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Abstract:With rapid population growth, urban designers face tremendous challenges to accommodate the increasing size of the population in urban areas while simultaneously considering future environmental, social, and economic impacts. A "smart city" is an urban development vision that integrates multiple information and communication technologies to manage the assets of a city, including its information systems, transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management systems, and other community services provided by a local department. The goal of creating a smart city is to improve the quality of life of citizens by using technology and by addressing the environmental, social, cultural, and physical needs of a society. Data modeling and data visualization are integral parts of planning a smart city, and planning professionals currently seek new methods for real-time simulations. The impact analysis of "what-if scenarios" frequently takes a significant amount of time and resources, and virtual reality (VR) is a potential tool for addressing these challenges. VR is a computer technology that replicates an environment, whether real or imagined, and simulates the physical presence and environment of a user to allow for user interaction. This paper presents a review of the capacity of VR to address current challenges in creating, modeling, and visualizing smart cities through material modeling and light simulation in a VR environment. This study can assist urban planners, stakeholders, and communities to further understand the roles of planning policies in creating a smart city, particularly in the early design stages. The significant roles of technologies, such as VR, in targeting real-time simulations and visualization requirements for smart cities are emphasized.

The integration of demand side management (DSM) with smart grid (SG) can facilitate residents' transfer into smart homes and sustainable cities by reducing the carbon emission. This manuscript reviews the recent works related to the application of DSM in SG through discussing the techniques and algorithms and their associated challenges for effective implementation. This paper also critically discusses the operation mode of DSM, the profile of energy production, storage and consumption, and finally the benefit obtained by the DSM implementation. Previous literature suggested that DSM practice reduced peak-to-average ratio, energy cost and carbon emission by approximately 10% to 65%, 5% to 50%, and 14%, respectively. The implementation of DSM in SG deals with a number of challenges such as security and privacy, tariff regulation, energy transmission, distribution, and effective utilization of energy resources. A number of international organizations have taken various measures and solutions to guarantee the security and privacy of the DSM in SG discussed. So far, a number of algorithms have been used as optimization approach to solve the DSM optimization problems; however hybrid algorithms have showed better performance than single algorithms due to their faster convergence speed. At the end, the paper presents the research gaps and future research directions.