Cloud Based Big Data Analytics for Smart Future Cities

TLDR

ICT is increasingly pervasive in urban environments, yet smart city initiatives often lack an integrated, cross‑thematic data perspective needed for sustainability and socioeconomic growth. This study aims to propose a cloud‑based big‑data analysis service that can generate actionable intelligence to support decision‑making in smart future cities. The authors present a theoretical framework for smart‑city big‑data processing and analysis, outlining how the proposed cloud service would collect, store, analyze, and visualize large‑scale urban data.

Abstract

ICT is becoming increasingly pervasive to urban environments and providing the necessary basis for sustainability and resilience of the smart future cities. Often ICT tools for a smart city deal with different application domains e.g. land use, transport, energy, and rarely provide an integrated information perspective to deal with sustainability and socioeconomic growth of the city. Smart cities can benefit from such information using Big, and often real-time cross-thematic, data collection, processing, integration and sharing through inter-operable services deployed in a Cloud environment. However, such information utilisation requires appropriate software tools, services and technologies to collect, store, analyse and visualise large amounts of data from the city environment, citizens and various departments and agencies at city scale. This paper presents a theoretical perspective on the smart cities focused Big data processing and analysis by proposing a Cloud-based analysis service that can be further developed to generate information intelligence and support decision-making in smart future cities context.