Department of Engineering, University of Messina, 98100 Messina, Italy.
Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale Informatica, 00185 Rome, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 May 12;21(10):3349. doi: 10.3390/s21103349.
A smart city represents an improvement of today's cities, both functionally and structurally, that strategically utilizes several smart factors, capitalizing on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to increase the city's sustainable growth and strengthen the city's functions, while ensuring the citizens' enhanced quality of life and health. Cities can be viewed as a microcosm of interconnected "objects" with which citizens interact daily, which represents an extremely interesting example of a cyber physical system (CPS), where the continuous monitoring of a city's status occurs through sensors and processors applied within the real-world infrastructure. Each object in a city can be both the collector and distributor of information regarding mobility, energy consumption, air pollution as well as potentially offering cultural and tourist information. As a consequence, the cyber and real worlds are strongly linked and interdependent in a smart city. New services can be deployed when needed, and evaluation mechanisms can be set up to assess the health and success of a smart city. In particular, the objectives of creating ICT-enabled smart city environments target (but are not limited to) improved city services; optimized decision-making; the creation of smart urban infrastructures; the orchestration of cyber and physical resources; addressing challenging urban issues, such as environmental pollution, transportation management, energy usage and public health; the optimization of the use and benefits of next generation (5G and beyond) communication; the capitalization of social networks and their analysis; support for tactile internet applications; and the inspiration of urban citizens to improve their quality of life. However, the large scale deployment of cyber-physical-social systems faces a series of challenges and issues (e.g., energy efficiency requirements, architecture, protocol stack design, implementation, and security), which requires more smart sensing and computing methods as well as advanced networking and communications technologies to provide more pervasive cyber-physical-social services. In this paper, we discuss the challenges, the state-of-the-art, and the solutions to a set of currently unresolved key questions related to CPSs and smart cities.
智慧城市代表了对当今城市在功能和结构上的改进，通过战略性地利用多种智能因素，利用信息和通信技术（ICT）来提高城市的可持续增长并加强城市功能，同时确保公民提高生活质量和健康水平。城市可以被视为相互关联的“对象”的微观世界，公民每天与之互动，这代表了一个非常有趣的信息物理系统（CPS）示例，通过在实际基础设施中应用的传感器和处理器来连续监测城市的状态。城市中的每个对象都可以既是关于移动性、能源消耗、空气污染以及潜在文化和旅游信息的信息收集者和分发者。因此，在智慧城市中，网络世界和现实世界紧密相连且相互依存。当需要时可以部署新服务，并可以设置评估机制来评估智慧城市的健康和成功。特别是，创建基于 ICT 的智慧城市环境的目标（但不限于）是改进城市服务；优化决策；创建智能城市基础设施；协调网络和物理资源；解决具有挑战性的城市问题，如环境污染、交通管理、能源使用和公共卫生；优化下一代（5G 及以后）通信的使用和效益；利用和分析社交网络；支持触觉互联网应用；激发城市居民提高生活质量。然而，大规模部署网络物理社会系统面临一系列挑战和问题（例如，能源效率要求、体系结构、协议栈设计、实现和安全），这需要更多智能传感和计算方法以及先进的网络和通信技术，以提供更普及的网络物理社会服务。在本文中，我们讨论了与 CPS 和智慧城市相关的一组当前未解决的关键问题的挑战、现状和解决方案。
