Understanding Smart City—A Data-Driven Literature Review

Abstract

This paper systematically reviews the top 200 Google Scholar publications in the area of smart city with the aid of data-driven methods from the fields natural language processing and time series forecasting. Specifically, our algorithm crawls the textual information of the considered articles and uses the created ad-hoc database to identify the most relevant streams “smart infrastructure”, “smart economy & policy”, “smart technology”, “smart sustainability”, and “smart health”. Next, we automatically assign each manuscript into these subject areas by dint of several interdisciplinary scientific methods. Each stream is evaluated in a deep-dive analysis by (i) creating a word cloud to find the most important keywords, (ii) examining the main contributions, and (iii) applying time series methodologies to determine the past and future relevance. Due to our large-scaled literature, an in-depth evaluation of each stream is possible, which ultimately reveals strengths and weaknesses. We hereby acknowledge that smart sustainability will come to the fore in the next years—this fact confirms the current trend, as minimizing the required input of energy, water, food, waste, heat output and air pollution is becoming increasingly important.

Data-Driven Smart Eco-Cities of the Future: An Empirically Informed Integrated Model for Strategic Sustainable Urban Development

“…This is owing to the core enabling and driving technologies of the IoT and big data analytics offered by smart cities in relation to sustainability (e.g. Angelidou et al, 2018;Bibri, 2019bBibri, , 2020dBibri, , 2021aBibri, , 2021bBibri, , 2021cBibri, , 2021dBibri & Krogstie, 2020b;Nikitin et al, 2016;Noori et al, 2020;Perera et al, 2017;Silva et al, 2018;St€ ubinger & Schneider, 2020;Trencher, 2019;Zawieska & Pieriegud, 2018;Zhuravleva et al, 2019). In particular, the key role of smart cities lies in connecting the aforementioned infrastructures of existing eco-cities.…”

Data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future: urban computing and intelligence for strategic, short-term, and joined-up planning

“…This will enable sustainable cities to leverage their collective intelligence in making actual progress towards integrating and balancing the dimensions of sustainability. This is owing to the core enabling and driving technologies of big data computing offered by smart cities in relation to or for sustainability (e.g., Angelidou et al 2017;Bibri, 2019a;Bibri & Krogstie, 2020b, 2020cNikitin et al, 2016;Perera, Qin, Estrella, Reiff-Marganiec, & Vasilakos, 2017;Petrovićand Kocić2020;Stübinger & Schneider, 2020;Thakuriah, Tilahun, & Zellner, 2017;Toli & Murtagh, 2020;Trencher, 2019).…”

The Use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as an Element of Smart City Implementation: A Case Study of Electricity Billing Document Management at Bydgoszcz City Hall

“…The smart city concept is not new [38]. The first research related to smart cities was conducted in the 1970s.…”

“…The most important among these may include, inter alia, the risk of perceiving the whole idea of robotic automation wrongly (solely through the prism of reducing the costs related to human resources), the risk related to choosing the wrong robotic automation approach within the given organization, the risk related to choosing the wrong robotic automation tool, the risk related to using the wrong approach to changing management within robotically automated processes, the risk related to push-back from staff engaged in the robotically automated processes, and the risk of having a competence gap [33] (pp. [37][38][39][40][41][42]. Additional risk factors may also include a continued high proportion of hardcopy documents that are entered as input to the robotically automated processes (this is a material constraint as it requires the use of OCR software); a lack of up-to-date and codified knowledge about the actual course of the business processes, in particular with respect to how exceptions that occur during business processes should be dealt with; and a lack of coordination for changes in the systems that a robot is operating on, which results in emergency stoppages.…”