Smart Cities

Abstract

The paper focuses upon the important notions that are required to develop Smart cities. However, emphasize is on the practices that may develop cities with great efficiencies and smart work. There are environmental hazards because of the cities that are very much producing harmful substances for the globe we live in and becoming a reason for global warming. Thus, research is done because of the urgent requirement of the smart cities throughout the globe. The paper brings importance on the ICT programs from IBM for the development of the several ongoing projects in Brazil, the US, Denmark, South Korea, and other countries illustrate the opportunities and challenges of this transformation.

Smart Cities

There are several notions that proves to be the facts that human activity has caused unprecedented ecological change, and people expansion will rapidly stress the world's natural resources to the breaking point. Global warming, land degradation, air pollution, declining per-capita availability of fresh water, food shortages, and reduced biodiversity are some of the starkest challenges. However, the top priorities for cities include sustaining water, energy, and food supplies, managing waste (95 percent of cities still dump raw sewage into their waters), and reducing greenhouse gas emissions Komninos. However, IBM and other organizations are making the world a smarter place and transforming places by implementing systems like Smarter City Assessment Tool,The Actionable Business Architecture, and The Municipal Reference Model.



Discussion

Once it has decided on transformation, a city must evaluate its needs and innovation opportunities, set clear objectives, prioritize development efforts, and establish metrics that let city planners, ICT consultants, and residents assess progress. However, IBM and other organizations have created several tools to facilitate this process including the Smarter City Assessment Tool, the Actionable Business Architecture, and the Municipal Reference Model. Researchers can use IBM's Component Business Model to partition a city into independent operational units, and they can apply its Smarter City Maturity Model to various domains ranging from resident-oriented services, such as social services and public safety, to structural functions, such as road maintenance and traffic management (Corey, 2006).

Smarter city transformation relies on the use of powerful analytical techniques to extract insights from real-world events to improve urban business processes. These processes can be broadly divided into planning, management, and operations. However, a smarter city provides urban planners with tools to exploit various sources of information about human behavior to aid in the allocation of resources—land, water, transportation, and so on—as the city evolves. Holistic modeling of the city's ecosystem provides quantitative support for strategy development, performance evaluation, identification of emerging best practices, and integration of initiatives. Analyzing data from other comparable cities can help planners calibrate urban dynamics models and compare their relative progress (Corey, 2006).

However, a smarter city can coordinate infrastructure management activities—the creation and maintenance of roads, equipment, and other assets—by providing cross-agency visibility of planned interventions. For example, the electrical utility's replacement of a cable under a street intersection might offer traffic managers an opportunity to save money by replacing a signal at ...