Building smart system foundations for smart cities

Smart technologies are an important tool to address efficient resource management in the face of global challenges such as urbanization and climate crisis.

In spite of popularity of these technologies, foundations which would enable building of sophisticated systems of systems, necessary for the existence of smart cities, have not yet been formed.

At the same time, domains such as industry, infrastructure and public services - where applications of this nature are anticipated to bring the most significant impact - are experiencing challenges threatening further developments: an abundance of issues stemming from intersections between policy and technology, such as security and privacy.

Given the critical and cyber-physical nature of these systems, resolving these issues is crucial to prevent potentially catastrophic failures of formerly isolated system which are now being connected to the internet in an enthusiastic push to exploit better connectivity for improved performance and efficiency.

Addressing these issues and forming principles upon which smart systems can be built to form an interconnected ecosystem is a necessary step towards applying smart technologies in practice and towards building the sophisticated and complex systems of systems heralded by smart city visionaries.