DEMO - A Simulation Framework for Multi-modal Commuting and Parking Optimization.

Smart cities are the future development direction of cities and are a comprehensive expression of the development of the organic life body of cities. The organic life form of a smart city relates to viewing the city as an organic life self-organizing system based on the wholeness and systemic nature of the smart city life form itself, to construct a holistic spatial linkage of the functions and mechanisms of the city life system, and to enhance the overall vitality of the space. This study is based on the literature of "smart city" research in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, and the current situation and related themes of smart city research in China are discussed through co-word analysis and cluster analysis using software such as SPSS and VOSviewer, among which there are four themes in co-word cluster analysis, namely, intelligent technology supporting smart city research; research on the integration of the social system of a smart city; research on the top-level strategic design and planning and construction of a smart city; and research on the development, evaluation, and concrete practice of smart city construction. Four conclusions are drawn from the development of smart city research in China: Firstly, smart city research has attracted the attention of multiple disciplines, and the research themes are scattered and integrated across disciplinary systems. Secondly, smart city construction, development rules, and characteristics need to be further explored, and the problems, future trends, and policy support for the modernization of China's cities and towns have been focused on engineering and technology, with a lack of practical research in non-technical areas such as humanities and ethics. Thirdly, the philosophical humanism and ecological ethics of smart cities need to be systematized, and their construction and development needs to be humanistic, systematic, and comprehensive, thus contributing to the sustainability, livability, ecology, and wisdom of future urban development. Fourthly, the development of the smart city system is supported by theories related to global cities and innovative cities, and the world city, a product of globalization, is undergoing a transformation into a digital and intelligent organic urban life form.

As research on smart cities garners increased attention and its status consolidates as one of the fanciest areas of research today, this paper makes a case for a cautious rethink of the very rationale and relevance of the debate. To this end, this paper looks at the smart cities debate from the perspectives of, on the one hand, citizens’ awareness of applications and solutions that are considered ‘smart’ and, on the other hand, their ability to use these applications and solutions. Drawing from a detailed analysis of the outcomes of a pilot international study, this paper showcases that even the most educated users of smart city services, i.e., those arguably most aware of and equipped with skills to use these services effectively, express very serious concerns regarding the utility, safety, accessibility and efficiency of those services. This suggests that more pragmatism needs to be included in smart cities research if its findings are to remain useful and relevant for all stakeholders involved. The discussion in this paper contributes to the smart cities debate in three ways. First, it adds empirical support to the thesis of ‘normative bias’ of smart cities research. Second, it suggests ways of bypassing it, thereby opening a debate on the preconditions of sustainable interdisciplinary smart cities research. Third, it points to new avenues of research.

The use of ICT to optimize urban processes, activities, efficiency and effectiveness of services turns cities into smart. Smart cities make it necessary to plan, monitor and analyze the city, except for the routine functions of the city. The study examined what smart city research projects are in five representative smart cities (London, New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and Istanbul) and whether there are similarities or differences in background assumptions. The literature used has a global reach; cities around the world have been chosen for comparison. By evaluating the existing literature, it has been evaluated that smart cities are the most successful and the weakest issues. Despite the centrality of New York and London’s smart city policies; they are fairly superior in economic competition. Public participation in smart city projects is already weak in Singapore and Istanbul. Barcelona has a more participatory policy than other cities, but it needs to develop a smart governance perspective. The study concludes with how the smart city ideology achieves its goals. The study adds value to smart city research by a critical look at the subject. Combining the results of practical smart city initiatives, it concludes the practicality and usefulness of smart city development.

PurposeThe cities are distinctly engine of economic growth, which depends upon speed at which innovations are brought out and trigger entrepreneurship. Smart city initiatives are one of the opportunities to unleash innovation and entrepreneurship in developing countries like India. Entrepreneurial ecosystem research in smart cities is still in its nascent phase. Therefore, the study aims to bring out elements for a start-up ecosystem to promote entrepreneurship in smart cities.Design/methodology/approachFocus group discussion has been applied to gain a variety of insights and opinion from selected participants with diverse expertise.FindingsThe study proposes a framework for developing a start-up ecosystem in smart city. The findings suggest the technology infrastructure along with the elements of start-up framework as knowledge hub, public policy, entrepreneurship and city economy.Research limitations/implicationsThe study does not show the impact of smart city strategies over an extended period.Practical implicationsA robust entrepreneurial framework usually impact on utilization of technologies for economic activities and regional development. The innovators, policymakers, city administrators, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and various stakeholders in society will get benefit from the outcomes of this study.Social implicationsThe evolution of smart cities is a social initiative with various stakeholders –such as governments, residents, businesses and entrepreneurs. The creation of start-up ecosystem in smart cities requires several levels of interventions such as new programs and institutional reforms.Originality/valueThe research explores pillars and constituents that describe a start-up ecosystem in smart cities and nurtures a collaborative culture of innovations and entrepreneurship.

This paper presents a generic two-stage optimization model and a simulation framework for on-demand grocery delivery. The proposed simulation framework can be used to reproduce any historical day's behaviour or evaluating various what-if scenarios. The two-stage optimization model's objective is to minimize the Cost Per Delivery (CPD) and maximize Customer Experience (CX). In the first stage, Last-Mile (LM) delivery optimization is modelled as a Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW). Both static and dynamic variants of the PDPTW model are tried out and compared to their performances. A Just-In-Time (JIT) heuristic is integrated with PDPTW to minimize waiting time. The second stage solves the First-Mile (FM) delivery optimization using a multi-objective assignment model for trading off between the CPD and CX. The proposed framework is simulated with actual order data and it was found that the the dynamic PDPTW model results in significant savings in CPD while maintaining a good CX.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how the intellectual capital (IC) approach and concepts could be fruitfully adapted to study the smart city phenomenon from a managerial point of view.Design/methodology/approach– This study is based on a long-term, in-depth ethnographic exploration of the vast global community, which is created around the smart city movement.Findings– The analysis suggests that, in order to effectively analyse a smart city context through the IC lens, the traditional IC framework needs to be extended for: expected outcomes, which should also include sustainability, resilience and quality of life; categories of key resources, which should also include institutional capital and environmental capital; units of analysis, which should also include territorial systems, such as transportation or waste; and key managerial challenges implied. As a final result, a smart city intellectual capital (SC-IC) framework is proposed.Research limitations/implications– Most of the cases analysed in this study are European; further studies are advisable to better investigate non-European smart city contexts.Practical implications– The paper suggests that the knowledge management, project portfolio management and network management approaches are crucial to better support managerial practices in smart city organizations.Originality/value– The SC-IC framework allows for a clear definition of the smart city organization, as a new knowledge-based, project-oriented, network-shaped type of organization. Therefore, the SC-IC framework provides smart city research with a consistent rooting in management studies. Further, this paper contributes to the fourth stage of IC research.

In game theoretical analysis of incentive mechanisms, all players are assumed to be rational. Since it is likely that mechanism participants in the real world may not be fully rational, such mechanisms may not work as effectively as in the idealized settings for which they were designed. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the robustness of incentive mechanisms against various types of agents with bounded rational behaviors. Such evaluations would provide us with the information needed to choose mechanisms with desired properties in real environments. In this article, we first propose a general robustness measure, inspired by research in evolutionary game theory, as the maximal percentage of invaders taking non-equilibrium strategies such that the agents sustain the desired equilibrium strategy. We then propose a simulation framework based on evolutionary dynamics to empirically evaluate the equilibrium robustness. The proposed simulation framework is validated by comparing the simulated results with the analytical predictions based on a modified simplex analysis approach. Finally, we implement the proposed simulation framework for evaluating the robustness of incentive mechanisms in reputation systems for electronic marketplaces. The results from the implementation show that the evaluated mechanisms have high robustness against a certain non-equilibrium strategy, but is vulnerable to another strategy, indicating the need for designing more robust incentive mechanisms for reputation management in e-marketplaces.

This chapter's purpose is to review the modern smart cities and open research challenges and issues of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). With the advent of XAI, people's lives have been improved, and the idea of smart urban has been created. Although the anticipated advantages, the adoption of AI differs between smart cities in part because of challenges and issues that can prevent the adoption of AI in smart cities. This chapter will explore the importance of XAI in smart cities and what is the current state of the art in various XAI applications in smart cities, the open challenges of XAI in smart cities, the research issue of XAI in smart cities, case studies and examples, and evaluations and analysis XAI models in smart city application. The open challenges will be covering developing and Novel XAI with ontologies, assurance in ML algorithms, scalability of XAI models in smart cities, etc.

This chapter aims to review existing evidence and map research on innovation in smart cities. Based on data from 822 articles and chapters, bibliometric analyses were performed to capture descriptive statistics and key themes of this field of research. The results of our descriptive analysis show that interest in this field of research is increasing, and substantial contributions have been made in the past 12 years. Moreover, the results from co-citation analysis show that innovation in smart city research is grounded in four clusters: open, urban, sustainable, and digital innovation. Key contributions within each theme will be discussed, and future research opportunities will be highlighted.

This study represents two critical steps forward in the area of smart research and practice. The first is in the form of the development of a comprehensive conceptualization of smart as a resource for researchers and government practition- ers; the second is in the form of the creation of a bridge between smart cities research and practice expertise. City governments increasingly need innovative arrangements to solve a variety of technical, physical, and social problems. Smart city could be used to represent efforts that in many ways describe a vision of a city, but there is little clarity about this new concept. This paper proposes a comprehensive conceptualization of smart city, including its main components and several specific elements. Academic literature is used to create a robust framework, while a review of practical tools is used to identify specific elements or aspects not treated in the academic studies, but essential to create an integrative and comprehensive conceptualization of smart city. The paper also provides policy implications and suggests areas for future research in this topic.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to model group advertising decisions, which are the collective decisions of every single advertiser within the set of advertisers who are competing in the same auction or vertical industry, and examine resulting market outcomes, via a proposed simulation framework named Experimental Platform for Search Engine Advertising (EXP-SEA) supporting experimental studies of collective behaviors in the context of search engine advertising.Design/methodology/approachThe authors implement the EXP-SEA to validate the proposed simulation framework, also conduct three experimental studies on the aggregate impact of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), the competition level and strategic bidding behaviors. EXP-SEA supports heterogeneous participants, various auction mechanisms and also ranking and pricing algorithms.FindingsFindings from the three experiments show that both the market profit and advertising indexes such as number of impressions and number of clicks are larger when the eWOM effect is present, meaning social media certainly has some effect on search engine advertising outcomes, the competition level has a monotonic increasing effect on the market performance, thus search engines have an incentive to encourage both the eWOM among search users and competition among advertisers, and given the market-level effect of the percentage of advertisers employing a dynamic greedy bidding strategy, there is a cut-off point for strategic bidding behaviors.Originality/valueThis is one of the first research works to explore collective group decisions and resulting phenomena in the complex context of search engine advertising via developing and validating a simulation framework that supports assessments of various advertising strategies and estimations of the impact of mechanisms on the search market.

Within the distribution system operator (DSO) framework, there could be alternative arrangements to enable market participation by all entities, including the privately owned distributed energy resources (DERs). In many cases, the retailers and similar aggregating agencies facilitate this. Even before finalizing the modalities of the market at the distribution level, it is essential to know about the possible market outcome and its impact on the operational decisions of DSO and vice-versa. This paper presents a simulation framework and associated case studies, where the market outcome and DSO’s operational activities are carried out in tandem to establish a realistic and feasible outcome. The market model is represented by a non-cooperative game where an efficient and fair solution is obtained using Nash equilibrium. For this, multi-player power transaction problem (MPTP) is solved using complementarity modeling. The proposed MPTP is further compounded with network reconfiguration and loss considerations which are the part of DSO’s operations. The inclusion of reconfiguration and loss allocation to entities makes the outcome realistic and feasible one. The proposed simulation framework is implemented on various test cases with a heterogeneous set of participants to establish its effectiveness.

Simulation of progressive failure in laminated composites under variable environmental conditions

This work address the channel capacity problem which is the key issue in the new generation mobile broadband network. The simulation framework for analysis of channel capacity solution based on usage of the heterogeneous networks in complex urban and indoor environment is introduced in this work. The impact of heterogeneous network on channel capacity is analyzed based on proposed simulation framework. The multi-parametric statistical channel model is used for simulation of the propagation conditions. The advantages and drawbacks for various deployment strategies of femtocells in presence of macro coverage are investigated. It is shown that shared frequency assignment with open access gives better overall channel capacity for majority of the mobile outdoor and indoor users.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of integrated high-permittivity materials (HPMs) on excitation homogeneity and global specific absorption rate (SAR) for transmit arrays at 7T. A rapid electrodynamic simulation framework was used to calculate L-curves associated with excitation of a uniform 2D profile in a dielectric sphere. We used ultimate intrinsic SAR as an absolute performance reference to compare different transmit arrays in the presence and absence of a layer of HPM. We investigated the optimal permittivity for the HPM as a function of its thickness, the sample size, and the number of array elements. Adding a layer of HPM can improve the performance of a 24-element array to match that of a 48-element array without HPM, whereas a 48-element array with HPM can perform as well as a 64-element array without HPM. Optimal relative permittivity values changed based on sample and coil geometry, but were always within a range obtainable with readily available materials (εr = 100-200). Integration of HPMs could be a practical method to improve RF shimming performance, alternative to increasing the number of coils. The proposed simulation framework could be used to explore the design of novel transmit arrays for head imaging at ultra-high field strength. Magn Reson Med 80:391-399, 2018. © 2017 International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.