg sm, martins tj, oehler vg, estey eh, miller cp, chien s, dai j, saxena a. a machine learning approach to integrate big data for precision medicine in acute myeloid leukemia. nature communications. 2018 jan 3;9(1):1-3. [3] sordo m. introduction to neural networks in healthcare. open clinical: knowledge management for medical care. 2002 oct. [4] fakoor r, ladhak f, nazi a, huber m. using deep learning to enhance cancer diagnosis and classification. inproceedings of the international conference on machine learning 2013 jun (vol. 28, pp. 3937-3949). acm, new york, usa. [5] vial a, stirling d, field m, ros m, ritz c, carolan m, holloway l, miller aa. the role of deep learning and radiomic feature extraction in cancer-specific predictive modelling: a review. transl cancer res. 2018 jun 1;7(3):803-16. [6] davenport th, glaser j. just-in-time delivery comes to knowledge management. harvard business review. 2002 jul 1;80(7):107-1. [7] hussain a, malik a, halim mu, ali am. the use of robotics in surgery: a review. international journal of clinical practice. 2014 nov;68(11):1376-82. [8] davenport t, kalakota r. the potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare. future healthcare journal. 2019 jun;6(2):94. [9] grosan c, abraham a. rule-based expert systems. in intelligent systems 2011 (pp. 149-185). springer, berlin, heidelberg. [10] ross c, swetlitz i. ibm pitched its watson supercomputer as a revolution in cancer care. it’s nowhere close. stat. 2017 sep 5. [11] davenport th. the ai advantage: how to put the artificial intelligence revolution to work. mit press; 2018 oct 16. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e3 artificial intelligence is changing health and ehealth care 7 [12] coulter a, collins a. making shared decision-making a reality. london: king's fund. 2011. [13] thrall jh, li x, li q, cruz c, do s, dreyer k, brink j. artificial intelligence and machine learning in radiology: opportunities, challenges, pitfalls, and criteria for success. journal of the american college of radiology. 2018 mar 1;15(3):504-8. [14] schmidt-erfurth u, bogunovic h, sadeghipour a, schlegl t, langs g, gerendas bs, osborne a, waldstein sm. machine learning to analyze the prognostic value of current imaging biomarkers in neovascular age-related macular degeneration. ophthalmology retina. 2018 jan 1;2(1):2430. [15] aronson sj, rehm hl. building the foundation for genomics in precision medicine. nature. 2015 oct;526(7573):336-42. [16] rysavy m. evidence-based medicine: a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. ama journal of ethics. 2013 jan 1;15(1):4-8. [17] rajkomar a, oren e, chen k, dai am, hajaj n, hardt m, liu pj, liu x, marcus j, sun m, sundberg p. scalable and accurate deep learning with electronic health records. npj digital medicine. 2018 may 8;1(1):1-0. [18] shimabukuro dw, barton cw, feldman md, mataraso sj, das r. effect of a machine learning-based severe sepsis prediction algorithm on patient survival and hospital length of stay: a randomised clinical trial. bmj open respiratory research. 2017 nov 1;4(1):e000234. [19] nait aicha a, englebienne g, van schooten ks, pijnappels m, kröse b. deep learning to predict falls in older adults based on daily-life trunk accelerometry. sensors. 2018 may 22;18(5):1654. [20] low ll, lee kh, hock ong me, wang s, tan sy, thumboo j, liu n. predicting 30-day readmissions: performance of the lace index compared with a regression model among general medicine patients in singapore. biomed research international. 2015 oct;2015. [21] davenport th, hongsermeier t, mc cord ka. using ai to improve electronic health records. harvard business review. 2018 dec 13;12:1-6. [22] volpp kg, mohta ns. patient engagement survey: improved engagement leads to better outcomes, but better tools are needed. nejm catalyst. 2016 may 12;2(3). [23] berg s. nudge theory explored to boost medication adherence. chicago: american medical association. 2018. [24] commins j. nurses say distractions cut bedside time by 25%. health leaders. 2010 mar. [25] utermohlen k. four robotic process automation (rpa) applications in the healthcare industry. medium. 2018. [26] huang cy, yang mc, huang cy, chen yj, wu ml, chen kw. a chatbot-supported smart wireless interactive healthcare system for weight control and health promotion. in2018 ieee international conference on industrial engineering and engineering management (ieem) 2018 dec 16 (pp. 1791-1795). ieee. [27] deloitte llp (firm). from brawn to brains: the impact of technology on jobs in the uk, 2015. [28] manyika j, chui m, miremadi m, bughin j, george k, willmott p, dewhurst m. a future that works: ai, automation, employment, and productivity. mckinsey global institute research, tech. rep. 2017 jun;60:1-35. [29] davenport th, kirby j. only humans need apply: winners and losers in the age of smart machines. new york: harper business; 2016 may 24. [30] davenport th, dreyer k. ai will change radiology, but it won’t replace radiologists. harvard business review. 2018 mar 27;27. [31] char ds, shah nh, magnus d. implementing machine learning in health care—addressing ethical challenges. the new england journal of medicine. 2018 mar 15;378(11):981. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e3 intelligent dashboards to monitor the occurrences in smart cities – a portuguese case study eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 intelligent dashboards to monitor the occurrences in smart cities – a portuguese case study r. silva, m. silva, g. caldas, f. portela* and h. santos algoritmi center, university of minho, azurem campus, guimarães, braga, portugal abstract this article concerns the needed response by the professional fire brigade regiment (fbr) in the city of lisbon. to solve and answer the question "how to improve fbr intervention requests when an emergency is detected?" the project aims to create a functional prototype containing interactive dashboards allowing the analysis of indicators that improve decision capacity. as results attest, 58% of false alarms are cancelled even after the emergency and rescue means have been activated to the location. about 97% of the suspended requests are not cancelled before the means are sent. the number of records of occurrences tends to increase over the 8 years of study. sunday is the weekday with the highest number of associated records, with 23.33%, specifically at 9 am and 8 pm. autumn is the season with more occurrences, with 26.51%. more than 50% of the occurrences are in the administrative services closing time and more than 50% of the registrations send only one vehicle to the place. these indicators aim to understand if these variables are probabilistically associated with requests for interventions to be able to anticipate these scenarios and help in decision-making whenever necessary. keywords: smart cities, business intelligent, intervention requests, data science, big data.. received on 25 october 2022, accepted on 17 december 2022, published on 27 december 2022 copyright © 2022 r. silva et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i4.2796 1. introduction the united nations (un) analysed the growth for the next 30 years. the world population is expected to grow by 2 billion people, from 7.7 billion to 9.7 billion [1]. it is possible to perceive a high population growth with a transition to an increasingly urbanised population which paves the way for different challenges in different areas, especially in the sustainable development of a smart city [2]. one of these challenges is developed in this article, which is, the assurance of response to emergency requests by the emergency and rescue services. based on this scenario, technology emerges as a predominant factor to assist the management of cities today. today’s smart cities have certain patterns in common, such as: *corresponding author. email: cfp@dsi.uminho.pt  according to weiss et al. [3] smart cities are cities that focus on a particular model, with a modern vision of urban development and that recognize the growing importance of information and communication technologies in directing economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, and quality of life in general;  with the increasing development of technologies associated with cities, a high amount of data to be generated daily was observed. as previously understood, there are certain challenges that a smart city must overcome and the amount of data to be created by the technological infrastructures inserted in cities is one of them;  the search for solutions through technology stands out and there are more and more solutions to fight these challenges to ensure the sustainable growth of cities; mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:cfp@dsi.uminho.pt eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first r. silva, et al. 2  however, beyond the huge amount of data to be generated, it is important to understand that these have different formats, making the analysis process much more complex and intensive for those who use these data. furthermore, all cities have their mode of operation, i.e., no city is similar and therefore the needs tend to be specific and objective when making decisions; the portuguese capital city, lisbon, is the case study of this article. it has about 500,000 inhabitants, which explains why requests for help during an emergency tend to be rather critical. the lisbon professional fire brigade regiment (fbr) is the focus entity of this article. it is responsible for the safety of people and goods in the city through rescue actions, prevention, and civil protection support. the article’s objective is to help solve a challenge suggested by lxdatalab, a management and urban intelligence centre of lisbon. this challenge focus on:  historical homologous periods of the occurrences of the fbr and other entities, characteristics, state and causes of the occurrences and degree of risk, among others;  three main focuses: a temporal analysis, an understanding of the occurrences’ characteristics and finally the mode of intervention and the current state of the occurrences;  a big data problem, in the sense of transforming this high amount of data into a highly effective and efficient process for the fbr when decision-making is necessary, specifically in an emergency intervention request;  solve the problem and answer the question "how to improve fbr intervention requests when an emergency is detected?";  developing a functional prototype containing interactive dashboards allowing the analysis of citystate indicators and the identification of variables that may be associated with intervention requests to anticipate these scenarios; the data were analysed in the “talend data quality” tool to understand the data provided, and their quality and get some conclusions. after that, the data provided in 3 spreadsheets (.xls) was properly organised in a data warehouse to reach a result. the data warehouse structure consisted of a table of facts and eleven dimensions, which were placed in a sql database using the workbench management tool. the transformations that some attributes had to undergo were performed through mysql commands. the result was illustrated with dashboards using the data visualization tool, tableau. the article is structured into seven chapters. the first chapter addresses the objective of the case study and its relevance. the second chapter refers to the background, explaining the basic concepts present in the practical development of the article and the kind of work already done regarding the subject. three previous works were studied. the third chapter presents the materials and methods used for the execution of the article as well as the data model and tools used. the fourth chapter shows the results of the case study. the fifth chapter presents the discussions, an analysis of the main results obtained, as well as measures to act on these events. in the sixth chapter, one can read the conclusions of the development of the prototype and in the seventh chapter the bibliographical references used for the development of the article. 2. background today, there is a variety of new challenges in our cities, created by technological advances and urban development. these challenges lead to the smart city concept. for anthopoulos [4] a smart city is defined as an innovative city that uses information and communication technologies and other means to improve the quality of life, the efficiency of operations and urban services. however, managing a smart city is not an easy process. making a good decision at a critical moment can lead to a more efficient operation, a more profitable city, or perhaps more satisfied citizens. this is how the concept of business intelligence (bi) emerges. at the moment, bi is understood as a set of data that has been collected from the past and the present to make better decisions about the future. this data is selected through certain criteria to draw conclusions. business intelligence makes the whole process of decisionmaking more intelligent, clearer, and as likely to be the future [5]. equally important, the concept of data science emerges, and this concept came from the accelerated growth in government and trade data creation [6]. according to cady [7] the concept is explained through complex algorithms and analysis that organise the data, being possible to obtain forecasts, to help in decisionmaking with greater accuracy, speed and efficiency, concrete hypotheses are obtained, being also possible the anticipation of future scenarios. however, managing and analysing data always offer great benefits to organisations as it is understood. however, as a result, they also imply other challenges. in this way, the concept of big data has expanded to explain a situation in which the logistics of storage, processing or data analysis have surpassed the traditional operational skills of organizations [8]. 2.1. smart-cities (and type of occurrences) the “smart-city” concept has become extremely popular and consists of the use of a plethora of it innovations to make cities smarter for the citizens. this concept first appeared in the 1990s and the main focus was on the impact of new information and communication technologies on modern infrastructures within cities. https://www.talend.com/products/data-quality/ https://dev.mysql.com/doc/workbench/en/wb-intro.html https://www.tableau.com/ eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first intelligent dashboards to monitor the occurrences in smart cities – a portuguese case study 3 a dense environment, like that of cities and capitals, requires its subsystems to work as one system with intelligence being infused into each subsystem. according to [9,10], they indicated that the smart city has six possible characteristics: smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living. with smart-city it is easier to acknowledge the occurrences happening, and the prevention of them, so the response to requests for intervention in an incident by the emergency and rescue services would be more effective. anepc (portuguese national emergency and civil protection authority) identified 143 types of occurrences, for example, fires, road accidents, harsh weather, and hazards [11]. several works with positive impacts have been done combining data science and iot and using actual occurrences, disasters or socio-economic data to create smart and sustainable cities. [12–14]. 2.2. related works the purpose of this subchapter is to analyse works related to the inherent paper. a portuguese decision support system the first work analysed refers to a dissertation under the theme “cidades inteligentes: um novo paradigma urbano estudo de caso da cidade do porto". the objective of this work was to understand and demonstrate what is the situation in the city of porto, as a future potential intelligent city [15]. this dissertation studied several projects, one in particular to create a centre that would support decisionmaking in the city. the creation of this centre includes elements from the areas of mobility, police, firefighters, civil protection and environment, among others. however, it is an experimental pilot work, unique in portugal. this centre has tried to respond to the city's problems, for example, when someone needs to break a door down it takes an average of 2h30 to do it. given the objectives presented in this work, it provides knowledge and explains the characteristics of the city of porto, intending to create a project to support the decisionmaking for the different problems of the city later on. however, it is only experimental, whilst the present article elaborates a functional prototype of interactive dashboards with real data from the city of lisbon, which found patterns and variations to help decision-making. a project that investigates mobility in cities the second work analysed concerns a dissertation named: "centro de operações integrado: câmara municipal do barreiro cidades inteligentes análise de um estudo de caso". the goal of this dissertation was to analyse and prepare an integrated solution between existing domains at barreiro municipality, creating all the essential conditions, both in terms of infrastructure, communications and the response provided by the municipality to the needs and expectations of its citizens [16]. this dissertation focused on the challenge of mobility in cities. however, this challenge was not only solved by the increase of existing public transport fleets, but also with their modernisation and use of technologies enabling their control and management. even though the goal has been achieved, there was no real implementation of the project as the data sources were not provided, as well as some essential application resources. the work elaborated in the article has an added value, as the lisbon municipality provided the actual data for the project, and in addition to traffic data, climate data and historical data of fbr occurrences were also provided. app: building intelligence system the third work analysed no longer concerns portugal, but boston. firefighters when responding to an emergency call of an occurrence like a fire in a building, have a very short time to evaluate the situation and plan a response. although governments collect a wide variety of information about each building in cities, most fire departments do not have access to this data, leading to unnecessary risk exposure and the inability to make informed firefighting decisions [17]. thus, building intelligence system emerged as a web application that integrates seven sources of city data to provide an optimised view of individual buildings in boston. this technological solution, although well implemented, only responds to requests for help in the type of occurrences such as fires. the other objective of this article is to find variables that might be associated with any type of emergency request. 3. materials and methods for the development of the project, it was necessary to use different tools for different purposes as well as different methodologies. firstly, case study was used with the objective of understanding in detail the case under study to help formulate the problem that the article intends to answer [18]. then, in a second moment, lab experiments was used, which consisted in performing a set of tests and configurations on the chosen variables to analyse the data under study, which in the practical part was developed and tested [19]. with these experiments, one was able to comprehend and identify the trends of the variables under study to understand how they evolve and respond to the paradigm of this article. the first phase did not fully use the case study methodology because only a case was created, but it was essential to understand the topic. the data science team did not have any expertise in managing occurrences at the beginning, and this phase was crucial to understanding the issues and getting sensitive to this area. this phase involved studying the environment and selecting the case from the several datasets received before proceeding with the lab experiment work. the experimental work was eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first r. silva, et al. 4 developed to answer the main questions (kpis formulated), so an extract transforming and loading (etl) process was conducted. then, a set of intelligent dashboards was prepared using the selected data. the research process followed the lab experiments steps combined with a case study: 1. examine the need for the experiment (case study); 2. define the objective for the experiment (case study); 3. define measures; 4. identify the important variables; 5. perform experiments; 6. analyse results; 7. act on results; 8. create reports. figure 1 explains and illustrates what kind of technologies and tools were used as well as their designation. as illustrated in figure 1, the initial focus for the project development was to have data sources to feed the analytical system intended to be built. these data sources were provided by lxdatalab in spreadsheet (.xls) format. these data divide into 3 spreadsheets, and each has 65,000 occurrences, which makes a total of 195,000 occurrences. once this stage was concluded, an analysis of the data provided in the "talend data quality" tool was undergone to understand what data were provided, their quality and conclusions about the attributes that feed the data sources. after understanding the characteristics of the data, that is, analysing the type of data delivered and what format they were in, it was intended to store them in a structured database. therefore, it was necessary to build a central structure in which the data were optimised and integrated. the data chosen to respond to the case under study and after being properly organised were placed in a sql database using a workbench management tool. the transformations that some attributes had to undergo were performed through mysql commands. in the last stage of the process, after the database was operational and properly loaded, the tableau tool was used for the analysis of the data obtained. in this stage, interactive dashboards were created to find patterns and facts that help decision-making when needed by the emergency and rescue services. in table 1 it is possible to visualise which tasks were performed in each tool. table 1. tool used for the development of the tasks inherent to this paper tool tasks talend etl (extract transform load) mysql data base tableau data visualization equally important was to understand how the data were organized and to do this kimball's approach was used. a data warehouse was built, through data collection, subject-oriented, integrated, non-volatile and time-varying to support management decisions [20]. for this, an entity and relationship diagram (erd) was developed. figure 2. entity and relationship diagram (erd) figure 2 shows the erd with the respective table designations, the relationship between them and the respective attributes such as metrics, primary keys, and foreign keys. the model is conceived in a star model containing a fact table, and eleven-dimension tables. the fact table, called “occurrences_management” is made up of sixteen foreign keys and four facts that result from the connection to the dimension tables and four facts. 4. experimental case study after receiving the datasets, the team identified the occurrences data as the most relevant to use in this work. then the team needed to study the lisbon reality and understand the type of occurrences, their needs, and figure 1. structure of the procedure to be performed eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first intelligent dashboards to monitor the occurrences in smart cities – a portuguese case study 5 features, among other details. after finishing the understanding phase, indicators were defined to answer the main questions. then was time to work with the data and do the etl process. during the preparation process (etp) a data quality analysis was performed, and a set of classes was created to help classify the data. finally, the data were analysed, the kpis were implemented, and the dashboards were produced. this chapter explains the main results of the last stage of the project, a business intelligence analysis, after using the kimball methodology and following lab experiment steps. 4.1. data preparation the analysis through a graphic visualisation makes the analysis much more intuitive and immediate. this way dashboards were elaborated with the help of the statistical data visualisation tool tableau. for the development of the project, the data were provided by the lxdatalab entity. real data from the city of lisbon were sent, thus, it is important to notice that these data are written in portuguese. however, before presenting the analysis, it is also important to understand which data were selected. the data used refer essentially to occurrences such as:  history in homologous periods of the occurrences of the fbr and other entities;  distribution of occurrences among the different civil parishes of the municipality of lisbon;  number of elements and vehicles sent to the location of the occurrence;  type of occurrences and most registered categories;  closing status of the occurrences;  entities which trigger more occurrences;  management of false alarms and suspension of intervention requests;  degree of risk of the occurrences. having understood what kind of data was chosen, an analysis is then carried out with the assemblage of these variables to find patterns and facts that help the decisionmaking, when necessary, by the emergency and rescue services. 4.2. data analysis the carried-out analysis aimed to answer some important questions as well as enter standards to help and facilitate decision-making. the analysis carried out is divided into three major focuses:  time analysis of occurrences;  analysis of the characteristics of the occurrences;  analysis of the mode of intervention and status of occurrences. time analysis of occurrences before analysing patterns in the city of lisbon, it is important to understand in a temporal way how occurrences are being conducted and how they tend to evolve. this temporal analysis refers to the homologous period from 2011 to 2018 and intends to answer five main questions: 1. how do occurrences tend to evolve? 2. which season of the year tends to have more occurrences? and how are these occurrences? 3. which categories of occurrences exist more regularly in the different seasons of the year? 4. on which day of the week and month are there more occurrences? 5. depending on the day of the week, what is the time of most occurrences? the answers obtained to these five questions and after the analysis of the dashboards resulted in the following:  over the years the number of recorded occurrences tends to evolve;  the season with the highest percentage of records, 26.51%, is autumn;  in autumn, the type of occurrence with 69.93% that stands out is infrastructures and roads;  the category of occurrence that stands out in summer is related to buildings. in winter it is water supply, road cleaning and flooding. in spring, occurrences that need support to the population and in autumn the occurrences related to transportation and equipment;  sunday is the day of the week with the highest tendency to register occurrences, with 14.81%;  on monday, the hour with more associated records is 10 pm, with 21.67%;  on tuesday, the hour with more associated registers is 1 pm, with 25.42%;  on wednesday, the hour with more associated registers is 4 pm, with 23.33%;  on thursday, the hour with more associated registers is 4 pm, with 20%;  on friday, the hour with more associated registers is 6 pm, with 30%;  on saturday, the hour with more associated registers is 10 am, with 21.67%;  on sunday, the hour with more associated registers is 9h and 8 pm, with 23.33%. after completing the temporal analysis, an analysis of the characteristics of the occurrences was also elaborated to understand in detail what was happening. analysis of the characteristics of the occurrences once the temporal analysis is concluded and understood as the occurrences happen and tend to evolve in time, the main characteristics of the occurrences under study are eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first r. silva, et al. 6 addressed. after looking at the characteristics of the occurrences, the aim is to answer eight questions: 1. how are the occurrences geographically arranged in the civil parishes of the municipality of lisbon? 2. which civil parish in the municipality of lisbon has the highest number of registered occurrences? 3. what happens in more detail in the 5 civil parishes of the municipality of lisbon with the highest number of registered occurrences? 4. how does the degree of risk differ in the civil parishes of the municipality of lisbon? 5. depending on the type of occurrence, which entities mainly trigger the emergency call? 6. which type of occurrence is registered more often? does the month have any influence? 7. depending on the type of occurrence, how many elements of the emergency and rescue services on average are sent to the location? 8. depending on the type of occurrence, how many vehicles are sent to the location? figure 3 shows that the highest number of occurrences recorded is in the civil parish of benfica with 7,351%. to understand this fact, separate research was carried out on the number of inhabitants in these civil parishes of the municipality of lisbon and one can see that, in ascending order, there are more inhabitants in the civil parishes of lumiar, benfica and olivais. it is, therefore, possible to conclude that although the civil parish of benfica is one with the highest number of inhabitants, it does not interconnect to the highest number of occurrences. in short, it is possible to conclude from this analysis that:  100% of the occurrences recorded in the civil parish of lumiar are at the level of services, particularly in the collection and rescue of animals;  the civil parish of parque das nações shows 50% of occurrences with chemicals and 50% of eventual river dumpings:  the civil parishes of misericórdia, beato, marvila and ajuda (100%) have in their history occurrences of moderate risk only;  the civil parish of são vicente (6.90%) is the one with the highest percentage of records of high-degree occurrences;  43.48% of the fire occurrences are triggered by security forces;  50% of the pre-hospital occurrences are triggered by medical emergency;  the types of occurrences more often recorded are "activities", "services" and "fires”;  the number of vehicles sent to an occurrence, regardless of its type, is one vehicle only;  an average of 6 elements are sent to the place of occurrences such as legal conflicts, civil protection, infrastructure and roads or technological and industrial incidents;  when the type of occurrence is fire, 4 vehicles (4.35%) are sent to the location. once all the main characteristics inherent to the occurrences under study have been concluded and assimilated, it is also important to analyse the mode of intervention and their state. thus, the following analysis tends to highlight some evidence of the state of the occurrences to help decision-making and, additionally, assist in the execution of the whole procedure when an occurrence happens. analysis of the mode of intervention and the state of the occurrences it was intended in an intuitive way to address the existence of false alarms of occurrences, the suspension of means of intervention related to the number of vehicles/elements sent and the final status of the occurrences. this way, it is possible to answer six questions: 1. when there is a false alarm, even after activating the emergency and rescue services, in what state is the occurrence? 2. is there a suspension of the request for support before activating the emergency and rescue services? 3. being a false alarm or suspension of occurrence, how many vehicles of the emergency and rescue services are sent to the location? 4. does the state of the occurrence influence its degree of risk? 5. does the entity that triggers the occurrence influence the state of the occurrence? 6. does the entity that triggers the occurrence influence its degree of risk? below are the answers to the above questions, intending to find standards for effective improvement in the management of occurrences. in short:  58.82% of the false alarms are cancelled even after the emergency and rescue means of intervention for the location have been activated; figure 3. geographical analysis of the civil parshes of the municipality of lisbon eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first intelligent dashboards to monitor the occurrences in smart cities – a portuguese case study 7  97.10% of the requests for suspension are not cancelled before the means are sent to the location;  be it a false alarm or a distressed call suspension, an average of 1 vehicle is sent;  the higher the degree of risk associated with the occurrence, the state of the occurrence is “administrative closure”; the state associated with a zero risk occurrence is “operational closure”;  regardless of the entity that triggers the occurrence, the state of the occurrence is mostly “administrative closure” and its degree of risk is moderate;  the management of occurrences and intervention requests (gopi) and the volunteer fire department (cbv) entities have 100% of records with a moderate degree of risk;  the lisbon municipal council (cml) entity has 100% of records with a high degree of risk;  the municipal civil protection service (smpc) entity has 77.78% of records with zero risk degree. 5. discussion once the development stage is over, an analysis of the main results obtained is made, as well as the measures adopted. table 2 is a summary of the relevant results achieved and the respective measure table 2. analysis of the main results with the respective measure of action event measures autumn is the season that registers more occurrences, with 26.51% there is a similarity between all seasons. the category of occurrence that stands out in the different seasons of the year:  summer is related to buildings;  winter relates to water supply, road cleaning and flooding;  spring occurrences relate with support to the population;  autumn occurrences relate to transportation and equipment. special attention to the occurrences most often recorded in a different season of the year is needed as well as an increase in the number of elements sent to the location. sunday, with 23.33%, is the weekday with the highest number of associated records, specifically at 9 am and 8 pm. special attention to this day and time to prevent the registration of occurrences needed. the civil parish of benfica registers more occurrences (7,351%). the intervention of emergency and rescue services must be increased in the civil parish of benfica. the civil parish of lumiar registers 100% of occurrences at the level of services, particularly in the collection of animals. the population of lumiar must be informed that the recorded occurrences happen with animals. 50% of the occurrences in the civil parish of parque das nações happen with chemicals and the other 50% are river dumpings. the population of the civil parish of parque das nações should be alerted to this type of occurrence. the civil parish of são vicente (6.90%) has the highest percentage of records of occurrences with a high degree. special attention to the civil parish of são vicente should be paid and notice that most of them are high-risk occurrences. the number of vehicles sent to an event, regardless of their type is one vehicle. at least one vehicle should be always available for an occurrence. 58.82% of the false alarms are cancelled even after the emergency and rescue means of intervention for the site have been activated. the emergency and rescue services should activate their means only when it is confirmed that it is not a false alarm. 97.10% of the suspension requests are not cancelled before the means are sent to the location. the emergency and rescue services must be able to cancel the means before being sent to the location. 100% of records of the gopi and cbv entities are of moderate risk; 100% of records of the cml entity are of high risk; the smpc entity has 77.78% of records with zero risk. when the emergency and rescue services know which entity triggers the occurrence, they should be able to perceive the type of risk of the occurrence. to sum up, in each event, the main measure is about the attention needed to prevent the events. in other situations, the measures involve maintaining emergency and rescue services vehicles always available and aware. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first r. silva, et al. 8 6. conclusion there was an essential question to answer: "how can we improve the requests for the intervention of the professional fire brigade regiment (fbr) when an emergency is detected in a smart city? to answer this challenge was developed a prototype with interactive dashboards and it was successfully achieved. these dashboards are the result of actual data provided by the municipality of lisbon. this prototype aimed to assist decision-making and understand data patterns to identify variables that may be probabilistically associated with intervention requests. as a result, 24 dashboards were obtained to meet the expectational goals. in short, this analysis highlights:  the understanding of the level of false alarms and suspension of media before and after they are sent to a location, and the need to improve because there are more than 50% of false alarms and requests for suspension which is a rather high percentage;  the highest number of occurrences is recorded on sundays, with 23.33%;  in terms of geographical distribution, it was understood that the civil parishes of benfica, lumiar, alvalade and são domingos de benfica are the most critical;  the registered occurrences tend to increase over the 8 years of study and the state after the conclusion of the occurrence is mostly "administrative closure";  regardless of the entity that triggers the occurrence, the state of the occurrence is mostly "administrative closure" and its degree of risk is moderate;  the number of vehicles sent was also analysed depending on the type of occurrence, and on average only one is sent. in future work, it is necessary to increase the variety of data present in the data warehouse which would consequently increase the analysis of business intelligence in the practical part of the article. in addition to this analysis of business intelligence, it would also be necessary to use the olap tool to make the analysis more enriching and intuitive so that at the time of an occurrence decisionmaking might be more direct and clearer. 7. references [1] the united nations. world population prospects 2022. https://doi.org/978-92-1-148373-4. 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[20] kimball r, ross m. the data warehouse toolkit: the definitive guide to dimensional modeling, third edition. 3rd ed. john wiley & sons, inc.; 2002. artificial intelligence in smart cities and healthcare eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 artificial intelligence in smart cities and healthcare sowmitha r.1,*, shanmuga raju s.2, harshini r.3, arjuna s.4 and ram kumar c.5 1m.sc. biomedical engineering and medical physics technical university of munich, germany 2assistant professor, department of ece, dr. n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india. 3ug student, department of bme, dr. n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india. 4ug student, department of bme, dr. n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india. 5associate professor, department of bme, dr.n.g.p. institute of technology, coimbatore, india. abstract in the era of the internet of things iot and artificial knowledge (ai) continues to define the century.artificial intelligence refers to a wide term that incorporates machine learning, normal language handling, rule based expert systems, actual robots, and robotic automation . the rise of computerized system and clinical gadgets in securely and productively diagnosing, treating, and planning care is an obvious sign that ai is digging in for the long haul and fill in significance. while ai holds a great deal of potential, the ramifications for essential consideration suppliers should be tended to as it might restrict execution. since the epidemic cities in 2019, the healthcare industry has escalated its ai-based advances by 60%. as indicated by the investigation, ai calculations like ann, rnn/lstm, cnn/r-cnn, dnn, and svm/ls-svmbhas a higher impact on the different smart city domains. smart city advances the unification of conventional urban infrastructure and information technology (it) to improve the quality of living and sustainable urban services in the city. to achieve this, smart cities require coordinated effort among the general public as well as private sectors to introduce it stages to gather and examine massive amounts of information. simultaneously, it is vital to design effective artificial intelligence (ai) based tools to deal with medical services emergency circumstances in smart urban communities. this paper reviews about the current technologies like artificial intelligence in the healthcare for smart cities. keywords: artificial intelligence, iot, smart cities, healthcare received on 31 july 2022, accepted on 12 september 2022, published on 21 september 2022 copyright © 2022 sowmitha et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i3.2275 1. introduction healthcare is a fundamental part of city life. a healthcare system includes particular gatherings (e.g., patients, essential consideration doctors, drug specialists, trained professionals, and different specialists) and various stages (counting medical issue checking, illness determination, clinical therapy, and restoration). late years have seen the quick development of populace thickness in urban communities, the consistently maturing populace, and the ascent in constant disease, which presents fabulous difficulties on existing medical care frameworks, like the appeal on clinics, clinical staff, and clinical assets in *corresponding author. email: mysteryprincess27@gmail.com feasible urban communities. the headways in internet of things (iot) and ubiquitous computing have presented to us a smart city, where we trust the controllable and organized city foundations (e.g., transportation devices, structures, public activity offices) can be utilized to help illness transmission identification, treatment checking, and recovery the board. besides, man-made brainpower (ai) enabled medical services has demonstrated to be more productive, more reasonable, and more customized. consequently, accumulating ai advances to medical services with regards to smart cities is profoundly essential. these days, urban communities are becoming shrewd and can be proficiently overseen through various frameworks and offices. its capability to help shrewd medical care frameworks can infiltrate various events (e.g., eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:harshinikaranr@gmail.com sowmitha r. et al. 2 savvy homes, local area wellbeing focuses, and brilliant emergency clinics) and situations (e.g., strange conduct observing, illness counteraction and analysis, clinical direction, solution proposal, recovery, and stamping observation). in this research topic, we exceptionally value the commitments exploring any of the diverse angles with respect to shrewd city helped medical services. all the more explicitly, we momentarily give a few opening issues as specific illustrations: as far as infection observing and counteraction, it is promising to use the foundations conveyed at each side of the city (e.g., building entryways, road garbage bin, and lifts) to identify sickness side effects (e.g., hack, fever, and asthma) among specific populaces. considering significant wellbeing direction, strong profound learning calculations and structures, (for example, convolutional brain organizations and diagram brain organizations) can be conveyed in brilliant wellbeing places to examine huge scope wellbeing information, find recognizable transient/spatial/topological examples, and backing exact determination. further, building a savvy medical care system among various gatherings is critical for effective clinical benefits. recently, the population density in cities has increased at a higher pace [1]. to make lifestyles in cities more agreeable and functional, the city ought to be smart and compelling. it is basically accomplished through a clever unique cycle using computational intelligence based advancements. this paper investigates how artificial intelligence (ai) is being used in the smart city thought. innovation has an imperative impact in smart cities, and imaginative mechanical procedures truly help metropolitan networks in turning out to be smarter. smart cities use ict to mechanize cycles and work on the idea of people's lives in metropolitan locales. likewise, it uses facilitated information advances to chip away at metropolitan foundation and enable responsive organization to remember inhabitants for city association. different present-day advances and approaches grant smart assist models with encouraging foster efficiency and exercises in medical administrations, transportation, energy, training, and various areas [1]. 2. artificial intelligence technology has a vital impact in smart cities, and imaginative mechanical methods truly help metropolitan networks in turning out to be smarter. smart cities use ict to computerize cycles and work on the idea of people's lives in metropolitan areas. moreover, it uses facilitated knowledge advances to chip away at metropolitan foundation and enable responsive organization to remember inhabitants for city association. different present day advances and approaches grant smart assist models with encouraging foster efficiency and exercises in medical administrations, transportation, energy, training, and various districts. artificial brain organization and significant learning computerized thinking progressions are quickly growing, basically in light of the fact that ai processes a great deal of data a ton faster and makes assumptions more unequivocally than humanly possible. while the huge volume of data being made reliably would cover a human trained professional, ai applications that utilizations ai can take that data and quickly change it into critical information. as of this synthesis, the fundamental block of using ai is that it is exorbitant to deal with a ton of data that ai programming requires. the ideal trait of artificial intelligence is ability to help and take actions have the clearest opportunity concerning achieving a specific goal. a subset of artificial intelligence is ai (ml), which implies that pc ventures can normally gain from and conform to new data without being helped by individuals. profound learning strategies engage this customized learning through the maintenance of tremendous proportions of unstructured data like text, pictures, or video [2]. intelligence is portrayed by learning and thinking. learning is a basic part in ai and is acknowledged through ai. thinking is another piece of ai, which consolidates data control to make exercises. the ai is expected to oversee two distinct ways emblematic based and information based (ai). human's interaction data through the eyes and that might measure up to the computer vision. in ai it incorporates techniques for getting, handling, examining, and figuring out images [2]. 3. ai in smart healthcare artificial intelligence in health care is an umbrella term to portray the application of machine learning (ml) algorithms and other cognitive technologies in clinical settings is shown in figure 1. in the least difficult sense, ai is when pcs and different machines mirror human perception, and are equipped for picking up, thinking, and simply deciding or making moves. computer based intelligence in medical care, then, is the utilization of machines to dissect and follow up on clinical information, typically determined to foresee a specific result [2]. a huge ai use case in medical care is the utilization of ml and other cognitive disciplines for clinical conclusion purposes. utilizing patient information and other data, ai can assist specialists and clinical suppliers with conveying more precise determinations and treatment plans. additionally, ai can assist with making medical services more prescient and proactive by breaking down huge information to foster better preventive consideration proposals for patients. medical services are quite possibly of the most basic area in the more extensive scene of large information due to its crucial job in a useful, flourishing society. the use of ai in healthcare service information can be a matter of life and death. computer based intelligence can help specialists, medical caretakers, and other medical services laborers in their everyday work. simulated intelligence in medical services can upgrade preventive consideration and personal satisfaction, produce more exact conclusions and therapy plans, and lead to better understanding results in eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e5 artificial intelligence in smart cities and healthcare 3 general. simulated intelligence can likewise foresee and follow the spread of irresistible infections by investigating information from an administration, medical services, and different sources. therefore, ai can play a crucial part in worldwide general wellbeing as a device for combatting epidemics and pandemics [3]. figure 1. artificial intelligence in smart healthcare numerous cities are to attempting to mimic the concept of smart city medical administrations via completing regular advancements and contraptions by merging clinical resources with ai-composed game plans. since smart wellbeing is related with the ict underpinning of the smart city, it very well may be named a subset of e-wellbeing. artificial intelligence composed iot has assisted wellbeing with caring frameworks essentially. dependability, quality, network dormancy, and information move limit are several the issues holding state of the art medical consideration back from transforming into a reality [3]. 4. e-health service architecture the iot smart city logical classification unites a lot of correspondences shows, data associations, standards, and prerequisites for the creation of uses in a city. however, special care ought to be taken to complete e-health care services, not simply considering the way that it is an order focused on prosperity and prescription, yet rather because it oversees issues that can be obstructing to a singular's life [4]. moreover, focuses associated with security and assurance should be surveyed preceding advancing health applications. an inconceivable representation of this sort of organization is m-health applications that have flooded the market due to the smart-telephones and wearables that work with the looking at and assessments of the clients due to the colossal number of sensors that these contraptions integrate. m-health applications rely upon a lot of internet and figuring developments, correspondence and information systems, and sensors and wearables contraptions related in a body region organization (ban), individual region organization (pan), thus on, which are used to get constant data which is transported off the pc people group to be taken apart by trained professionals and expect control over their patients [4]. whether or not we talk about the destiny of iot in this field, these integrate becoming new enabling stages for a developing people, for instance, recognizing the activities of everyday living, checking social co-tasks and industrious disorder management. in this regard, e-prosperity presents another medical consideration network perspective that interconnects ip based correspondence progresses, for instance, close field communications (nfc), 6lowpan, low power bluetooth and emerging 5gnetworks for future internet-based medical consideration organizations. thus, the make of m-iot applications is normal due to the interest for care in homes; where the two patients and their gatekeeper will be benefited, from the individual and monetary viewpoint [5]. accordingly, consistent trades for routine tests clinical can be avoided; convey ability cost in medical administrations can lessen, flow, and redesigns in clinical outcomes can be gotten to the next level. likewise, a sweeping improvement in the underpinning of data associations and clinical contraptions using far off correspondence to grasp data and send through different structures until they show up at the master doctor. eprosperity applications should be arranged so they do not hinder patients' normal schedules passing on them to communicate their thoughts in a protected environment, serenity of mind, food and drink contacts with friends and family, including giving encouragement physical, social and mental inclination [5]. 4.1. sensor data collecting layer data securing is performed through different sensors answerable for estimating physiological signals, for example, body temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, pulse, muscle action, and others. the sensors are associated with a passage, which is liable for handling the data prior to being conveyed to the doctor; generally, it is a versatile (cell) base situated nearby the patient. sensors incorporated into the ban ought to be light weight, little and shouldn't ruin the singular's development, regardless of whether they utilize battery-powered or replaceable battery they ought to guarantee that the data isn't lost during substitution periods [6]. also, the ongoing sensor plans are flexible on the grounds that they can be put anyplace on the body creating more vigorous medical applications, and closeness and the contact with the skin the sensors permit estimating specific physiological boundaries. in this context, an identification design in view of iot works with the execution of these plans, since they adaptively further develop energy efficiency, permitting the utilization of sensors in light of the patient necessities. because of the energy impediment eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e5 sowmitha r. et al. 4 of these devices, these may require low power correspondence conventions, for example, zigbee or bluetooth that are utilized in low-speed wpans [6]. 4.2. medical resource management layer putting away the cloud offer versatility and openness benefits of interest from the two patients and clinical organizations. also, hosting and handling can lessen costs by giving better demonstrative data. despite the fact that there are issues that should be viewed as in clinical data put away in the cloud like hybrid cloud/cloudlet architecture: cloudlets have been acquainted as an answer with convey low dormancy to observing undertakings through pans. plus, the correspondence between the concentrator (mobile) and the cloudlet is finished through a wi-fi interface, lessening inertness and data move albeit the utilization of lte isn't enthusiastically suggested in light of the fact that it is uncovered the transmission of data to the slack delivered by the mobile network [7]. protection patient's data: the patient data can undoubtedly be compromised, on the grounds that a pan or ban is associated with a centre point, and anybody with a straightforward sniffer could catch the network bundles, uncovering the patient's status and weaknesses. it is prescribed to utilize encryption strategies to guarantee data security. secure data stockpiling in the cloud: per the terms defined by the health insurance portability and accountability act (hipaa), clinical records should be divulgence safeguarded, making fitting moves for forestalling unapproved getting to this data. clinical data handling in the cloud is as yet a test in iot applications [7]. 4.3. smart medical service layer the sensors can in-corporate different physiological examples to the customary office and research office assessments, allowing to work on the patient's medicines. this dataset brings the chance of performing data assessment, and define an ai model for sickness prediction or recognize upgrades during the time spent clinical diagnostics. not enduring, prior to being utilized for a huge extension, a couple of hardships ought to be overcome, these consolidate the support of the regulatory prerequisites for the medical gear, the readiness of clinical staff, etc., which makes that these improvements won't be taken on quickly [8]. usually, breaking down the tremendous proportion of data that the sensors give is an outstandingly perplexing endeavour. nevertheless, with the ascent of big data for the control of huge volumes of data, various estimations and methodologies have been made for the treatment of clinical data. one of the most generally perceived issues presented in this field is that the data have not a semantic connection. thus, the growing experience may not work; one expected reply for this issue is to take advantage of the clinical records that various substances have taken care of in their electronic systems. similarly, view of data in the clinical field is fundamental, in light of the fact that reference charts, pie frames and other can be utilized to address the improvement of a disorder, and subsequently specialists find it more straightforward to show the conditions of a patient. due to the high volume of data accumulated by the iot sensors means a lot to consolidate present day portrayal gadgets for addressing this data. besides, a vital piece of compact finders, concerning the data obtained in a lab, is that data are assembled over a much longitudinal way, inside radiant short lived looking at and simultaneously through different modes [9]. 5. smart applications and role in e health the technology address serious areas of strength for a, we can approach sensors, coordinated circuits, and more instruments which can be used by subject matter experts, scientists, schools and even high school projects, to propel the creation of iot applications. these parts incorporated into an exchanges net-work, allowing have applications or things related with the internet. the going with depicts specific smart city applications that contribute to a great extent to e-wellbeing organizations [10]. 5.1. smart building the aim is to make residencies, homes and business structures more sustainable, put together on energy efficiency to work with respect to the individual fulfilment, e.g., smart structures can screen their essential prosperity, direct lighting and warming considering presence detection, and use wise devices to robotize everyday tasks [11]. 5.2. smart environment the aim is to chip away at the quality of life and security of residents, e.g., avoiding noise in metropolitan networks, early rebuke of episodes or unforeseen events, obstruct guides of people and safe districts in case of disastrous occasions, e.g., shakes, floods, volcanic launches, twisters, and forest fires [12]. 5.3. open data it implies data that is openly available and may be used and inspected by outcasts (legal openness). metropolitan people group can use opensource stages like jkan to convey data and to use the data to make one more application to help people. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e5 artificial intelligence in smart cities and healthcare 5 5.4. smart citizens this thought is associated with the creation of networks, e.g., smart training uses life-long learning programs, which could focus in on employability, digital thought, or specific people social affairs, e.g., children with mental irregularity, more established or those with physical disabilities. 5.5. smart transport one of the most important aspects to consider within a smart city is mobility. it can work on the security, efficiency, quality of life and time of users within the urban communities, e.g., using complex sensors, an independent vehicle can incorporate a personal assistant, self-driving and self-leaving capacities, control the force of the lights and even work on in the decrease of co2 emissions. indeed, whether the driver experienced any crisis, the vehicle could go without help from anyone else to the closest clinic. at long last, paths committed to bikes can give an option to the utilization of vehicles, decreasing the outflow of gases and working on the health of the users [13]. the objective is to further develop medical services frameworks, making them more powerful and efficient under the watchful eye of patients being this physically or from a distance, e.g., the wearable devices could send data from patients with a sickness (cardiac pathologies, insufficiencies, arrhythmias, etc.) to continuous checking frameworks, permitting specialists to act in the shortest conceivable time when something unanticipated is happening. ambulances could send continuous estimations of a patient to the trauma centre so that while showing up the hospital, the specialist has every one of the outcomes and manage the most effective prescription for his/her fast recuperation, or even saving the patient's life. to be sure, rescue vehicle robots could be incorporated for sending them to remote or painful regions in optimal times, keeping away from jams and land courses [13]. 6. iot and healthcare related to wsns the iot brings an exceptional measure of information that the network foundation necessities to deal with. the answer for these issues is to tweak the customary organization plans to the most recent guidelines of organization insight, which guarantees ideal security. medical clinics, centres and care offices need cost effective network, the security of which consents to information insurance guidelines but at the same time is simple to utilize and to work [14]. 6.1. digital drugs one of the more current improvements in the medical administrations industry is known as "smart pills". smart pills are taken like normal medication yet are furnished with an observing development extension to the genuine solution or some likeness thereof. they use it to propel data to a sensor worn on the body. these sensors screen drug levels in the body considering a patient's obvious or dissected condition. the data from the minimal sensors are then conveyed to a cell phone application, and that suggests that patients can get to data on their vital capacities themselves. experts can do this expecting the patient agrees. this is the manner in which the treating specialists choose if a drug is filling in as expected or possibly causing optional impacts. in november 2017, abilify my cite shipped off the main fda-cleared smart pill that time ventured when the medicine was truly taken. at the point when the pill comes into contact with the patient's gastric destructive, it sets off a sensor that means the hour of contact and first advances this data to the wearable sensor ultimately to the cell phone application. the right estimation and the supported confirmation are huge basics for a viable treatment. such data is altogether vital for clinical specialists, and they at absolutely no point in the future need to rely upon the patient's assertion alone when treatment plans ought to be totally adhered to. if patients fail to do this, the expert can search for a discussion and explain the explanation straight forwardly. one of the areas that causes fairly more trouble are assumed "mechanical" pills. once ingested, they can do certain jobs straightforwardly in the patient's body. right when the prescription is conveyed, the development separates and is handled, a decision that is great for enormous, long, chained drug particles like proteins, peptides and antibodies [14]. 6.2. patient monitoring pattern setting advancements in medical administrations license both continuous and transient consideration to eagerly be seen even more. distant patient checking (rpm) engages medical administrations specialists to screen fundamental signs and assess genuine reactions to past medications without being in a comparative spot as the patient. the gadget used depends upon the prosperity of the different patient. for instance, it very well may be an embedded-on heart device, an airflow monitor, or an arranged blood glucose meter. the gadget being alluded to accumulates the best data. in case the characteristics are not as they should be, the data are simultaneously shipped off a data set for recording and to the treating trained professional. the expert can analyse the data dynamically and answer as required. such gadgets are as often as possible used following a movement. they help with decreasing the number of medical facilities stays and avoid re-confirmations since issues are perceived even more quickly. this licenses experts to answer earlier and keep away from likely ensnarement’s. with the help of the data accumulated consistently, it is besides possible to change and change treatment decisions even more quickly, dependent upon the patient's actual reaction and condition. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e5 sowmitha r. et al. 6 this grants experts to answer earlier and avoid likely troubles [15]. 7. conclusion the future of health care is exceptionally encouraging, taking into account the rapid development in sensor technology, ai and machine learning. for patients, hospitals and physicians as well medical device manufacturers, there are new open doors as well as even the commitment to utilize the internet of things. clearly challenges and significant changes must be dominated. all through the investigated writing there is a consistency for use of smart advancements in smart cities and particularly in healthcare, and ai and blockchain innovations are key driving factors for enhancement and improvement of overall user experience of smart cities. despite the fact that there are expected drawbacks of artificial intelligence and machine learning advancements with regards to smart cities, they still likewise have a potential to have an impact on the manner in which we know smart healthcare and smart urban communities at this point. references [1] winston ph. artificial intelligence. addison-wesley longman publishing co., inc.; 1992 jan 2. [2] hamet p, tremblay j. artificial intelligence in medicine. metabolism. 2017 apr 1;69: s36-40. [3] holzinger a, langs g, denk h, zatloukal k, müller h. causability and explainability of artificial intelligence in medicine. wiley interdisciplinary reviews: data mining and knowledge discovery. 2019 jul;9(4):e1312. [4] allam z, dhunny za. on big data, artificial intelligence and smart cities. cities. 2019 jun 1; 89:80-91. [5] batty m. artificial intelligence and smart cities. environment and planning b: urban analytics and city science. 2018 jan;45(1):3-6. [6] voda ai, radu ld. artificial intelligence and the future of smart cities. brain. broad research in artificial intelligence and neuroscience. 2018 may 8;9(2):110-27. [7] luckey d, fritz h, legatiuk d, dragos k, smarsly k. artificial intelligence techniques for smart city applications. in international conference on computing in civil and building engineering 2020 aug 18 (pp. 3-15). springer, cham. [8] srivastava s, bisht a, narayan n. safety and security in smart cities using artificial intelligence—a review. in2017 7th international conference on cloud computing, data science & engineering-confluence 2017 jan 12 (pp. 130133). ieee. [9] agarwal pk, gurjar j, agarwal ak, birla r. application of artificial intelligence for development of intelligent transport system in smart cities. journal of traffic and transportation engineering. 2015 jun 24;1(1):20-30. [10] bokhari sa, myeong s. use of artificial intelligence in smart cities for smart decision-making: a social innovation perspective. sustainability. 2022 jan 6;14(2):620. [11] voda ai, radu ld. how can artificial intelligence respond to smart cities challenges? in smart cities: issues and challenges 2019 jan 1 (pp. 199-216). elsevier. [12] kirwan cg, zhiyong f. smart cities and artificial intelligence: convergent systems for planning, design, and operations. elsevier; 2020 may 6. [13] golubchikov o, thornbush m. artificial intelligence and robotics in smart city strategies and planned smart development. smart cities. 2020 oct 3;3(4). [14] ahmed s, hossain m, kaiser ms, noor mb, mahmud m, chakraborty c. artificial intelligence and machine learning for ensuring security in smart cities. in data-driven mining, learning and analytics for secured smart cities 2021 (pp. 2347). springer, cham. [15] veselov g, tselykh a, sharma a, huang r. applications of artificial intelligence in evolution of smart cities and societies. informatica. 2021 jul 15;45(5). eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 09 2022 10 2022 | volume 6 | issue 3 | e5 this is a title 1 the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam andrej adamuscin1,*, julius golej1 and miroslav panik1 1 institute of management, slovak university of technology in bratislava, vazovova 5, 812 43 bratislava abstract a smart city in general is a very wide socio-economic-urban-technical phenomenon that inherently represents an increase certain quality of the urban environment and organism. it is not only a technical and technological level of development of infrastructure of a city, but constitutes mainly intellectual maturity and awareness of all stakeholders of the urban organism. topic of smart cities is gaining exponentially in importance, as the socio-economic and demographic changes creating new trends, needs, requirements and challenges for existing urban areas, inner urban processes and their management. there are already a number of applied strategies, which proves the efficiency and sustainability of the solutions. in this contribution authors are trying to outline the problematic areas of bratislava to achieve smart city concept, whereby they take inspiration from the neighbouring city of vienna and amsterdam, which in turn are considered as some of the top smart cities in europe. keywords: smart city, framework strategy, renewal, bratislava, vienna, amsterdam, received on 17 december 2015, accepted on 07 july 2016, published on 20 july 2016 copyright © 2016 a. adamuscin et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.18-7-2016.151629 *corresponding author. email: andrej.adamuscin@stuba.sk 1. introduction with the development and change in society, particularly with changes in the manufacturing sectors of the economy is changing not only the economic structure, but also the environment of the city. cities in the past responded to the industrialization of the construction of industrial buildings and entire structures, thus changed functional, respectively the spatial arrangement (mostly) rural zone of sites. today needs to reflect the opposite trenddeindustrialisation, thus changing the use of functional areas and industry objects to other functions. it may be a manufacturing, services, logistics, research / development, or even housing and recreation. for the past 20 years also bratislava has undergone many dynamic changes. disordered and uncontrollable new construction of buildings and renovation of existing housing stock without comprehensive strategy or insufficient implementation support system, both static and dynamic transport should be the main reasons such as these developing processes should be started to meet the highest requirements of contemporary modern european cities. bratislava as a sister city of vienna, from which it is located approximately 64 km could thus in its direction just to take an example from vienna which is considered among the top european and world smart cities for several years. to achieve this state could be helpful, inter alia, also a project eu-gugle and also prepared several concepts such as “methodology for complex renewal of housing estates with a focus on housing reconstruction” or research article eaeai endorsed transactions on smart cities eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ a. adamuscin, j.golej and m. panik 2 still uncompleted implementation of transport policy of the city of bratislava. 2. definitions of smart cities the concept of “smart city” has become more and more popular in scientific literature and international policies. to understand this concept it is important to recognize why cities are considered key elements for the future. cities play a prime role in social and economic aspects worldwide, and have a huge impact on the environment. [1, 2] table 1 reports some of the definitions of “smart city” proposed in the literature, providing an idea of the many meanings that has a smart city. many definitions of smart cities exist. a range of conceptual variants is often obtained by replacing “smart” with alternative adjectives, for example, “intelligent” or “digital”. the label “smart city” is a fuzzy concept and is used in ways that are not always consistent. [3,4] table 1. some selected definitions of “smart city”. definition source a smart city is a city well performing in a forward-looking way in six “smart” characteristics, built on the ”smart” combination of endowments and activities of self-decisive, independent and aware citizens. www.smartcities.eu [4] a city well performing in a forward-looking way in economy, people, governance, mobility, environment, and living, built on the smart combination of endowments and activities of self-decisive, independent and aware citizens giffinger et al. (2007)[5] “[…] two main streams of research ideas: 1) smart cities should do everything related to governance and economy using new thinking paradigms and 2) smart cities are all about networks of sensors, smart devices, real time data and ict integration in every aspect of human life.” p. 57 gabriel cretu 2012) [6] smart cities “are the result of knowledge-intensive and creative strategies aiming at enhancing the socio-economic, ecological, logistic and competitive performance of cities. such smart cities are based on a promising mix of human capital (e.g. skilled labor force), infrastructural capital (e.g. high-tech communication facilities), social capital (e.g. kourtit and nijkamp (2012) [7] intense and open network linkages) and entrepreneurial capital (e.g. creative and risktaking business activities).” p. 93 for better understanding of what all is in the concept “smart” necessary to redefine, a model (figure 1) can be used. the model is based on a definition of giffinger, who defined “smart degree” of 70 medium-sized european cities focusing not only on digital data and information, but on 6 dimensions: smart mobility, smart environment, smart governance, smart economy, smart people, smart living. [5, 8] figure 1. six components of smart city [8] figure 2. the relationship between components and characteristics of smart cities [8] eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam 3 according to de santis, fasano, mignolli and villa (2014b) especially six dimensions of smart city categorize the conception between neoclassical theory of regional and city development. actual study of the european parliament mapping smart cities in the eu (2014) supplements the scheme of six smart city characteristics by three components – technological, human, institutional (figure 2). [8] 2.1. vienna smart city the “smartness” of a city describes its ability to bring together all its resources, to effectively and seamlessly achieve the goals and fulfil the purposes it has set itself. in other words, it describes how well all the different city systems, and the people, organizations, finances, facilities and infrastructures involved in each of them, are: individually working efficiently; and acting in an integrated way and coherent way, to enable potential synergies to be exploited and the city to function holistically, and to facilitate innovation and growth. [9] recent years vienna has become a leading smart and sustainable european city. the austrian capital differs from most other metropolises through its good performance in so many areas: housing, public transport and other infrastructure services (e.g. waste separation, spring water mains), education and universities as well as vast urban green spaces. [10] vienna is the city with the world’s best quality of living, according to the mercer 2014 quality of living rankings, in which european cities dominate. [11] for the city of vienna has been prepared a framework urban development strategy with a view into the 2050. the present smart city vienna framework strategy is directed at all target groups of the city: vienna’s citizens, enterprises, non-profit institutions and, last but not least, the public sector itself. [10] smart city vienna comprises first and foremost the aim of resource preservation. development and modification processes in the sectors of energy, mobility, and infrastructure and building management are to dramatically reduce co2 emissions by 2050. [10] in fact vienna recently created a public private entity, tina vienna which is tasked with co-developing smart city strategies and solutions for the city. nowadays there are prepared more than 100 smart cities projects being developed throughout the city. [12] for example one of the mentioned projects is citizen solar power plant. with a goal of obtaining 50% of their energy from renewables by 2030, the city partnered with the local energy provider, vienna energy, they developed a crowd-funding model whereby individual citizens can buy half or whole panels and receive a guaranteed return of 3.1% annually. [13] vienna is also testing out a range of electric mobility solutions from expanding their charging network from 103 to 440 stations by 2015 to testing ev car sharing and electric bike rentals. vienna bike sharing program is fully accessible to visitors, not just residents. [14] another important innovation has been in rezoning dense neighbourhoods allowing for zero-parking residential buildings. residents in these communities commit to not owning a personal vehicle. finally, vienna is renovating a 40 hectare former slaughterhouse district and turning it into a much smarter use: an innovation district focused on media science and technology. by 2016, the city expects 15,000 people to working on start-ups in the neu marx quarter district. [13] furthermore, vienna took the extra step of incorporating the strategy into law to minimize the risk of future mayors throwing the plan out to start over. [14] smart city vienna framework strategy the key goal for 2050 of smart city vienna is to offer optimum quality of living, combined with highest possible resource preservation, for all citizens. this can be achieved through comprehensive innovations (shown on fig. 3). figure 3. the smart city vienna principle [10] p. 17 the present framework strategy describes the key goals and principal approaches chosen to attain them. it represents guidelines for the numerous important specialised strategies of the city that define concrete multiyear plans for such areas as urban planning, climate protection, the future of energy supply or vienna as an innovation hub. [10] the smart city vienna framework strategy is more comprehensive (but not exhaustive), pursues a long-term horizon (2050) and does not offer detailed packages of measures. however, concrete sub-projects with a shorter timeframe will definitely be formulated and implemented. [10] eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 a. adamuscin, j.golej and m. panik 4 2.2. amsterdam smart city the city of amsterdam is ranked third in the european rankings by cohen. amsterdam set out its goals for sustainability in the structural vision 2040 and the energy strategy 2040 follows [15]: • 40% reduction in co2 emissions in 2025, compared with 1990 levels, • 75% reduction in co2 emissions by 2040, • climate-neutral municipal organisation in 2015. to help achieve these targets, the amsterdam innovation motor (aim), now amsterdam economic board, the city of amsterdam, net operator liander and telecom provider kpn started the amsterdam smart city platform in 2009 [15]. the amsterdam smart city (asc) platform is a partnership between businesses, authorities, research institutions and the people of amsterdam that initiates, stimulates and advances smart city projects in amsterdam. the main objective of the asc platform is to help to achieve the targets set out in the energy strategy 2040 and to reduce carbon emissions in amsterdam. asc believes in a habitable city where it is pleasant to both live and work. in 2015 this platform has have into a partnership with over 100 partners, which are involved in more than 90 innovative projects. these smart city projects deal with a variety of topics and cover all characteristics of a smart city including energy transition, smart living, smart society, smart areas, smart economy, smart mobility solutions and open connectivity. the amsterdam smart city platform is aware of the many different ideas that can be applied to the city and the challenges that the city faces. by challenging parties to submit and execute innovative solutions to urban issues, asc connects and accelerates this progress. asc also addresses the possibilities to strengthen previous activities. this advances the development of new markets and profits for innovative solutions. where possible, these solutions are replicated elsewhere in the city (shown on figure. 4). [15] figure 4. the amsterdam smart city platform [15] inspirational projects from amsterdam to bratislava smart parking mobypark parking in big cities is becoming more and more difficult. many drivers spend on average 20 minutes per time while looking for a parking spot. this increases co2 emissions and most important of all; people waste their time. mobypark, a sharing parking platform, will make parking easier and more efficient. private parking lots, public parking garages, hotels, and hospitals: they make their unoccupied parking spots available for drivers through this app. mobypark offers all the available places on a platform where it's possible to see real time availability and book these parking spots ahead. as a result, drivers spend less time searching for a single spot and reduce co2 emissions. in her turn, ensures that you can easily rent a parking place for several days of a private individual, hotel or another institution. the service of mobypark consists of a website and an app (android and ios). it offers parking opportunities in more than twelve cities in the netherlands (2014) and makes it possible in more than five countries to share your parking space and to rent your parking places for a short or long term. its aims to, among others in collaboration with amsterdam smart city, enlarge the amount of parking places and partner up with different with public and private organizations. [16] smart living – city-zen in the city-zen project several innovative solutions are demonstrated in the field of smart grid, heat networks and sustainable housing in nieuw-west in amsterdam. the residents and users have a central position in all the solutions. the changes give the users more choice in the ways they use energy. the project is developing a positive energy district by implementing a variety of measures such as sustainable transport, smart parking systems and car sharing. the city-zen projects provide a major boost to the energy ambitions. in amsterdam, the following projects are being implemented: intelligent net, sustainable heat network, drinking water used for cooling of business area, energy saving by residents, testing living lab, serious gaming and roadmap to city zero energy. [17] 3. methodology for smart cities according global advisory committee for smart cities benchmarking was developed 62 indicators across the smart cities wheel (shown on figure 5). eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam 5 figure 5. smart cities wheel [14] each of the six components of the smart cities wheel are assigned a set of indicators reflect an attempt to create a proxy for measuring each of the sub-components of the wheel. each component contains 3 subcomponents. therefore there are 18 total subcomponents in the model, and with 62 indicators, that leaves an average of almost 3.5 indicators per subcomponent (shown on appendix a. smart cities benchmarking indicators). the data were transformed by using a mathematical formula called a zscore, which permits the comparison of data in different units (e.g. %, tons of ghg emissions, etc.). each of the 6 components is then assigned a maximum of 15 points and the results are transformed in a way that the highest performing city in each category is assigned 15 points. thus, if one city were to lead in each of the six components, the city would obtain a maximum score of 90 points. of the 62, 16 of them are also directly mapped to the new sustainable cities iso standard (iso 37120). [14] 3.1. mercer’s quality of living mercer’s quality of living reports provide valuable information and hardship premium recommendations for over 460 cities throughout the world, the ranking covers 223 of these cities. [11] living conditions are analyzed according to 39 factors, grouped in 10 categories [11]:  political and social environment (political stability, crime, law enforcement, etc.)  economic environment (currency exchange regulations, banking services)  socio-cultural environment (media availability and censorship, limitations on personal freedom)  medical and health considerations (medical supplies and services, infectious diseases, sewage, waste disposal, air pollution, etc.)  schools and education (standards and availability of international schools)  public services and transportation (electricity, water, public transportation, traffic congestion, etc.)  recreation (restaurants, theatres, cinemas, sports and leisure, etc.)  consumer goods (availability of food/daily consumption items, cars, etc.)  housing (rental housing, household appliances, furniture, maintenance services)  natural environment (climate, record of natural disasters) the scores attributed to each factor, which are weighted to reflect their importance to expatriates, allow for objective city-to-city comparisons. the result is a quality of living index that compares relative differences between any two locations evaluated. for the indices to be used effectively, mercer has created a grid that allows users to link the resulting index to a quality of living allowance amount by recommending a percentage value in relation to the index. [11] 4. bratislava until the fall of former political regime in 1989 was in slovakia, including bratislava for several years realized mass production of affordable housing. this construction was marked by the poor quality of buildings, especially as regards their energy performance. this poor technical condition mainly of prefabricated apartment buildings in many cases persists to these days, also thanks to still unrealized coherent concept of housing estates renewal. renovation of buildings in bratislava is provided on individual and un-conceptual basis. renewal is performed only on separate apartment blocks, without connectivity to their immediate surroundings (shown on fig. 6). despite to this state for ministry of transport, construction and regional development has been developed a comprehensive study of housing estate renewal in the recent past: “methodology for complex renewal of housing estates with a focus on housing reconstruction”. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 a. adamuscin, j.golej and m. panik 6 figure 6. prefabricated apartments building in bratislava [18] within this study was developed analysis of the current state of housing estates renewal in slovakia architectural, urban, administrative aspects and existing planning tools of complex housing estates renewal. there were analysed european documents in the field of urban development (leipzig charter, toledo declaration, the territorial agenda 2020, the europe 2020 strategy) as well as the research was performed on the selected model of foreign examples. finally was realized the draft of methodology process of preparing strategic documents for housing estates renewal with emphasis on housing reconstruction at urban level, with an emphasis on an integrated approach and feasibility plans. [19] it should be added that putting this methodology into practice is heavily dependent on a momentary political will. now, the slovak capital has a chance to move forward within a project aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of nearly-zero energy building renovation models. bratislava is the only eastern european city to participate in the eugugle project, which stands for european cities serving as a green urban gate towards leadership in sustainable energy. the aim of the project is to create a concept of energy performance and securing the energy efficiency of buildings when using them, as well as the reduction of energy intensity within the city’s district in which the building is located. in other words, the project will take into consideration not only the reduction of energy consumption in the buildings, but will simultaneously deal with other aspects of a sustainable environment, like the interconnection of the building with public space, green areas and sustainable forms of mobility. the latter includes mass public transport, bicycles and moving on foot. bratislava was chosen in a strong competition of 45 european cities and the city is cooperating with vienna in this project, while the austrian capital is serving as a district leader. over the five years of the project (20132018) bratislava with other european cities will join efforts to combine the latest research results in smart renovation of groups of buildings at the district level and use this knowledge to renovate the living space. the main task of this project is to bring to bratislava new, sustainable technologies that will reduce emissions caused especially by heating apartment blocks. within this project, bratislava can receive up to €2 million to renovate 40,000 square meters of total floor area, i.e. up to €50 per square meter to cover the costs of the renovation. out of the total floor area, 20,000 square meters should account for buildings owned by the bratislava municipality, while the remaining 20,000 square meters should account for privately owned housing represented by owners’ associations or apartment block administrators. the european commission will refund the renovation costs only after the works are completed and have achieved the target parameters. [20] “the apartment buildings, selected for the project eugugle demonstration are located in two districts: the wider city centre and the western part of bratislava city (shown on figure 7). a wide range of different building types from different construction systems and construction materials were selected for the eu-gugle project demonstration and are representing the typical city´s building composition. almost all of the selected buildings are characterized by high energy demands and present diverse typical technical difficulties. the buildings, in current stage, have very poor thermal protection of the envelope and require high amount of energy for space heating and domestic hot water preparation. most of the buildings are connected to a district heating network. the selection of pilot private apartment buildings is aimed to identify the wide spectrum of issues and problems that could prospectively occur in the renovation process of housing stock in the city. between 60’s and early 90’s, due to city expansion and lack of housing units, many prefabricated concrete apartment blocks were built. the exemplary renovation of the municipal social housing is expected (the municipal lodging-house for disadvantaged families and the house for elderly people)”. [21]  total floor area to be renovated: ≈ 40,000m²  type of buildings: both private apartment buildings and buildings own by community used for housing.  primary energy savings target: up to 60-75%. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam 7 figure 7. eu-gugle districts in bratislava – demonstrations in red [21] the energy saving measures outlined below will result in 60 to 75 % reduction of energy use in buildings compared to present state. the proposed measures will be replicated in other apartment buildings, located in different city districts, which are constructed in the same or have very similar construction systems. the actions are focussed on following technical and non-technical measures [21]: technical measures [21]:  improvement of the energy performance of buildings through renovation and retrofitting measures (thermal protection of peripheral constructions, roofs, replacement of existing windows with triple-glazed windows,)  implementation of renewable energy sources in district heating systems (eventually disconnection of buildings)  retrofitting of building technical system components and thermal insulation of distribution system pipes; reduction of energy use through technical measures  renewal of elevators, increasing of energy and transport efficiency (duplex elevator group control system)  replacing of fossil energy sources by several innovative technologies (application of heat recovery from the sewage, and air, heat pumps integrated in a low energy heat network, pv, cogeneration systems) non-technical measures [21]:  introduction of metering and regulation control systems • motivation of tenants (metering), communication measures and advisory activities to reduce energy consumption through user’s behavior  energy efficiency rental fee and other agreements with tenants also very important is the issue of transport infrastructure. physical lifetime of transport infrastructure depends primarily on the building materials and old design of transport capacities. the materials that were used for its construction currently do not meet the quality requirements due to the infrastructure was not subject to more fundamental recovery process during its lifetime. moreover, the infrastructure lifetime is significantly influenced by the intensity of its use. its implementation largely falls within the period of implementation of residential buildings and public facilities in housing estates, when at least in a position of static transport capacitively was sufficient for the then demands. the issue of parking in slovakia is a long-term problem, whether in existing buildings or with new development projects where parking costs are only kind of forced expenditure on which developers often want to save money. bratislava is one of the european metropolises, which seeks for the solution for several decades (shown on figure 8). problem that bratislava was not ready for, is a major building boom which caused a further increase in both passenger and freight transport in the city center. this means that the constantly increasing level of motorization brings to slovakia and especially in densely populated urban areas around the capital bratislava even higher space requirements. that becomes the most valuable quantities especially in the inner-city environment. this fact makes new demands on the urbanization of our cities, the professionalism of solutions to traffic problems and high standards to ensure a quality environment. one of the most serious current problems closely related to urban space in bratislava is the traffic situation, especially the issue of static traffic. [22] figure 8. parking in bratislava [23] another important issue in the field of comprehensive transport solutions in bratislava is the fact that there is insufficient traffic data database and the city does not have sufficient details of current conditions of its urban road network. city of bratislava is lacking the scheduled surveys and their results, which would be able to determine the disproportion of the current state and predict its development. [24] the list of projects that have an ambition to contribute to the solution of traffic problem in bratislava is quite long. solving problems with static traffic in bratislava could be implemented using comprehensive regulation through traffic signs. in practice this means charging for parking at a time of increased congestion and the designation of paid parking zones with the road signs. paid parking zones could improve the environment and conditions for non-motorized road users, as well as improving the quality of transport services. one of the solutions to the problems with static traffic could be building a semi recessed and recessed parking, garage houses, increase recessed parking with one or two floors. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 a. adamuscin, j.golej and m. panik 8 addressing of static traffic in different districts of the city lies in cooperation with the magistrate of the capital. cooperation includes the selection of appropriate areas that would capacitive mean an increase in parking areas for individual districts. solution of this complex issue could be also implemented through ppp projects. another solution is a free parking not only on the borders of the city, but also outside, for example in malacky, pezinok or senec. the condition is to create high quality service suburban bus line, which will operate at appropriate intervals. another solution of problem of static transport in bratislava could be seen in the construction of smart parking spaces by installing smart parking sensors placed directly on the parking places. drivers would be allowed to easily find a free parking place and would contribute significantly to the reduction of emissions in the city. [22] another important issue is the participatory budget of the city and the city districts. bratislava as the first slovak city began experimenting with the introduction of participatory budgeting since 2011. citizens were given the opportunity to decide directly on the reallocation of public finances and on the form of public space and services. participatory budgeting process takes place throughout the year and is open to all citizens. in the first phase are collected suggestions and ideas from people on the use of public finances. they are then sorted and processed into projects. since the idea is always more than a means to implement them, citizens must also decide which of their ideas are supported and which are not. [25] it took place at participatory budgeting at the city level for a number of deficiencies and irregularities in recent years. they arise in the event of a communication strategy that would attract as many residents into the process; or administrative support, which would work systematically on the involvement of citizens and work on the drafts; and especially mismatch about the rules for the conduct of participatory budgeting process. municipality of bratislava launches e-governance project in 2015. it is a project of electronic council, which contributes to saving the environment and optimizes the work of the city office. the official website of the city will be available invitations and materials for meetings, profiles of deputies and information about their individual vote, or resolution of the city council. the new application will serve all as citizens, as well as local authorities and the deputies. [26] 4. smart living: the concept of lowcarbon housing solutions for the selected urban zone in bratislava defining of the solved area the area of interest falls within the city district of petrzalka in the capital bratislava. extent the solved area covers an area about the size of 1,096,348 m2 (109.6 hectares). in terms of space-functional compositions holds a dominant function of housing in apartment buildings. residential buildings are mostly built in a u shape with exterior surfaces (with centre public playgrounds and the dominant urban vegetation). housing construction in the area is designed in the form of 8-storey and 12-storey panel blocks of flats. the vast range of amenities consists of commercial and service facilities, facilities for sports and administrative buildings. figure 9. defining of the solved area [27] solved area represents a residential zone, which is an aesthetic appearance and functionality relatively the same as the surrounding urban environment within the territory of city district of petrzalka (fig. 9). on this residential zone are linked monofunctional zones of sport, recreation and employment opportunities. solved area and all the territory of petrzalka in addition to interconnection of individual zones requires also a certain humanization of the urban environment and creation of living street space, which at many locations are missing. baseline emission inventory of co2 production within the model area within the framework of the solved area are situated panel apartment blocks built in 1983-1987. construction and technical solution of residential buildings is different, whether the type, size, number of stories or the number of flats (see figure 10). therefore, the energy consumption also varies in each apartment buildings. as the age of the buildings reaches almost 30 years, a major potential for reduction of energy consumption currently lies in the reconstruction of housing stock in this area. in the solved area is situated 37 residential buildings covered by housing association. within the framework, the solved area was carried out renewal of the 25 apartment buildings. for another 14 apartment buildings, the renovation project has not taken place and no requests has not been submitted for realization any renewal. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam 9 type a type b type c figure 10. views and cuts of individual types of apartment buildings in the solved area [28] another factor influencing the leakage of co2 emissions into the atmosphere is the age of apartment buildings, which in this case is determined by approximating the value of the object from a technical point of view. this means to what extent is influenced the overall energy consumption through technical condition and constructional features of a residential building. from housing association were given information about the energy consumption of buildings in 2012-2014. according to the methodology of redistribution of energy consumption in households (58% for heating, 22% for heating the water, 10% for lighting and 10% of electrical appliances) was calculated individual production of co2 emissions from housing (see appendix b). strengths 42 weaknesses 49 green areas 10 panel technology 10 public spaces 10 technical condition of apartment buildings 8 thermal insulation for over 50% of apartment buildings 7 the total energy consumption of apartment buildings 8 monitoring of energy consumption 8 energy consumption for public lighting 9 the quality of life of residents 7 emissions arising from the concentration of vehicles 7 the aesthetic appearance of the environment 7 opportunities 37 threats 15 green infrastructure 9 increase in co2 production 8 complex reconstruction of apartment buildings 10 climate change 7 (energy certification) smart public lighting 8 environmental pollution 8 table 1. swot analysis: identification of positive and negative elements in the context of reduction / production of co2 [27] figure 11. weighted swot analysis [27] for the classification of swot analysis prevails weaknesses (49) above strengths (42), while above threats (23) dominates opportunities (27). based on the assessment, can be determined the strategy of alliance for a given area. taking into account the weaknesses that area has, also has the potential for development in the context of decreasing production of co2 by improving green infrastructure, comprehensive reconstruction of residential buildings and applying smart technology for public lighting. under the final strategy of alliance we can understand cooperation of housing association with different legal entities and public authorities to improve living conditions and even all environment. the conception of housing estate development the philosophy of the conception of area development is based on the analysis of the current state of the territory and lies in the deepening issues in the field of energy consumption with the aim of intensifying functional relations, and reducing co2 gas emissions. the output for design of adequate measures for the model area is a concept developed in connection with invariant solution of the final concepts (fig.). interconnection of individual elements of concepts will contribute to a radical reduction in co2 emissions through various technical and environmental instruments applicable to the model area. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 a. adamuscin, j.golej and m. panik 10 figure 12. final concepts of the model area development [27] the concept on the left, naming interest area as "lowenergy housing estate". housing estate with arranged vegetation and interconnected with green gardens in combination with water features could to a certain degree ensure a reduction of emissions and also affect an environmental behaviour of residents of the solved area. each housing inner block should have a uniform structure and continuity to the surrounding green living by using various technical and technological instruments. "lowenergy housing development" would become an economically-profitable and energy-efficient housing estate with a direct impact on the surrounding environment with the possibility of applications to locations outside of this area. the principle of the final concept is the creation of urbanistically compact unit with a lower energy consumption. it also includes the transition of this area to economic efficient and environmental friendly mode of public lighting. this would ensure a significant reduction in energy consumption and thus there would be a housing estate based on power save mode from the energy and economic point of view. the concept on the right side, naming interest area as the "green housing estate." the philosophy of this concept is to reduce co2 emissions through green elements. besides the possibility of revitalization of public green spaces, which has the ability to absorb co2 emissions it is also an appropriate solution for implementation of green roofs on residential buildings. together with smart public lighting this model area could become greener and a more ecological environment for its residents. summary based on the calculation of the energy consumption of residential buildings in the solved area and the subsequent production of co2 emissions, we concluded that one of the most effective tools for reducing emissions is the complex renewal of residential buildings. by using building renewal could be decreased co2 emissions by up to a quarter. by using other technological and technical interventions such as green roofs, smart street lighting, public green revitalization, etc. the reduction of co2 in the area could reach more than 50%. 5. conclusion in order to bratislava achieve the smart city concept it needs to develop and implement mainly a comprehensive concepts a policies in the field of residential and nonresidential buildings, transport infrastructure, technical infrastructure, public spaces but also in the field of sustainable economy and governance. of course, main condition to achieve this effective sustainable development is the implementation of the latest materials, technologies and innovative concepts in each of these areas, whether in the field of urban development, ict and construction and architecture, etc. in this would help to bratislava a generous funding from the european funds, the potential of which the city does not know sufficiently take full advantage. this could help the generous funding from the european funds, the potential of which the city does not know to sufficiently take full advantage. precisely in these areas bratislava could take inspiration from the sister city of vienna and amsterdam, which actual projects and its approaches to them could be considered as an exemplary direction of sustainable development of a modern european city. references [1] mori, k., christodoulou, a. (2012) review of sustainability indices and indicators: towards a newcity sustainability index (csi), environmental impact assessment review, vol. 32, no. 1,pp. 94-106. [2] albino, v., et al. 2015. smart cities: definitions, dimensions, and performance. available on: http://www.academia.edu/8958101/smart_cities_definitio ns_dimensions_performance_and_initiatives [3] o’grady, m., o’hare, g. (2012) how smart is your city?, science, vol. 335, no. 3, pp. 1581-82. [4] available on: (2015): www.smart-cities.eu [5] giffender, r., fertner, c., kramar, h., kalasek, r., pichler-milanović, n., meijers, e. (2007) smart cities: ranking of european medium-sized cities. vienna: centre of regional science – vienna ut. [6] gabriel cretu, l. (2012) smart cities design using eventdriven paradigm and semantic web. informatica economica, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 57-67. [7] kourtit, k. & nijkamp, p. (2012) smart cities in the innovation age. innovation: the european journal of social sciences, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 93-95. eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam 11 [8] rucinska s., knetova j. (2014). development planning optimalization of the košice city in the context of the smart city and city region conceptions. 5th central european conference in regional science – cers, 2014. available on: http://www3.ekf.tuke.sk/cers/files/zbornik2014/pdf/rucin ska,%20knezova.pdf] [9] iso/iec jtc 1, information technology. smart cities, preliminary report 2014. iso 2015, published in switzerland. available on: http://www.iso.org/iso/smart_cities_report-jtc1.pdf [10] smart city wien, framework strategy (2014). city of vienna. vienna city administration, 2014. isbn 978-3902576-91-0 [11] 2014 quality of living worldwide city rankings – mercer survey. united states, new york, 2014. available on: http://www.mercer.com/newsroom/2014quality-of-living-survey.html#city-rankings [12] cohen, b. (2014) the 10 smartest cities in europe. fast company & inc, 2015 mansueto ventures llc. available on: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3024721/the-10-smartestcities-in-europe [13] cohen, b. (2014). the smartest cities in the world. fast company & inc, 2015 mansueto ventures llc. available on: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3038765/fast-cities/thesmartest-cities-in-the-world [14] cohen, b. (2014) the smartest cities in the world 2015: methodology. fast company & inc, 2015 mansueto ventures llc. available on: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3038818/the-smartest-citiesin-the-world-2015-methodology [15] smart parking amsterdam smart city (2015). available on: http://amsterdamsmartcity.com/about-asc [16] city-zen. amsterdam smart city (2015) available on: http://amsterdamsmartcity.com/projects/detail/id/64/slug/s mart-parking [17] city-zen. amsterdam smart city (2015) available on: http://amsterdamsmartcity.com/projects/detail/id/78/slug/ci ty-zen [18] photo (2015). available on: http://www.konzervativnyvyber.sk/v-bratislave-sa-dennepreda-12-novych-bytov-kupuju-sa-z-papiera/6093/ [19] finka, m., golej, j., jamečný, ľ., ladzianska, z., ondrejička, v., baloga, m., schweigert, m., tóth, (2012). metodika komplexnej obnovy sídlisk s dôrazom na obnovu bytových domov: 1. 2. 3.etapa. bratislava: stu v bratislave. ústav manažmentu, 2012. 248 p. [20] liptáková, j. (2014). making bratislava a smart city. the slovak spectator. available on: http://spectator.sme.sk/c/20049863/making-bratislava-asmart-city.html [21] eu-gugle (2015). available on: http://eu-gugle.eu/pilotcities/bratislava/ [22] špirková, d., golej, j., panik, m. (2014). the issue of urban static traffic on selected examples in bratislava in the context of economic sustainability. international conference on traffic and transport engineering ictte 2014. 27th – 28th november 2014. belgrade, serbia. isbn 978-86-9161531-4 [23] photo (2015). available on: http://bratislava.sme.sk/c/8011526/parkovanie-v-petrzalkestarosta-bajan-podliezol-zakon.html [24] methodology of traffic capacitive impact assessment of investment projects (2014). the annex to decision of the mayor of the capital city of the slovak republic, bratislava. 16 p. [25] vittek, p. (2014). aby aj o peniazoch rozhodovali ľudia. p e r e x , a. s. available on: http://nazory.pravda.sk/osa/clanok/322462-aby-aj-openiazoch-rozhodovali-ludia/ [26] samospráva spúšťa digitálne zastupiteľstvo (2015). hlavné mesto sr bratislava. available on: http://www.bratislava.sk/samosprava-spusta-digitalnezastupitelstvo/d-11048590/p1=11049947 [27] hrabošová, a. 2016. možnosti znižovania produkcie co2 v bývaní v sr v kontexte súčasnej európskej politiky. stu v bratislave. [28] ministerstvo doprav, výstavby a regionálneho rozvoja slovenskej republiky, mdvrr sr, 2008. available on: http://www.telecom.gov.sk/index/open_file.php?file=vysta vba/vedadokumenty/realvyskulohy/zasahnosnkonst003 391a.pdf eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 a. adamuscin, j.golej and m. panik 12 appendix a. smart cities benchmarking indicators [14] eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 the challenge for the development of smart city concept in bratislava based on examples of smart cities of vienna and amsterdam 13 appendix b. the total average energy consumption and co2 production of renewed and non-renewed residential buildings type of apartment building number of buildings number of households the total average consumption of renewed buildings [kwh] (2012-2014) the total average consumption of nonrenewed buildings [kwh] (2012-2014) the resulting value of co2 of renewed buildings (20122014) [t] the resulting value of co2 of non-renewed buildings (20122014) [t] average percentage of co2 production of renewed buildings on non-renewed a 9 768 496782,74 512181,08 100,002 103,102 15,90% b 4 192 254500 288715,56 51,231 58,118 c 25 1440 262656,93 391430,5 52,873 78,795 source: authors eai european alliance for innovation eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 07 2016 | volume 1 | issue 1 | e5 an intelligent machine learning based intrusion detection system (ids) for smart cities networks 1 an intelligent machine learning based intrusion detection system (ids) for smart cities networks muhammad yaseen ayub1,*, usman haider2, ali haider1, muhammad tehmasib ali tashfeen3, hina shoukat1 and abdul basit4 1department of computer science, comsats university islamabad, attock, pakistan (e-mail: yaseen.ayub@ieee.org, sp17bse-018@ciit-attock.edu.pk, fa18-bcs-053@cuiatk.edu.pk) 2department of electrical engineering, national university of computer & emerging sciences, peshawar, pakistan (e-mail: usmanhaider@ieee.org) 3school and electrical and electronics engineering, fast national university peshawar pakistan (e-mail: alitashfeen@gmail.com) 4department of electrical and computer engineering (ece), comsats university islamabad campus (e-mail: abdulbasitmujahid925@gmail.com) abstract introduction: internet of things (iot) along with cloud based systems are opening a new domain of development. they have several applications from smart homes, smart farming, smart cities, smart grid etc. due to iot sensors operating in such close proximity to humans and critical infrastructure, there arises privacy and security issues. securing an iot network is very essential and is a hot research topic. different types of intrusion detection systems (ids) have been developed to detect and prevent an unauthorized intrusion into the network. objectives: the paper presents a machine learning based light, fast and reliable intrusion detection system (ids). methods: multiple supervised machine learning algorithms are applied and their results are compared. algorithms applied include linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, xg boost, knn and decision tree. results: simulation results showed that knn algorithm gives us the highest accuracy, followed by xg boost and decision tree which are not far behind. conclusion: a fast, secure and intelligent ids is developed using machine learning algorithms. the resulting ids can be used in various types of networks especially in iot based networks. keywords: iot, ids, machine learning. received on 31 october 2022, accepted on 23 january 2023, published on 08 march 2023 copyright © 2023 muhammad yaseen ayub et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v7i1.2825 1. introduction in the modern age of technological inventions, overall world dynamics is changed. due to wireless communication and iot networks connectivity is made possible. according to analytics, in 2022 around 14.4 billion iot devices are connected [1]. in near future iot devices will exceed up to 41 billion. wireless sensor * corresponding author. email: yaseen.ayub@ieee.org networks will provide better solutions for tracking and monitoring. there exist many applications of iot networks which include home automation, digital banking and security systems. with the help of iot based camera surveillance business shops and homes can be secured from intruders [2-6]. collectively these applications form the basis of future smart cities. smart cities, in particular, are heavily dependent on iot networks for various critical services such as transportation, energy management, and public safety. this eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e4 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ muhammad yaseen ayub, et al. 2 increased dependence makes smart cities more vulnerable to cyber-attacks [7]. security is considered the main problem with iot based networks. attacker tries to hijack iot network by sending false data packets. due to that network becomes vulnerable and intruder easily unbalances the entire system [8]. in smart cities there is extensive use of iot networks which makes its security a huge concern. attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in iot devices to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information, disrupt city services, or cause physical damage. this makes intrusion detection a critical requirement for ensuring the security of smart cities [9]. tele-medicine is a new concept in smart cities where doctor will operate and consult the patient remotely. therefore, intruder can disturb the process by deploying dos/ddos, sybil, spoofing, wormholes and man-in-the middle attack [10-12]. this can cause some serious life threatening situation for the patient. figure 1, depicts the concept of iot network of multiple devices using an ids and its advantage in case of any intrusion figure 1. iot network using concept of intrusion detection system however, to make smart city environment safe from such attacks, threat detection is very much necessary. therefore, intrusion detection system (ids) plays an important role in identification of various attacks on iotnetworks [13]. this research paper presents the concept of ids using machine learning techniques for optimal detection of cyber-attacks. figure 1, shows the concept of ids in iot networks. section 2 presents literature review of all research work that has been done recently in this domain. section 3 explains intrusion detection systems in detail along with their different types, followed by section 4 which describes real time applications of iot networks in a smart city concept. then section 5 discusses simulation environment and simulation results generated by applying machine learning techniques on unsw-nb15 dataset. at last section 6 presents conclusion and future discussions. 2. literature survey this section presents limitations related to iot-networks. in, iot based communication networks sending information from one node to another is quite tough. therefore, nature inspired e-anthocnet has improved overall standards of communication. but still security is the main concern which needs to be addressed with possible solutions [14-16]. machine learning technique decision tree enhance connectivity in between nodes by using received signal strength indicator (rssi). due to cyberattacks on iot networks connectivity will be unbalanced [17]. intelligent detection system is introduced which can easily detect dos/ ddos and ping of death attacks. markov chain distribution is used to balance false positive and false negative which lead to the problem of high accuracy [18]. queue based traffic management is used to monitor data packets of iot-networks. anomaly based ids is designed using poisson distribution to minimize false alarm and missed detection. the proposed system is able to identify ping of death attacks but still higher attack probabilities need to be evaluated which use to degrade network performance [19]. table 1 present’s limitation of various proposed machine learning based ids using different techniques as well as stimulation environment. table 1. machine learning techniques & limitations referen ce machine learning techniqu es type of ids simulati on tool ids limitation s [38] fusion decision anomal y-based test bed unable to detect host attack payload monitored attacks. [39] knn & rsl hybrid sdn and blockchai n accuracy can be improved. [40] rnn hybrid python 3.0 rnn has a slow and complex training process and faces difficulty with long sequence. [41] rf anomal y-based iot system anomalybased approach is deficient on true alarm rate [42] rf anomal y-based scada less accurate than a eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e4 an intelligent machine learning based intrusion detection system (ids) for smart cities networks 3 hybrid model [43] ann hybrid matla b ann technique usually lack in accuracy to some extant [44] svm anomal y-based matla b accuracy needs to be improved [45] dnn anomal y-based tensorfl ow & python mitigation required for false alarm [46] cnn anomal y-based python data labeling is a better practice helps the algorithm’s better understandi ng [47] snn, bxg boost & dnn anomal y-based python precision refinement is requisite. 3. intrusion detection system for iotnetwork iot networks are usually poorly secured so the fact is that the critical data, they are carrying is vulnerable to various kind of attack. an ids acts as an alarm that beeps in case of any possible attack [20]. idss have been more common because they continuously analyze the network traffic thus no unverified packet passed unattended. currently researchers are more interested to impose various methodologies of machine learning and deep learning powered with various algorithms on iots for the detection of intrusion [21-22]. in smart cities with such extensive use of iot networks and in such close proximity of humans with sometimes sensitive data on them, it is absolutely necessary to incorporate strong intrusion detection system (ids) that mitigates the threat of information leakage and network hijacking which. if in smart city a critical network is hijacked, it can result in loss of precious and sensitive information. it can also lead to life threatening situation. thus protecting smart city infrastructure against possible attacks is very important. the advancement in iot security has led to detection even on sensor node in iot network [23]. there are three common types of ids: • anomaly-based ids • signature-based ids • hybrid ids 3.1 anomaly based ids for iot networks the anomaly-based detection system search and validate the iot network pattern with the normal-behavior thus any anomaly beyond a specific level is considered as a threat and system is warned and system learns gradually. it has a threshold defined which acts as a boundary, any change in normal network behavior beyond that threshold is classified as a threat. anomaly-based detection system overcomes various barriers of excellence like it can detect zero-day error and has capability to sense unknown attacks but has high false alarm rate. [24][25]. 3.2 signature based ids for iot networks signature-based intrusion detection system corroborates the network traffic pattern with the pre-existing signatures and makes a decision regarding an intrusion on basis of their match. they are also called rule based intrusion detection system. their limitation is that they can only detect and classify those attacks which are already stored in its database. any attack with unsaved pattern passes unattended. this type of ids has low false alarm rate but is unable detect zero-day error [24-26]. 3.3 hybrid based ids for iot networks a hybrid-based ids is combination of both types so it can detect both zero-day attacks as well as pre-defined attack patterns. it is a very flexible and customizable ids, it can be customized to prioritize certain types of threat depending on scenario. with this approach the low false alarm rate and high detection rate is achieved thus precision and accuracy of ids is improved [26-27]. . 4. real-time application of iot-networks in smart cities iot market is growing continuously and researchers are pointing towards more and more application of iots. the concept of smart cities rely heavily on use of iot networks for faster communication and automation. the world’s next target is automation and iot network is the tool to achieve this goal. the researchers have found the most interesting applications of iot networks in smart cities scenario such as in smart traffic management, emergency response, health care, smart homes, smart grids, agriculture, smart monitoring etc. [28]. some of the applications are further explained below: eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e4 muhammad yaseen ayub, et al. 4 4.1 smart traffic management. iots sensors can be installed on roads, intersections and other key areas to monitor traffic patterns in real time. these iot sensors then can collect certain data about traffic flow, vehicle speeds, traffic density etc. which can then be used for the optimization of traffic signal and routing to improve traffic flow and reduce congestion [29] [30]. this can be very useful in smart cities during peak traffic times as it can help reduce delays and improve the overall efficiency of the road network. another application of iot in smart traffic management can be the integration of traffic data with public transport system. this can allow for more efficient routing and scheduling of busses and trains as well as the integration of real-time traffic data into public transport journey planning apps so people can know about traffic situation in a particular area before planning any trip or traveling plan. 4.2 emergency response in smart cities, the use of iot networks for emergency response can involve the installation of sensors in key areas such as public buildings, streets and parks to detect emergencies in real-time. these sensors can be triggered by factors such as smoke, fire or extreme temperatures to alert the authorities of potential emergencies. iot networks can also be used to gather real-time data on the location and status of emergency services vehicles, allowing for more efficient routing and deployment of these resources in response to emergencies [31]. another use can be integration of emergency data with public warning systems, such as sirens or messaging system. this can allow authorities to quickly and efficiently alert the public of any potential dangers and provide guidance on how to respond. iot networks can be integrated in smart cities and they can help improve the speed and efficiency of emergency response efforts, leading to a faster resolution of emergencies and a reduction in the impact on the community. thus creating a smart and safer smart city environment for public [32]. 4.3 iot for healthcare iots have the most critical advantage in healthcare. they have increased facility of medicare with minimal expenditure even in remote areas. smart iot wearables can monitor a patient’s vital signs in real-time and alert healthcare professionals to any potential risks. now any medical officer can monitor his patient without paying him personal visit or keeping patient in the hospital. sensors applied for the patient’s care shares data with the doctor through iot network and thus complete examination of the results is not a big deal anymore [33]. 4.4 iot based smart home iot has played an important role in home automation. almost all home appliance i.e., ac, refrigerator, washing machine lights, fans, door locks etc. are now available in smart version even vehicles have been shifted towards iot network thus they can be accessed remotely. iot sensors can play a key role in security of a smart home in smart cities. sensors can monitor and protect the home from potential threats such as burglaries or fire. a smart home has many sensors like fire & smoke sensor, gas sensor etc. that alert the user if any parameter crosses the threshold. so, a smart home with iot network ensures the safety of residents [3] [34]. 4.5 iot for smart grid the purpose of smart grid is to provide electricity to the customers by means two-way digital communication. a smart grid can track each consumption of the electricity at all the locations of the system. smart grid targets have been achieved via iot. through an iot network, a smart grid is capable of disaster as well as operation monitoring on high voltage transmission lines, efficiency, accuracy and operation period that is very strenuous in manual systems [35]. 4.6 iot for agriculture the production of the agriculture is going to increase using iot through smart farming. iot is been used for the monitoring of crops as well as animals through various tools and sensors connected through iot network like monitoring of greenhouse temperature, humidity of field, disease diagnosis etc. various machinery used in agriculture is been smart now can be controlled remotely through iot network. moreover, uavs are also been deployed in the modern farming and agriculture [36]. 4.7 iot in smart cities with the advancing world, the first idea is smart cities collectively creating a smart world. the evolution of smart city is parallel to the evolution of all its components. a smart health system, smart transport system, smart buildings, smart energy management, smart administration, smart industries and smart security etc. will collectively be the building blocks of a smart city and iot provides the base to this progression [37]. 5. simulation environment for simulation python is used to do experimentation on iot-networks. unsw-nb15 dataset is utilized which is having updated network traffic information. machine eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e4 an intelligent machine learning based intrusion detection system (ids) for smart cities networks 5 learning techniques like linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, xg boost, knn and decision tree are simulated [48-54], which generated very good results. table 2, shows results of machine learning classifiers where knn is having better accuracy compared to the rest of algorithms about 98.3061%. the overall explanation of table 2 is illustrated in figure 2. table 2. accuracy of machine learning techniques algorithms accuracy linear discriminant analysis 97.6717 quadratic discriminant analysis 94.0314 xg boost 98.2507 knn 98.3061 decision tree 98.2137 figure 2. machine learning algorithms like linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, xg boost, knn and decision tree using unsw-nb15 dataset’ 6. conclusion and future directions iot networks can be deployed in almost every field. there exist many problems in iot networks due to that intruder easily attack and unbalance entire network. this paper has introduced machine learning techniques to detect possible cyber-attacks from updated australian dataset called unsw-nb-15. types of intrusion detection system in iot networks are incorporated which include anomaly, signature and hybrid. different iot-based applications are being discussed which provide a clear picture of limitations and vulnerabilities. around five machine learning techniques like linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, xg boost, knn and decision tree are utilized. this paper is giving investigation of security countermeasures. especially, the approach of intrusion detection system is used to identify various cyber-attacks. moreover, in near future, as iot devices are increasing continuously with the passage of time. ids using supervised machine learning, deep learning, computational intelligence, optimization, genetic algorithm, supervised learning, reinforcement and sliding mode controller is helpful to detect possible cyber-attacks. also, new dataset for network security is the need for researchers. scientists must focus on real-time applications regarding intrusion detection system. in 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[54] koroniotis n, moustafa n, sitnikova e, slay j. towards developing network forensic mechanism for botnet activities in the iot based on machine learning techniques. ininternational conference on mobile networks and management 2017 dec 13 (pp. 30-44). springer, cham. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e4 investigation of blockchain for covid-19: a systematic review, applications and possible challenges eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 investigation of blockchain for covid-19: a systematic review, applications and possible challenges shah hussain badshah1, muhammad imad1, muhammad abul hassan2,*, naimullah1, shabir khan1, farhatullah3, sana ullah4 and syed haider ali5 1department of computing and technology, abasyn university peshawar, onlinesoftteach@gmail.com, imadk28@gmail.com, naimnan.15@gmail.com, mshabirkhan1993@gamil.com 2department of information engineering and computer science, university of trento, italy, muhammadabul.hassan@unitn.it 3school of automation, control sciences and engineering, china university of geosciences, wuhan, 430074, china farhatkhan8398@gmail.com 4department of computer science, qurtuba university of science and technology, peshawar pakistan, sunnykhan3304@gmail.com 5department of electrical engineering, university of engineering and technology peshawar, engrsyedhaiderali@yahoo.com abstract smart city is emerging application in which many internet of things (iot) devices are embedded to perform overall monitoring and perform processing automatically. in smart city the authenticity is key problem and many users in the in smart city has faced challenges during covid-19. the covid-19 epidemic, a deadly virus, first appeared in the globe in 2019. the world health organization (who) states that it is almost certainly feasible to contain this virus in its early phases if some precautions are taken. to contain the infection, most nations declared emergencies both inside and outside their borders and prohibited travel. artificial intelligence and blockchain are being used in smart city applications to monitor the general condition in the nation and reduce the mortality rate. blockchain has also made it possible to safeguard patient medical histories and provide epidemic tracking. ai also offers the ideal, wanted answer for correctly identifying the signs. the primary goal of this study is to fully investigate blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (ai) in relation to covid-19. a case study that was recently developed to identify and networked pathogens acquired important knowledge and data. additionally, ai that can handle massive quantities of medical data and perform difficult jobs will be able to reduce the likelihood of intricacy in data analysis. lastly, we highlight the present difficulties and suggest potential paths for addressing the 19 diseases in future circumstances. keywords: smart city, blockchain, covid-19, virus, artificial intelligence (ai), pandemic, machine learning, deep learning received on 30 november 2022, accepted on 02 march 2023, published on 23 march 2023 copyright © 2023 shah hussain badshah et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v7i1.2827 1. introduction today, security is more important than ever, as numerous organizations, both private and public, have experienced costly losses and reputational damage because of hacking and other forms of cybercrime especially in smart city [1]. the adoption of blockchain technology has made it much simpler and faster to implement security patches and other updates to websites, social media platforms, and other types of online infrastructure. as a result of covid-19 in smart city application, more people than ever before are communicating with their loved ones via social networking sites, but it is incredibly difficult to stop criminal activity or counteract fake information spread via the web. blockchain technology is used by public and commercial (hired) agencies to address the problems of plagiarism and other forms of fake material on these sites. the european centre for disease prevention and control estimates that 10 million people are affected with this virus every year [220], making prevention efforts difficult due to a lack of eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e5 mailto:onlinesoftteach@gmail.com mailto:imadk28@gmail.com mailto:mshabirkhan1993@gamil.com mailto:farhatkhan8398@gmail.com mailto:engrsyedhaiderali@yahoo.com https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ a shah hussain badshah, et al. 2 available tools like immunizations and a covid-19 protection package [21-30]. numerous studies demonstrated that x-rays are crucial in the initial phases of diagnosis of the virus. as a result of the prevalence of online transmission of medical records, it is crucial that this sensitive information be safeguarded to prevent the spread of inaccurate data [31-35]. machine learning and deep learning are two approaches being used to combat the spread of misinformation online, especially in the smart city. distributed ledger technology, or blockchain for short, keeps records in several separate systems and links them together in a decentralized, peer-to-peer network. blockchain transactions are protected by a cryptographically strong mechanism, such as a digital signature, for example. in the last few years, the covid19 epidemic has affected the health and lives of people all over the world [36]. the pandemic has expanded to around 150 nations. the european centre for disease prevention and control estimates that up to 10 million individuals are infected due to the virus's ease of spread, lack of effective immunizations, and the unreliability of commercially available covid-19 test tools [3]. new studies have demonstrated the importance of diagnostic tests like x-rays in the diagnosis of coronavirus illness. also, academics have prohibited unorganized information from social networks and stressed using blockchain technology to defend against and identify fake news and hoaxes [37]. researchers and medical specialists from all over the world are scrambling to find a new tool to combat the covid-19 pandemic. unverified claims in the media and hearsay can be exposed with the help of machine learning and deep learning techniques. bitcoin technology expedites the transfer of data used to monitor physical possessions. four primary levels are built into the blockchain architecture to ensure that anomalous spread is being stopped. all incoming communications on the web are constantly monitored by the four levels (computer, network, blockchain, and device) [38]. the speculative meaning becomes clear and will play an important role in the future of the digital world if one considers blockchain technology, which is presently required for cryptocurrencies. it is imperative that this technology continues to advance and become more user-friendly so that it can be used to solve future security problems in a wide variety of industries and institutions. in order to anticipate the results of the covid19 test and identify the patients who will be negatively impacted by the discrimination, machine learning categorization methods are indispensable [39]. in the article [40], the authors examine the categorization of the covid-19 dataset and point out where various classifiers perform poorly on the corona dataset. the chosen classification algorithms will be use, and their classification performance will be measured across a number of metrics including accuracy, sensitivity, falsepositive rate, and f-measures. to get the best outcomes possible from machine learning methods, we compare the efficiency of various categorization classifiers on the coronavirus dataset [41]. as a result of their difficulties, chinese scientists have had to delve deeply into the virus to determine the best way to deal with the coronavirus enigma. tests of different techniques for classifying models yield information about their predictive success [42], but these tests can lead to model confusion. to ensure that ct scan picture quality is detected at an early stage, the model is being optimized using deep learning. it appears that illnesses all over the world, such as aids, tb, hepatitis, and measles, will be severely impacted by the covid-19 epidemic, prompting the world health organization to proclaim an emergency. the world health organization (who) and other study institutions face an enormous workload, which could be greatly alleviated with the aid of machine learning algorithms. 1.1 symptoms the documented signs of covid-19 are diverse. some people may experience symptoms as soon as 14 days after contracting a virus. figure 1: covid-19 symptoms and indications, including temperature, congestion, shortness of breath, exhaustion, loss of flavour or scent, headache or bodily pain, trouble breathing, vertigo, and diarrhea [43]. there is a higher chance of more severe consequences from covid-19 infection in older individuals who already have pre-existing medical problems, such as heart disease, pulmonary disease, diabetes, or persistent illnesses. acute renal damage, organ failure, cardiac problems, and bacterial infection are all potential complications that can result in mortality. figure 1. covid-19 symptoms, preventive measures, its global impact, and mitigation efforts. 1.2 preventive measures preventive measure is important to stop the spreading of the virus and reduce the risk of countering. currently, preventive measures are washing hands with soap for 20 seconds, keeping a social distance in a crowded place of at least 2 meters, wearing a surgical mask, and avoiding touching your face, nose, and eyes. another preventive measure is cleaning the house regularly, staying home and not going outside unnecessarily, covering coughs and sneezing, and monitoring health issues. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e5 investigation of blockchain for covid-19: a systematic review, applications and possible challenges 3 1.3 global impact in addition to having an impact on human existence, covid-19 also has an impact on the world economy. many nations have issued stringent lockdowns and advised citizens to remain at home, but as a result, covid-19 regulations have shut down workplaces, marketplaces, and other businesses. the covid-19 shutdown had a major effect on business and the world economy [13], as well as public transportation, building, tourists, supply chain disruption, unemployment, and food shortages. 1.4 mitigation efforts the government and organizations have implemented relief strategies in addition to protective ones to halt the infections. many apps have been created in different nations to increase the effectiveness of the viral detection procedure and track the covid-19 patients by using a phone app to track and identify the virus. these apps made use of bluetooth or the internet to keep the patient's data in protected form, allowing the medical officials to quickly get in touch with each one of them separately. in addition to alerting users when an infectious individual is nearby, these apps also inform users of health problems [14]. section 1 of the literature survey discusses the contrast of linked papers. the following is the paper's primary contribution: • the poll included a thorough analysis of blockchain technology's ability to combat the covid-19 outbreak and discover cures for these diseases. • this essay compares various bitcoin research studies and emphasizes their models, goals, contributions, and flaws. • the covid-19 epidemic was noted in this survey's potential research obstacles and future directions for blockchain technology by study experts and users. the following is how the document is set up: a overview of the blockchain literature is presented in section 2. the role of blockchain technology in the fight against the covid-19 epidemic was covered in section 3. the blockchain's materials and techniques will be covered in section 4. in the framework of covid-19, section 5 addressed the blockchain technology issues and future plans. the end is presented in section 6 to finish. 2. literature review to improve the effectiveness of blockchain methods created for the retrieval and storage of jointly managed data, yuting wu et al. conducted research. additionally, the system guards against data manipulation when various businesses and groups' data is processed. reducing irrelated data by proofing the supply chain [15]. researchers radhya sahal and saeed h. alsamhi concentrated on the use of blockchain technology for the covid-19 pandemic warning use case, which used collaboratively built digital clones for a decentralized smart pandemic. the internet of things (iot) and artificial intelligence (ai) transformation are being greatly aided by the new technologies of blockchain, especially in the healthcare industry. data exchanged between medical cyber-physical systems and safe real-time data processing for the covid19 epidemic [16]. figure 1 compares various study projects pertaining to bitcoin and covid-19. table 1. comparison of our survey paper with existing works. ref algorithm / models applied purpose contribution weakne ss limitatio n [15] rf, knn, adaboost, gbdt algorithm, xgboost, rf, lr, classification, confusion matrix, data tamper proofing mechanism improved previous techniques security loopholes still exist [16] practical byzantine fault tolerance (pbft) algorithm, blockchain framework, decision tree data security, data integrity, real-time data analytics, predictions, data sharing, data splitting, model evaluation to increase speed, the architecture dispersed warning use case. numerous smart gadgets with numerous communic ation issues technolog y beyond the fifth generatio n (b5g) or sixth generatio n (6g). [17] rf, mlr, rn, nbg, svm, nb, c5 bcn, bch, slr, tzs, xrp, eos, cdo to improve precision, eliminate any background data. improper handling of a large collection [18] ddn neural network, fed, blockchain ehrs, sqlite, api, feature extracted more work is required to manage large data and increase precision. the algorithm could be improved to face unimporta nt characteris tics. [19] ai, machine learning techniques utilization ai and blockchain technology used for the covid-19 pandemic. survey type the security problems with blockchain technology still need to be monitored. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e5 a shah hussain badshah, et al. 4 [20] ml, ai, supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement. linear regression visualization, analyze parallel analysis of tools and programs small collections of training data [21] federated learning, data abstraction classification, peer-to-peer network blockchain technology, simulation, improved tiny nodes are required problems arise with large storge files. [22] artificial intelligence models; machine learning, federated learning analysis, detection, researchers are still trying to make the systems more responsive. internet access is not widely accessible . how to gather statistics on the impacted covid-19 patients. [23] blockchain technology with federated learning, deep learning, data normalization, routing algorithm, vgg, resnet, mobilenet, densenet segmentation, detection, classification improve using the structure of modern ct scans lack of a suitable sample for training data [24] ai, ml models, data mining methods, blockchain approaches swot analysis, analysis, boost protocol effectiveness for a specific risk management security. high operating costs, the potential for splits, a dearth of freedom, and the requireme nt for more data storing capacity on local computers . [25] ml, dl, blockchain, ai, robotics, big data detection, segmentation, classification, radiography and computed tomography (cmt) model should also employ other ideal methods. additional need to manage huge informatio n [26] machine learning algorithms, flexibility and scalability determine the success of the program. the system's major flaw is that it depends on users having and using smartphon es. 3. blockchain technology in smart city application against covid-19 pandemic the covid-19 pandemic may push the medical system to its breaking point and prevent the development of effective treatments. an accurate data supervision system that would instantly be compatible with medical treatment systems instruction that demands potential outbreaks is being reduced in the movement. the current covid-19 data, however, comes from disparate sources like clinical labs, hospitals, and the public and contains large amounts of data for evaluation without being thoroughly coordinated. it contains careless information because it complicates attempts to determine potential outbreaks and covid-19 quarantines. contrarily, a limitation is a time-consuming covid-19 data recognition method that typically requires a few hours to finish testing for viruses to improve precision. the challenge is how to accelerate a covid-19 identification while maintaining high precision. like how it is difficult to manipulate covid-19 data, which has intricate arrangements and large volumes, using human-dependent medical tools [27]. figure 2 displays the information about applications for blockchain and ai technology. figure 2. blockchain applications in fighting covid19. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e5 investigation of blockchain for covid-19: a systematic review, applications and possible challenges 5 3.1 patients information sharing to study covid-19 and determine the illness and viral signs, it is crucial to exchange patient data with medical research facilities both domestically and globally. blood records and prescription information are acceptable if the private of the patients' data is protected and no violations of national and foreign data exchange regulations are made. different iot devices and blockchain technology can be used to gather data, making it simpler to share it with various institutions and medical experts. 3.2 tracking infectious disease outbreaks the public health statistics for contagious diseases like covid-19 are processed quickly by blockchain technology, which also provides a more precise summary and adequate reaction. additionally, this will help us keep track of viral activity, early symptom identification, potential new cases, and pandemic levels of transmission. 3.3 securing medical supply chains bitcoin is useful for monitoring and identifying medical supply networks as well as documenting and analysing the demand for logistical materials and supplies. the supply chain includes several parties, including documents of the process and verifying evidence for each party to monitor each step separately. 4. methods and materials to provide a summary of the inquiry into the use of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence in the battle against the coronavirus epidemic, the suggested comprehensive studies emphasized research methodologies and included the following crucial stages. we start by keeping in mind the shortcomings of the current healthcare system and choosing the motivational step for why covid-19 and ai should be used instead. researching all pertinent scientific articles related to the study topic is the second stage. we examine research on the technological applications of blockchain and artificial intelligence in supporting initiatives to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. in this case, we use research threads like machine learning strategies [28][29], blockchain technology, deep learning methods [30], and covid-19 to delve into and prioritize the most acceptable technical papers for our analytical examination. next, we choose the relevant information for the specified queries. we made the decision to highlight peer-reviewed, excellent studies that were given in books, journals, symposiums, seminars, and symposia that dealt with the subject of the study. the third part is all connected articles essential to their titles. we read the main idea out loud, select the main buzzwords, and draw attention to the abstract idea that draws contributions of pertinent data to the paper. then, for the purpose of comparing the studies, we cycled the terms into groups and by sections. the final step is data extraction, which gathers all the information required to examine the technological terminology and blockchain and ai advances in relation to the coronavirus outbreak [31][32]. 4.1 proposed blockchain-ai architecture for coronavirus fighting with the aid of models, covid-19 illnesses can be fought by integrating blockchain and ai technology. stakeholders, blockchain functions, ai classifiers, and constant covid data sources are the four key stages that are outlined below in figure 3 [33]. to create and monitor useful data from the raw data to acquire the information, academics have been using databases from clinical laboratories, social networks, and institutions for experimental observation. each scholar should be familiar with handling data and the methods for gathering information. additionally, coronavirus statistics include radiography pictures and x-rays of historically infected impacted regions to gather the information from various websites, clinical laboratories, social media, publications, government accounts, the world health organization, and other resources. the chinese government alleges that we are currently creating a sizable database system to keep daily patient data and quickly assess contaminated cases in each region of information or data gathered by the national health commission with recommended time severe [34]. the national directory is presently linked to the society living in the digital age. websites keep and disseminate data about ct scans and xray pictures [35]. if you pay attention, you will notice that the government offers data centres for academics who need to conduct additional research and determine the best trial given the present scenario of a disease epidemic expanding rapidly. because it involves identifying the important data from the provided information, covid data analysis is not a simple job. blockchain, on the other hand, can analyse 19 connection services, such as recording donations, analysing outbreaks, and safeguarding the daily medical supply chain. the blockchain-based security data is evaluated using insightful ai-based findings. large amounts of data can be gathered from covid-19 sources to forecast the best answer and perform precise analysis. five key uses of ai, including epidemic covid-19 detection, vaccine development, projection, coronavirus analytics, and forecast of any future covid-like outbreak, can highlight assistance for covid-19 combat. 4.2 combining blockchain and ai for combating covid-19 in the movement, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can be combined to create potential future treatments for the epidemic. for instance, experts laboured eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e5 a shah hussain badshah, et al. 6 to determine the best answer and forecast coronavirus development [36]. to protect public life, the government released directions urging citizens to maintain a safe distance and abide by the law. deep learning design can estimate the model's performance criteria based on the patient's description, medical history, and current therapies. to categorize the data and produce correct findings, data is generating crucial guidelines. ai algorithms would assist government officials in building a gadget to educate the public about quarantine and social segregation practices regarding final choices [37]. figure 3. blockchain and ai for coronavirus fighting in smart city 5. challenges and future directions to combat the covid-19 epidemic, blockchain technology offers a hopeful solution. the poll also notes that when using these methods in the context of the healthcare industry, various obstacles are carefully considered. we also talked about the difficulties and potential paths for this area. bitcoin technology should be thoroughly examined in the healthcare industry and disseminated in accordance with legal and governmental requirements. concerns with copyright violation and slander as well as legal issues related to content and personal information can determine what laws apply to blockchain operations. the monitoring application for covid-19 is typically used to monitor and halt the spread of the epidemic, but because user privacy is so crucial, particularly when it comes to private data, it must be protected. however, according to new study studies, blockchain technology poses security risks to software used in the medical and healthcare industries [38] [39][40]. the dearth of information about the viral outbreak, such as infectious cases, normal cases, medical supply state, and tools to recognize the virus, presents a difficult job in the covid-19 pandemic. most of the covid-19 data originate from social media, the gathering of medical records, and the tracking of app health; however, the data are insufficient for extensive ai operations. to operate the blockchain software, sophisticated tools and storage were needed. therefore, it is crucial to create hardware to track covid-19 and quickly examine data inside a blockchain network computer. the systems that support blockchain technology should be enhanced and made better to perform well from a variety of technological angles, including speed, delay, resource usage, and pdr. security problems still exist with blockchain. blockchain storage was subject to a 51% assault on block mining and a double spending strike. as a result, data protection through blockchain should be enhanced. blockchain and ai should be merged to create more effective healthcare system technology with improved efficiency and enough machinery to address pandemic problems. 6. conclusions smart city has caught attention from both industry and academia but still some security related issues need to be addressed and moreover the false spreading of information over social media in covid-19 situations are very challenging. the covid-19 epidemic has spread illnesses like aids, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and measles throughout the globe, prompting the world health organization (who) to proclaim a public health emergency. the massive load placed on the who as well as scholars and experts can be lessened with the aid of machine learning algorithms. to recognize and address the covid-19 epidemic, we have provided a summary of blockchain technology utilized in smart city in this 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[37] m. chang and d. park, "how can blockchain help people in the event of pandemics such as the covid-19?", journal of medical systems, vol. 44, no. 5, 2020. available: 10.1007/s10916-020-01577-8 . [38] a. musamih, r. jayaraman, k. salah, h. hasan, i. yaqoob and y. al-hammadi, "blockchain-based solution for distribution and delivery of covid-19 vaccines", ieee access, vol. 9, pp. 71372-71387, 2021. available: 10.1109/access.2021.3079197. [39] l. yang, j. zhang and x. shi, "can blockchain help food supply chains with platform operations during the covid19 outbreak?", electronic commerce research and applications, vol. 49, p. 101093, 2021. available: 10.1016/j.elerap.2021.101093. [40] m. imad, m. abul hassan, s. hussain bangash and naimullah, "a comparative analysis of intrusion detection in iot network using machine learning", studies in big data, pp. 149-163, 2022. available: 10.1007/978-3-03105752-6_10. [41] m. hassan, s. ali, m. imad and s. bibi, "new advancements in cybersecurity: a comprehensive survey", studies in big data, pp. 3-17, 2022. available: 10.1007/978-3-031-05752-6_1. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities 01 2023 03 2023 | volume 7 | issue 1 | e5 this is a title this paper proposes an optimised design of an autonomous delivery robot while adopting the latest technologies from the different branching fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and tele-communication. as a prospective representation of a user-centric robot design, the proposal is design with the major focus on maximizing users’ satisfaction throughout every human–robot interaction (hri) touchpoints. by the use of sensor fusion techniques along with the deployment of an image detection-based technique accompanying the point-cloud-detection-based path-planning methodology, the robot delivery would be optimised with effective path-planning and obstacle avoidance capability. with the extension of 5g connectivity, it is proposed that the real-time status update and video stream would enable greater efficiency in terms of remote monitoring and centralised robot administration. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article applied design and methodology of delivery robots based on human–robot interaction in smart cities wing ting law1*, kam wah fan 2, ki sing li 3, and tiande mo4 1,2,3,4 hong kong productivity council, hong kong abstract keywords: smart cities, smart mobility, robotics, robot, human-robot interaction; hri; human-centric computing; interaction design; user centric design; robot design; robot methodology. received on 30 august 2022, accepted on 02 april 2023, published on 26 june 2023 copyright © 2023 law et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/ eetsc.2649 1. introduction adapting to the shift of the modern world with increasing traffic of goods and a severe labour shortage, it is foreseeable that the trend of robot delivery would be much popular in order to serve as a versatile alternative for human labour in cities [1][2][3][4]. by having robots take part in labour-intensive tasks, the automation in various industries allows the precious labour resources to re allocated on the important value-added tasks. in recent years, on-demand delivery robots in buildings have been a welcomed substitution over human delivery in most business. this paper, therefore, aims to demonstrate a user-centric idea on human-robot interaction [5] (hereafter called hri) using various design and methodologies that adopt the latest technology among the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and tele communication in real-life applications. throughout the adoption of the different types of technology, it is realised that various hri considerations could be taken into account in order to enhance the overall user experience by revamping human-robot touchpoints. with careful considerations on the planned usage and optimised user experience, hardware design, and software design, the research team proposes the development of an advanced delivery robot that grants the advantages of “user-friendly” system flow, well-compartmentalised hardware architecture, advanced sensor-fusion that enables the deployment of an image-detection-based trajectories prediction technique accompanying the point-cloud *corresponding author. email: cadencelaw@hkpc.org 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 1 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:cadencelaw@hkpc.org w. t. law et al. figure 1. a general user journey map for using a delivery robot detection-based path-planning methodology, as well as a 5g compatible low-latency server-robot connectivity for real-time monitoring and streaming. 2. general hri considerations in delivery robots according to the research from patric r. spence, negative feelings would be easily expressed if the robot is perceived as useless, such that the users would then be encouraged to isolate themselves from the use of the robot [6]. as a matter of fact, it is perfectly common for users to avoid solutions that are perceived to be less efficient or effective when the users believe they could outperform those solutions themselves. this observation gives the insight to the research team that it is crucial to enlighten users with the perception that the robot has to be cognitively effective and efficient in terms of the quality of the robot performance both tangibly and intangibly. this very insight originates the research team’s initial understanding to hri. the rawest concepts of general hri originated from the novel robot of isaac asimov in 1941, which stated that a robot shall not injure a man being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. it is one of the later interceptions in 1994 that if a robot-based economy develops without equitable adjustments, the backlash could be considerable [7]. therefore, it is the interpretation of the research team that, it is important to create a robot paradigm that balance between the economic or technological advantages provided by the robots and the overall drawbacks led by the deployment of the robots. it is in the consensus of later hri considerations that the goal of hri is to allow comfortable and acceptable interactions [5][8]. it is common that users might have uncertain feelings when considering the interaction with robots in contrary to the face-to-face communication among actual human beings. as such, this paper focuses on enabling user-centric hri by optimised designs and methodologies. in the proposed use-case, there would be numerous touchpoints between humans and robots during the user journey of the delivery robot. 3. planned usage and optimised user experience for general documents/ samples delivery tasks, it is commonly believed that the system performance in terms of stability and reliability are the major focuses from an engineering standpoint. however, in the perspectives of hri, the importance of having an intuitive and fool-proof system design that could optimise user experience outweighs every quantitative study on system performance. in short, the common users would always appreciate a simple robot that could be interacted and controlled easily and intuitively, over a flawless but complicated robot with rigid and exhaustive control measures. as suggested by valeria villani, the effective physical and cognitive interaction on robotic solution not only promotes efficiency, but also grant safety and intuitive ways to program and interact with robots [9]. it is therefore the sense of intuitiveness in user experience that drives the research team to develop a “user-friendly” user journey as the key foundation toward an optimised user journey, as shown in figure 1 which lays out all touchpoints between the users and the robot. from the perspective of general users, the journey of the delivery task always starts from the need for having something delivered, which is a very typical scenario in in building use-cases. then, as an automated delivery service, the item sender would call the robot for delivery service, which should be at its best availability to response to the sender’s call. once the sender drops off the item to the robot, the robot would then begin its delivery in a secure, careful and promising fashion. eventually, the robot should arrive at the destination, so that the item receiver could collect the delivered item in its perfect condition. simple as the below logic flow might sound, the research team believes that the best user experience that could ever be provided, must be a well-planned and comfortable experience, i.e. “user-friendly”. it is therefore obvious that there would be numerous touchpoints between the robot and the users, such as the user interface, the storage cabinet, 2 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 applied design and methodology of delivery robots based on human–robot interaction in smart cities figure 2. system architecture of the proposed delivery robot the visual appearance and attraction, as well as the audible alerts for notifications. in the expected use-case of the delivery robot, it is assumed that the robot would have to be able to freely travel within the different floors of the building with reasonable passage space and crowdedness of obstacles. in terms of free travel, the access towards elevators and door would also have to be interactable with the robot, such that the robot would be able to communicate and interact with the elevators and doors in order to get access towards the designated areas inside the building. 4. hardware design with the aim to design a robust delivery robot as a potential alternative for human labour that facilitates and encourages smooth and comfortable user experience regarding user perception, interaction and engagement, the development of a versatile robot would be necessary, such that the robot would have to have an industrial design that emphasises on the robot’s physical appearance and functionality, let alone well-designed compartmentalisation. in general, there are proposed to be six different units in the delivery robot, including power unit, internet unit, sensor unit, i/o unit, storage unit and the driving unit as illustrated in figure 2. the power unit that lives up all parts, like the heart of a human, contains the rechargeable lithium-ion battery for providing dense and efficient energy, and the battery management system (bms) for protecting the battery from operating outside its safe operating status, monitoring and reporting the usage and current information. to ensure safety, the emergency stop (e-stop) is also included as a part of the power unit to sever all power immediately if needed. the sensor suite, as depicted as the eyes of the robot, helps gathering all environment data that enables the robot to have the correct moving directives when performing its task. the inertial measurement unit (imu) measures and reports the orientation of the robot by using a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes. the ultrasonic sensors and 2d lidar are used to support collision avoidance by detecting nearby objects. similarly, the 3d lidar is used to detect objects in a greater range to achieve accurate localization and navigation. moreover, the camera captures image and videos for further visual analytics. the driving unit, as depicted as the feet of the robot, includes the wheels, motor drivers and bumper, which allow the robot to perform physical movements. to enhance its mobility, the robot is configured to be front wheel-drive with omni wheels so that omni-directional manoeuvring through crowds could be achieved. the i/o unit, as depicted as the mouthful and facial expression of the robot, serves as a communication pathway with other road-users, enabling multiple touchpoints. the on-board touchscreen with intuitive and relatable ui, two-way communication system and the led visual indicator visualise the current status of the robot with the road users with messages like, “i am idle” or “i am in a task”. the storage unit is a value-added unit, acting like the weight-bearing hands of a human, allowing users to deliver goods in a secure way by adopting the use of nfc readers and cards, and an electric lock. the internet unit, as the metaphorical representation of the human mind, provides access to the internet and further expands the touchpoints of the robot. last but not least, the centre processing unit, as depicted as the brain of the robot, links up all the above units to 3 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 w. t. law et al. centralise the control over all the computational processes and coordinates all components to perform tasks. in terms of visual and audio design, to increase touchpoints and communicate with users throughout the delivery task, the robot would provide signals through visual and audible indicators, including lcd display, led lighting, and audible alerts and prompts through speaker. it is believed that the with the help of the visual outputs in the forms of graphics and texts that are shown on the lcd display as well as eye-catching led lighting for status indication, along with comprehensive voice prompts and attractive audible alerts, users and passers-by could have a more intuitive understanding to the robot and its status to avoid accidents, and increase the sense of user-friendliness. details of visual led and audible indictors are as described in table 1. table 1 robotics language visual and audible indicators 5. software design as an autonomous delivery robot with the primary duty of in-building delivery, successful navigation among in building structures is the most vital part for the performance of the delivery robot, in terms of navigation robutness and simultaneous localization and mapping (slam) [10][11]. therefore, it is crucial to organise all the related processes in a comprehensive manner. figure 3 above illustrates the entire navigation process from sensor information inputs to hardware actuations, such that the robot could fully utilise the technology advancement in sensor fusion, slam, and 5g. 5.1 sensor fusion – obstacle detection and path planning as mentioned, this delivery robot would be equipped with various kinds of sensors, including inertial measurement unit (imu) for acceleration measurements, motor drivers for odometry measurements, 2d and 3d lidar for real time simultaneous localization and mapping (slam), camera for object recognition, and ultrasonic sensors for collision detection. whenever a navigation task is initiated, the inputs from all the sensors would be firstly combined in the sensor fusion process to enhance the pose estimation accuracy of the robot. after that, the more complete and accurate data would be used to localise the actual location of the robot in the environment through the localization process, through the use of different localization algorithms [12][13]. at the same time, the data from the camera would also be adopted in the object recognition process to identify the category of the filmed objects from the visual feed, so that the later obstacle avoidance process could make reasonable reflections for optimal path planning. likewise, the data from the ultrasonic sensors would be used for the real-time collision detection process, such that imminent collisions figure 3. simultaneous localization and mapping (slam) figure 4. software operation main flow from perception to actuation 4 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 applied design and methodology of delivery robots based on human–robot interaction in smart cities figure 5. sensor fusion – object recognition in distance would be detected and address corresponding response, as illustrated in figure 4 and figure 5 figure 3 and figure 4 are the expected visual representation of the navigation and localisation methodology. it should be the core value of this sensor-fused integration to be able to understand the environment in terms of the existence of surrounding obstacles. as depicted in figure 4, if the point cloud data from lidar is obtained as the sole input, accurate size and distance information would be complete for only items that exists in the most effective region of the lidar range. on the other hand, with the use of sensor fusion techniques, as depicted in figure 4, from the image feed from the front camera, the use of the detection models allows the robot to clearly identify every visibly detected obstacle in terms of size and distance. this enhancement in obstacle detection facilitates further decision-making on the path-planning logics. for instance, for static obstacles like chairs and desk, the delivery robot should plan for alternative paths as these types of objects would always stay in their existing position; while if non-static obstacles like pedestrians are detected, the delivery robot could try to eliminate the chance of collision by playing voice prompt to alert those pedestrians or just wait a while in a safe position until the obstacle is clear from the path. it is believed that such soft handling would make the delivery robot more like a human and enable dynamic and case-based decision. 5.2 motion planning flow of an in-building delivery task as the core component of an in-building delivery robot, the functionalities of navigation and localization have been given special focuses in terms of collision avoidance, path planning, and cross-floor travel handling. in the traditional approach for collision avoidance, the algorithm simply stops the robot until the obstacle is out of the detection range. alternatively, it is a more advanced method is to perform path-planning based on the result of model-based trajectory predictions on the movement of moving obstacles like walking pedestrian. while the traditional approaches are less desirable in densely populated environments such as streets and parks given the constant crowdedness, the latter approach performs much effectively on those situations with reasonable traffics. as depicted in figure 6 and figure 7, the trajectory prediction model uses the gathered information from the sensor fusion process, such as current distance, and current linear and angular velocity to serve the purpose of object tracking. with the aid of sensor fusion technology, the research team has adopted the image-detection-based trajectories prediction technique along with the point-cloud-detection based path-planning methodology enabled by the use 3d and 2d lidar, such that the object trajectories information on each of the individually tracked obstacle would be imported to the prediction algorithm to perform movement prediction with a fair confidence level, which would then be combined with the point-cloud-based navigation algorithms to plan for an optimal and obstacle free path. to be specific on the main motion planning flow of the delivery robot, each delivery task the robot handles involve three major iterative steps, namely the “handshakes”, the “walk”, and the “ride”, as illustrated in figure 8. every delivery task starts with the first simple “handshake”, where the users would entrust items to the robot’s cabinet figure 6. illustration on object tracking figure 5. illustration on trajectory prediction 5 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 w.t. law et al. figure 6. proposed motion planning flow using the nfc card reader and initiate the delivery task by pressing one single button on the robot, which would then acknowledge the delivery task by audible alerts. this action-and-reaction-based “handshake” aims to work as the initial basic contact that would establish a sense of trustworthiness towards the users. when the delivery task is initiated, the “walk” is begun, where a smooth melody would be played to indicate the robot’s presence, and a vivid led lighting and display would be used to notify near pedestrians, just like taking a good walk together in music and glares. in details, the “walk” is actually a check-point-based path where the robot proceeds to the next check-point after reaching one. the process of path-planning, as mentioned beforehand, consists of two major parts, including the image-based obstacle detection and the point-cloud-based navigation, such that the obstacle detection model would provide trajectory prediction upon moving obstacle while the navigation stack would provide distancing information about static obstacles. to facilitate effective path-planning, the robot takes into concern information from both ends and output the optimal obstacle-free path for the robot to travel. then, the “ride” begins when the robot has to travel in floors with elevator, such that the robot would communicate with the elevator server wirelessly to acquire the current status of each elevator, so that the robot could call for elevators that are currently idle and allow the elevators to prioritise the needs of human passengers. once, the elevator has been called and with the elevator door opened, another detection model would be used to search for passengers and pedestrians, just to ensure the robot would be able to enter the elevator safely. right before entering the elevator, the robot would even notify pedestrians by clear audible alerts. once the destination floor is reached, the “walk” resumes and continues until the robot arrives at the final checkpoint for the delivery. the whole delivery task would then be completed by one last “handshake” where the users would retrieve the entrusted items from the locked cabinet using the nfc card reader and the robot would acknowledge its completion in delivery with another audible alert. from an engineering perspective, this might have been one simple flow design for a basic delivery task. as a matter of fact, the major emphasis in this flow design, as well as the industrial design of the robot, has been the intractability with pedestrians, such that numerous touch points were provided throughout the “handshakes”, the “walk”, and the “ride” in terms of audio, visual and interface interactions as mentioned in previous sections. 5.3 backend server connection and 5g extensibility throughout the design of the delivery robot, various security, safety and administrative considerations were also involved, such that a backend server was developed for the purpose of centralised robot control, especially for those requiring low tolerance in latency for high-speed data transmission [14]. it is the experience of the research team that enlightens the importance of remote monitoring and control of robots. the backend server acts a remote data logger that stores and reflects the current status of the robot, i.e. battery consumption, locational information, task status, task history, and any alert produced. besides data-logging, for security and safety reasons, the backend server also acts as a remote control-panel that allows authorised personnel to control the robot in terms of check-point assignment, task initiation and termination, and real-time video feed from the robot’s front camera. it is fully understood that the more important and powerful the backend server is, the higher the risk associated with the server-robot communication is intercepted, eavesdropped or even altered. therefore, the communication architecture between the server and robot 6 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 applied design and methodology of delivery robots based on human–robot interaction in smart cities is reinforced in both software and hardware levels. in terms of software, the content for every outgoing communication would be encrypted with aes format, such that every status information and each frame from the video feed would be masked. however, with the increased processing time for the status update and video stream, it would be much difficult to establish a real-time connection. thus, the 5g technology has been adopted to enhance the speed as well as the security level for the of the data transmission. the use of 5g technology gives three major benefits to the communication architecture, including high data transmission speed, large maximum carrier bandwidth, and mass connectivity. in terms of the expected use-case, the high data transmission speed allows the robot to upload the loads of status messages and streams of video feed to the server with a very low latency, so that real-time monitoring of the robot could be achieved. to be specific, the 5g architecture uses ultra-reliable and low latency communications (urllc) to allow the travelling network to be optimised for processing incredibly large amounts of data with minimal delay so as to support end-to-end latencies as low as 5ms [15]. this is achieved by implementing a new approach to handle radio frame slots. instead of fixed radio slots of 1ms in 4g, 5g uses a multi numerology approach to allow flexible definition of radio slots, so that radio slots with shorter timespan would be allows, in returns of a lower latency. in addition, the large maximum carrier bandwidth benefited from the 5g technology makes the streaming of 4k resolution video possible in real-time. with the use of enhanced mobile broadband (embb), a greater data bandwidth complemented by moderate latency improvements on both 5g nr and 4g lte could be provided, such that the actual latency between image capturing and video presentation on the server for high resolution videos, like 4k or omnidirectional vr video, could be less than 0.3 seconds even after the implementation of the required data compression, and data encryption and decryption as mentioned. last but not least, the advantage of mass connectivity provided by the adoption of massive machinetype communication (mmtc) allows extremely high connection density of online devices, and thus enables the deployment of robot fleets and the potential migration of sensors or processes through cloud computing in the future, where the large number of robots and independent sensors would no longer be the limitation for real-time data transmission and processing, even in conditions of limited communication resource [16]. it has been one of the biggest challenges for traditional indoor-deploying robots to face internet instability due to the complex indoor environment. therefore, to encounter this challenge, numerous 5g-enabling antennas and transceivers have been deployed throughout the building, such that the robot would have guaranteed full internet connection while traveling among the designated deployment areas of the delivery tasks. as a matter of fact, the adoption of the 3.5ghz (sub-6) spectrum has enabled a cost-efficient deployment of the large number of transceivers such that the 3.5ghz spectrum allows a satisfying transmission rate from 193 to 430 mbit/s down, while having a reasonable sensing range of in the building complex, when compared to the two other expensive and range-limiting spectrums of 26-28ghz and 4.9ghz [17]. 6. conclusion it is obvious that the business model of modern companies is experiencing a huge change towards automation in recent years. it is inevitable for business to accompany this shift in paradigm by adjusting their business strategy and even business model to introduce a higher level of business automation. as a result, citizens would have a greater and more frequent exposure towards the different types of robots in workspace. it is therefore a crucial issue to design new robot morphologies, appearances, behaviour paradigms, interaction techniques to encourage a smooth and reassuring interaction between human and robots, let alone the design of systems, algorithms, interface technologies, and computational methods that supports such human-robot interaction. as a prospective representation, the research team proposes the development of a user-centric design of a delivery robot that could optimise user experience. by adopting the latest technologies from the different branching fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, and tele communication, the proposed delivery robot is intended to maximise users’ satisfaction throughout every hri touchpoints. as a delivery robot, the proposed hardware design follows the foundational design concept of a last-mile autonomous delivery robot, such that this robust robot would be able to provide a welcoming visual and audio appearance, as well as a reliable architectural framework with the six core units of power unit, internet unit, sensor unit, i/o unit, storage unit and the driving unit, to metaphorically serve as the heart, mind, eyes, mouth, hands, and feet of a human. as the major attraction, the proposed robot adopts the latest techniques in artificial intelligence to perform real-time slam with both image-detection-based trajectories prediction technique and the point-cloud-detection-based pathplanning methodology for effective navigation and obstacle avoidance. as the major duty of the delivery robot, a cross-floor travelling flow has also been proposed to enable and facilitate effective path-planning, communication between the robot and elevator/doors. it is another design attraction that the internet unit is proposed to be deployed with 5g compatibility in the 3.5ghz (sub 6) spectrum, so that the server-robot connection would be 7 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 w. t. law et al. of higher speed and security, enabling stable status monitoring and video streaming. it is believed that the proposed robot design would be able to serve as a viable proposal for a new generation autonomous delivery robot, with the major software design focus on sensor fusion, advanced motion planning, 5g based high-speed backend server communication and streaming. it is the research team’s next action to build the actual prototype that employs the proposed design and methodologies. it is hoped that with such design specification, the user-friendly delivery flow and comfortable user experience provided would be able to encourage a closer and sophisticated human-robot interaction. 7. further development while serving with a vital proposal, the research team believes that, as a further enhancement or a design re deployment with customised use-cases, more reinforcement and alternative design could have been made with the latest technological advancement. the first enhancement proposal would be the adoption and integration of natural language processing (nlp) technology, like chatgpt [18], which could be applied to allow natural and human-esque interaction so that verbal human-to-human interaction could be extended to a human-to-robot level. the touchpoints between the delivery robot would have been evolved to a whole different level, by expanding communication capabilities with contextual understanding and abstract command processing, and dynamic command adaption, such that causal verbal command could be actually used to control the flow of the delivery task, e.g. specifying the destination with abstract verbal description, pausing the robot movement by saying a simple “stop”, and re-defining checkpoints or directions by tipping the robot “turn left” or “turn right”, or even “take this package to the café near the entrance”. another interesting enhancement would be the implementation of multi robot-to-robot communication, for instance the concept of collaborative multi-robotic tasks in the complex development [19], and hence the development of multi agent systems [20]. it is like the sociological paradigm of social collaboration, where multiple people, groups, or departments could interact with each other to achieve common goals, a fleet of robots could apply the same paradigm to accomplish a much intensive task. for example, in terms of items delivery, when the items to be delivered is way too many or too big for one single robot, it might be possible for the fleet of robots to collaboratively deliver parts of the big group of items or move in synchronous movement to deliver the single big item. if a reliable and self-sustaining robot-to-robot communication framework could be developed for general robot collaborations, it is believed that the level of automation could be vastly improved, which could thus further enhance the economic and technological advancement for the realm of hri. references [1] bilge mutlu and jodi forlizzi. 2008. robots in organizations: the role of workflow, social, 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[20] bodi, m. , szopek, m. , zahadat, p. and schmickl, t. 2016. evolving mixed societies: a one-dimensional modelling approach. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities. 1, 3 (may 2016), e5. doi: https://doi.org/10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262514. 9 eai endorsed transactions on smart cities volume 7 | issue 2 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/ wing ting law1*, kam wah fan 2, ki sing li 3, and tiande mo4 abstract 1. introduction 2. general hri considerations in delivery robots 3. planned usage and optimised user experience 4. hardware design 5. software design 5.1 sensor fusion – obstacle detection and path planning 5.2 motion planning flow of an in-building delivery task 5.3 backend server connection and 5g extensibility 6. conclusion 7. further development references smart tourism ecosystem perspective on the tourism experience: a conceptual approach eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first eai endorsed transactions on smart cities research article 1 smart tourism ecosystem perspective on the tourism experience: a conceptual approach vaz serra p.1,2*, seabra c.1,2 and caldeira a.1,2 1university of coimbra, portugal 2cegot – geography and spatial planning research centre, portugal abstract the smart tourism ecosystem concept, in addition to integrating various components, processes, and actions in the design of a place, advocates certain results through the convergence of technological resources, business environments, and valueinducing experiences. this conceptual paper should result in theoretical contributions regarding the specificity of the tourist experience within the framework of a smart tourism ecosystem, with a view to the competitiveness and sustainability of accommodation and destinations. from the perspective of a smart tourism ecosystem, the production and consumption of tourist value − which, hopefully, should be socially, culturally, environmentally, and economically sustainable −, is shared, and generate distinctive experiences, and the corresponding interactions are promoted by technology, through the collection, processing, and communication of data. the suggested approach has relevant implications at the management level, given the need to obtain differentiating factors, mediated by technology, with the incorporation of added value for the stakeholders. keywords: smart tourism ecosystem, tourism experience, value co-creation. received on 16 november 2022, accepted on 16 december 2022, published on 27 december 2022 copyright © 2022 vaz serra p. et al., licensed to eai. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by-nc-sa 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as th e original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eetsc.v6i4.2857 1. introduction the tourism experience, with its multidisciplinary nature, as well as its remarkable and structural contribution to the evolution of tourism, namely to the competitiveness and sustainability of accommodation units [1] and destinations [2], has taken on increasing importance in the literature [3]. associated with the tourist experience, the concept of a smart tourism ecosystem emerges [4], which, in addition to integrating various components, processes, and actions in the design of a place, advocates certain results through the virtuous convergence of technological resources, business environments and value-inducing experiences [5]. smart tourism ecosystems are systems of actors that aim to (i) use pre-existing technology and institutions for the co-creation of value, in the short term; (ii) create *corresponding author. email: pedrovazserra@hotmail.com technologies, through innovation, or new institutions — praxis, social rules, values — in the long term [6]. a smart tourism ecosystem is, therefore, a tourism system that takes advantage of smart technology in the creation, management, and delivery of smart tourism experiences and is characterized by intensive information sharing and value co-creation [4]. considering the relevance of the combination between the tourism experience and the perspective of a smart tourism ecosystem — where the relationship between decision-making and interaction processes, as well as its influences and outcomes, is highlighted [7] —, this conceptual approach proves to be opportune for the concepts it incorporates and theoretical relevant for the current and prospective scenarios it enshrines. the suggested approach, supported by literature review, has relevant implications at the management level, given the need to obtain differentiating factors, with the incorporation of added value for the parties involved, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ mailto:pedrovazserra@hotmail.com eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first vaz serra p., seabra c. and caldeira a. 2 capable of achieving and renewing balance between supply and demand, using technology, which today is unavoidable. the structure of the paper contemplates the conceptual approach to the tourism experience, followed by the highlighting of the transition from a product/produceroriented view to a service-oriented one, linked to the perspective of the smart tourism ecosystem, and its relationship with the tourism experience, before the concluding remarks. 2. the tourism experience currently, several authors contribute to the evolution of the concept of tourist experience (see table 1). table 1. tourism experience: evolution of the concept nowadays (2007-2015) source: [8] – adapted. reference concept [9] the past, personal, travel-related event that is sufficiently memorable to enter long-term memory [10] it results from a model, classified into four dimensions: pleasure, rediscovery, authenticity, and knowledge [11] it stems from micro-oriented structures, psychological, and macrooriented models, sociological for [9], experience translates into ascendancy in consumers, even to the detriment of the products or services themselves, or diluting them [12], and, in the same sense, neuroscience suggests that consumers are less driven by functional arguments rather than internal sensory and emotional elements [13]. the work of [10] stands out for its attempt to understand the process of experience itself as a precursor of experiences. for [11], studying experience implies understanding the meaning that the cultural norms of a group offer to the individual, as a way of interpreting and approaching its purpose and significance [8]. thus, as experiences are personal, i.e., they occur in the individual's body and mind, the result depends on how the consumer, contextualized by a specific situation and mood, reacts to the enacted encounter [14]. as for the dimensions of the tourist experience, investigations are usually structured in their phases, influences, and outcomes [15]. in this sense, the model developed by [16] and applied to tourism [17][18] constitutes an essential reference, which includes five distinct but related phases: anticipation, travel to the destination, activity at the destination, return trip, and remembrance, bearing in mind that reading and the effect of experiences change over time [19] and, therefore, must be approached from a multiphase perspective [20]. however, in addition to the multiphase nature, personal influences and outcomes must be considered, as the traveller arrives at a destination with ideas about the types of experiences that can occur, resulting from the social construction of an individual and that can include information, or perceptions, taken from communication networks and digital channels, product images, expectations, knowledge and previous travel experiences, in addition to activities in which it participates and the types of interaction, with various environments and social dynamics, even informal, which occur [21][22]. thus, [15] propose a conceptual model of influences and outcomes of the tourist experience (see figure 1), considering that this corresponds to what happens during a tourist event. figure 1. influences and outcomes of the tourist experience. source: [15] – adapted. in this model, which comprises their phases, considering that the experience is planned before a trip takes place and remembered long after it has ended, with the assumption that, during the outward trip, the tourists can still be involved in the process of developing expectations, in the same way, that, when returning, they can reflect on what they experienced [15]. considering the models and theoretical foundations, a conceptual framework emerges that includes personal and internal factors, but also influencing and external factors, which interact at various stages [15]. this framework influences the perception of the global tourist experience, i.e., the process in which the stimuli related to experience are processed, organized, and interpreted, and knowledge of internal factors is considered fundamental to effectively managing external factors [9]. thus, the most relevant influences are the physical environment, the staff, other tourists, and the products available [23][21], from which the complex nature of tourist experiences can be inferred. therefore, the tourist experience — which constitutes the core of most products and services offered by eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first smart tourism ecosystem perspective on the tourism experience: a conceptual approach 3 hospitality and tourism companies [24] and creates a competitive advantage that is difficult to imitate and replace [25] — can encompass cognitive, sensory, affective, and social dimensions, likely to be pleasant, exciting, satisfying, and meaningful [26] [27]. 3. redefining services and value exchanges with the aim of redefining services and value exchanges, the evolution from a product/producer-oriented view to a service-oriented one led to the development of various theories of service [28]. the service-dominant logic [29] and the service science [30], later named general theory of science, management, and service engineering, are of particular importance, having identified, from different angles and with an impact on organizational configurations, the main elements involved in the exchange of services. in the service-dominant logic [29] three concepts are presented, through a service-for-service view: i) service and the relationship between goods and services; ii) the customer-supplier relationship; iii) the value. the exchange of services, which generates benefits for all actors, stems from the resources of each stakeholder, with users being considered active participants, actor-to-actor, and, as such, resource integrators that shape service delivery depending on the specific context [29]. thus, from the service-dominant logic, the co-creation of value is the result of the exchange of resources, according to a participatory approach, in which users are, at the same time, producers and consumers and become determinants of a value that is no longer be produced exclusively by the suppliers [6]. in turn, service science represents an application of the main premises of the service-dominant logic, where the practices, as well as their implications, for the implementation of new service systems are revealed [30]. service science, an interdisciplinary research stream, advances in the elaboration of models for the application of scientific principles to the provision of services, promoting the creation of new knowledge to improve the planning and management the delivery, in terms of productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency [30]. thus, service systems emerge on the provision of services and the exchange of resources, which emphasize the role of technology [6], later renamed smart service systems, precisely given the widespread impact of information and communication technologies (ict). and emerge also smart service ecosystems (see figure 2), which define the social bonds underlying co-creation, i.e., to the system, the focus is on technology, and to the ecosystem, is on the social [6]. figure 2. integrated framework for a smart service ecosystem. source: [6] – adapted. so, systems allow a micro analysis of service-forservice exchanges, and interactions between users who share information through technology [6]. in turn, ecosystems have a macro perspective, of the global interactions of the network between the different social systems, expanding the field of vision, including social prerequisites, i.e., the promoters of the exchange of synergistic resources that, in the long term, can generate value co-creation and new knowledge [6]. smart service systems are conceived as organizational models that benefit from the application of modern technologies to the design and delivery of services, to promote real-time interactions, accelerate co-creation processes and induce systematic innovation, based on renewal, continuous improvement, and exchange of knowledge [31], and they optimize their goals through selfconfiguration, to enable lasting behaviour, capable of satisfying all the members involved [31]. the vision of ecosystems, in turn, adopts two perspectives [29]: i) reductionist, which identifies the vectors of value co-creation; ii) holistic, which considers the emergence of innovation at a broader level and considers the importance of social norms in the formation of exchanges and in the generation of new value. based on the aforementioned fundamentals and models, the transposition tot tourism is carried out, with four key dimensions of a smart tourism ecosystem — human, technological, social, and interactive — which is made up of: i) actors, who exchange skills, experiences and knowledge; ii) institutions, which promote the integration of resources, based on a common set of social arrangements; iii) technology, which generates and renews social arrangements [4]. in summary, smart tourism ecosystems are systems of actors that aim to i) use pre-existing technology and institutions for the co-creation of value, in the short term; ii) create modern technologies, through innovation, or new institutions, praxis, social rules, values, in the long term [6]. eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first vaz serra p., seabra c. and caldeira a. 4 4. the smart tourism ecosystem perspective smart business networks are an integral part of the smart tourism system as, with the destination and smart technology infrastructure, they form a smart tourism ecosystem [4]. a smart tourism ecosystem is constituted (i) by systems, which include actors, who exchange resources with each other; (ii) by institutions, which promote the integration of resources, based on a common set of social arrangements; (iii) by technology, which generates and renews social arrangements [4]. tourists, who use technology to explore the resources of this ecosystem, actively contribute data inherent to their movements, consultations, and uploads, and thus integrate their key actors, such as operators, the government, residents, and means of communication, among others [4]. the resources that actors own, and exchange between can be (i) tangible or intangible, such as tools, software, and information; (ii) human, such as skills, knowledge, and virtual communities; (iii) relational, between partners and suppliers — any stakeholder is an actor with the objective of interacting and exchanging resources with other actors for the co-creation of value [32]. a smart tourism ecosystem is, therefore, a tourism system that takes advantage of smart technology in the creation, management, and delivery of smart tourism experiences and is characterized by intensive information sharing and value co-creation [4]. to unleash innovation and support productivity in the business ecosystems themselves, it is essential to recognize their insertion in communities and the creation of shared value that, at the same time, allows for increased competitiveness and the improvement of economic and social conditions [33]. thus, there are four dimensions of a smart tourism ecosystem — human, technological, social, and interactive [6]. an ecosystem implies, among other principles, the existence of a shared objective [34], here related to the production and consumption of tourist value, culminating in significant tourist experiences. economic and environmental sustainability are also inherent priorities at the system level, as these resources are essential for its viability. thus, the shared objective is the availability of enriched, high-added value, meaningful and sustainable tourist experiences [35]. by enabling a plug-and-play business environment, the ecosystem facilitates continuous and open innovation, as new service providers can connect and add value to the network, in a permanent and fluid way [36]. thus, the collection, processing, and exchange of tourism-relevant data — that is, the informatisation of tourism because of the integration of smart technology [37][38] — is a central function of the ecosystem. however, the ecosystem, although centred on tourism, includes a variety of elements that integrate it and go beyond it, such as (i) tourist and residential consumers; (ii) tourism providers; (iii) tourism intermediaries, such as tour operators and agents; (iv) support services such as telecommunications, banking/payment services, platforms, and social networks; (v) regulatory bodies and ngos; (vi) carriers; (vii) technology and data companies; (viii) consulting services; (ix) tourist and residential infrastructure, such as swimming pools, parks, museums, among others; (x) and companies normally attributed to other sectors, such as medical services, or commerce [4]. given the opportunity, actors proactively seek advantages from value creation and new actors enter, or emerge, from the cross between them. it thus becomes evident that it is extremely difficult to delineate the limits of a smart tourism ecosystem — the socalled bioblitz, the activity aimed at identifying and counting species in an ecosystem, appears to be useful, but difficult to achieve in its fullness [4]. although the smart tourism ecosystem corresponds to a fluid and heterogeneous set of connections and interactions, tourists have a crucial role, as co-creators, highlighting the main objectives to be achieved in relation to them, (i) anticipation of their needs, with the ability to make suggestions for context-specific activities, such as points of interest, meals, and recreation; (ii) improving experiences by providing information, personalized and location-based interactive services; (iii) allowing and encourage the sharing of their experiences, interfering in the decision-making process of others, but also reliving and reinforcing experiences, as well as building their own image on social networks [39][40]. on the side of companies and other stakeholders, expectations regarding the benefits of the ecosystem lie in (i) process automation; (ii) efficiency gains; (iii) development of new products; (iv) demand forecast; (v) crisis management and, in general, (vi) value co-creation [39][40]. in this context, tourists assume the role of active participants in its creation because, in addition to consuming, they also create, comment on, or improve data, which constitute the basis of the experience, for example through photographs or videos, using their digital self. to access destination information infrastructure or add value through mobile computing [32]. among these elements, digital ecosystems stand out, characterized by an open, flexible, demand-driven, interactive network and collaborative architecture [41], focused on interactions between technological elements — such as devices, databases, or programs — and related information flows, forming the infrastructure for digital business ecosystems [42]. technological advances, which allow system interoperability and the dynamic exchange of information, are fundamental to establishing interconnectivity, from the ecosystem perspective [4]. thus, the digital ecosystem, in the context of tourism, is described as a smart tourism system, which supports autonomous nodes, with dynamic network configurations, in heterogeneous and distributed environments, which supports flexible communication and allows access to eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first smart tourism ecosystem perspective on the tourism experience: a conceptual approach 5 information at any location. anywhere and anytime, covering complete consumer lifecycles and all business phases, with different users [4][32][43]. technology, increasingly evolved and sophisticated, appears, also in the smart tourism ecosystem, to have enormous and wide-ranging potential, such as, for example, the use of small unmanned aerial vehicles [44][45][46][47][48]. 5. a smart tourism ecosystem perspective on tourism experience smart tourism is also a social phenomenon, resulting from the convergence of icts with the tourist experience [49], whose co-creation process corresponds to the sum of the psychological events that a tourist goes through when actively contributing through physical and/or mental participation in activities, and interacting with other subjects in the experience environment [40][41]. the smart tourism experience, where meaning is enhanced, is identified with the purpose of the dynamically interconnected actors that make up a smart tourism ecosystem, translated into access, or improvement, of differentiating, meaningful and sustainable experiences, guided by the digitization of key business processes and organizational agility [37]. in fact, the smart tourism experience, where meaning is praised, is identified with the purpose of the actors, dynamically interconnected, that integrates a smart tourism ecosystem, translated into the access, or improvement, of differentiating, significant and sustainable experiences, guided by the digitization of key business processes and organizational agility [37[50]. therefore, its technological base is unavoidable, as the experience is improved, or optimized, through smart technology, associated with wi-fi/mobile connectivity and big data, which allows recommendations enriched by meaning, identified with the context and value aggregators [37][50]. it should be noted, however, that the integration of a single technology, within an accommodation or tourist destination, will not be enough to make it a smart destination, requiring a multifaceted construction of intelligence to create value for stakeholders and increase competitiveness [51]. thus, the smart tourism experience is characterized by being mediated by technology [4][37] and optimized through personalization, awareness of context and realtime monitoring [52]. it is important, therefore, to recognize active participation and interaction in co-creation experiences, considering that local tourism experiences involve parts connected in multiple ways — emotional, cognitive, physical, and social —, in proximity and intensity [41]. in this context, products and services are dynamically designed and structured by companies and users, creating differentiating markets and experiences, highlighting that a smart tourism system is built on trust, scalability, and openness toward participants and services [4]. it should be noted that, although the literature consecrates the importance of a differentiated tourist experience and, therefore, value-generating [52], there are few approaches to the potential cognitive overload and the effort required to navigate a smart destination scenario, where not all tourists have the skills, or desire, to constantly interact with information. other equally prominent issues are related to security and privacy [53][54], as well as excessive exposure to and dependence on technology, not least because of locationbased services that, especially useful for travellers, make them vulnerable, although privacy in tourism is a special case, as the interaction with suppliers and, therefore, with their applications is usually of short duration, which limits the construction of a process of trust, which is often underestimated [55]. it should also be noted that the issues of trust and privacy — in addition to the digital divide, which not only applies to consumers but also to tourism providers [49] — underlying the smart tourism info structure, are complex and require knowledge investment, control, and responsibility [49]. advanced technology and contemporary innovations encourage suppliers and users to implement solutions against malicious attacks, leading to the provision of new dynamic provisioning, monitoring, and management of it capabilities [56]. in fact, information security receives attention from both academia and industry for the purposes of prevention, integrity, and data modification, with traditional and mathematical security models being implemented to deal with information-related issues, with computational intelligence emerging as a security technique, inspired in biological development [57]. a more critical perspective on smart tourism experiences, more information on the psychological and health risks of permanent exposure to data from contextsensitive systems, and insights into consumer attitudes towards the various aspects of smart tourism, including its willingness to cooperate and create, as well as its willingness to enjoy such processes and the real dimensions of the use value generated by consumers [32]. although with some latent limitations, or concerns, smart tourism is a promising scenario, which results in more convenient, safe, exciting, and sustainable living spaces for residents and tourists; more personalized and therefore more relevant tourist experiences; and even greater opportunities for new services, business models and markets to emerge because of more flexible structures and different perspectives on value creation [56]. 5. concluding remarks the tourism experience is a by-product of service design, since its precise determinants are not entirely under the control of the designer [8], and the empowerment of eai endorsed transactions on smart cities online first vaz serra p., seabra c. and caldeira a. 6 consumers — as co-creators of their experiences, a notion to which companies desirably seek to respond — driven by icts, transform the role of consumers in the development, consumption, and experience of products and services. with the internet and web 2.0. — the tools associated with social networks generate unprecedented opportunities for consumer involvement along the value chain — to emerge as catalysts for change that, in addition to impacting the way companies and consumers interact, also transform the way [41][52]. increasingly, companies and consumers collaborate with each other [57], with co-creation being a customercentric approach based on the principle of putting the consumer first and recognizing him as the starting point of the experience. and value creation [29]. the smart tourism experience, where meaning is praised, is identified with the purpose of the actors, dynamically interconnected, that integrates a smart tourism ecosystem, translated into the access, or improvement, of differentiating, significant and sustainable experiences, guided by the digitization of key business processes and organizational agility [4][51][52]. the suggested approach will have relevant implications at the management level, given the role of the various stakeholders, and active participants in the co-creation of the experience, using their digital selves to access information infrastructure and/or add value. the development of smart tourism is ongoing. in many ways, it evolves naturally from the widespread adoption of ict in tourism. however, systematic, and widespread coordination and sharing, as well as the exploitation of tourism data for value creation, is still in its infancy. the crux at this point is building viable smart tourism ecosystems [50], and the complexity of tourism makes it difficult to go beyond the specific platform service innovations. however, the technological push towards smart tourism is far-reaching and tourism is expected to provide the scenario that makes possible the pioneering of many of these smart technologies [35]. however, ecosystems cannot be created [4], as we are dealing with open and flexible structures that evolve over time. implementing a smart tourism destination requires patience, strategic management, and continuous evaluation and change. perceiving the destination as an ecosystem is essential, with the vision and a clear set of objectives for innovation being key enablers for smart tourism destinations. these developments require the formation of new models of travel behaviour, new models of product design [58][59], and new models of research and evaluation which, in turn, establish a new paradigm of tourism management [60]. acknowledgements. this research received support from the geography and spatial planning research centre (cegot), funded by national funds through the foundation for science and technology (fct) under the reference uidb/04084/2020. references [1] henrique de souza l, kastenholz e, barbosa m de l de a. relevant dimensions of tourist experiences in unique, alternative person-to-person accommodation—sharing castles, treehouses, windmills, houseboats or house-buses. international journal of hospitality & tourism administration. 2020 oct 1; 21(4):390–421. available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/15256480.2018.1511495 [2] rasoolimanesh sm, seyfi s, hall cm, hatamifar p. understanding memorable tourism experiences and behavioural intentions of heritage tourists. journal of destination marketing & management. 2021 sep 1; 21:100621. available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2021.100621 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