Submit to Sustainability Review for Sustainability Propose a Special Issue

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

► Journal Browser

Urban Planning and Smart City Decision Management

Print Special Issue Flyer
Special Issue Editors
Special Issue Information
Keywords
Published Papers

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2020) | Viewed by 24131

Share This Special Issue

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Kijun Han

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 41566, Korea
Interests: Computer Networks, Data Communication, Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, Cyber Physical Systems

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Currently, urban planning and smart city management, while maintaining sustainability standards has become a critical concern. Smart city emerged as a concept that aims to improve quality of life of urban citizens and stabilized in the spotlight for last few decades, due to dramatic urbanization all over the world. In fact, high degree of information technology integration and comprehensive utilization of information are main features of modern smart cities. In other words, exponentially growing data are exclusively linked with urban development. Nevertheless, enormous volume and complexity of this data hinder the feasibility of extracting knowledge through traditional computing architectures and methods intensifying the issues in smart city decision management. Subsequently, creating a huge demand for efficient and powerful smart city decision management strategies that are applicable for one or more smart city components i.e. transportation, energy management, governance, etc.

Unceasing urbanization occurred during past few decades alarmed the need for sustainable resource utilization in urban planning and smart city management. Hence, modern era seeks for sustainable modeling, simulation, optimization, and controlling strategies for smart city planning, development, and management.

This special issue welcome papers that provide an in-depth analysis on current advances in optimal smart city planning and decision management to advocate sustainability. The papers must show originality and give a significant contribution to the scope of the Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Kijun Han
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Urban planning
Sustainable cities
Decision management
Decision optimization
Big Data Analytics
Machine learning for city operations
Architecture for smart cities
Energy management in smart cities
Smart city applications
Big Data in cities
Data management in smart cities

Published Papers (5 papers)

Download All Papers

Order results

Result details

Show export options Show export options

Select all

Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

Jump to: Review

23 pages, 2208 KiB

Open AccessArticle

FIViz: Forensics Investigation through Visualization for Malware in Internet of Things

by Israr Ahmad, Munam Ali Shah, Hasan Ali Khattak, Zoobia Ameer, Murad Khan and Kijun Han

Sustainability 2020, 12(18), 7262; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187262 - 4 Sep 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3215

Abstract

Adoption of the Internet of Things for the realization of smart cities in various domains has been pushed by the advancements in Information Communication and Technology. Transportation, power delivery, environmental monitoring, and medical applications are among the front runners when it comes to leveraging the benefits of IoT for improving services through modern decision support systems. Though with the enormous usage of the Internet of Medical Things, security and privacy become intrinsic issues, thus adversaries can exploit these devices or information on these devices for malicious intents. These devices generate and log large and complex raw data which are used by decision support systems to provide better care to patients. Investigation of these enormous and complicated data from a victim’s device is a daunting and time-consuming task for an investigator. Different feature-based frameworks have been proposed to resolve this problem to detect early and effectively the access logs to better assess the event. But the problem with the existing approaches is that it forces the investigator to manually comb through collected data which can contain a huge amount of irrelevant data. These data are provided normally in textual form to the investigators which are too time-consuming for the investigations even if they can utilize machine learning or natural language processing techniques. In this paper, we proposed a visualization-based approach to tackle the problem of investigating large and complex raw data sets from the Internet of Medical Things. Our contribution in this work is twofold. Firstly, we create a data set through a dynamic behavioral analysis of 400 malware samples. Secondly, the resultant and reduced data set were then visualized most feasibly. This is to investigate an incident easily. The experimental results show that an investigator can investigate large amounts of data in an easy and time-efficient manner through the effective use of visualization techniques. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Planning and Smart City Decision Management)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

14 pages, 4532 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Novel Power Scheduling Mechanism for Islanded DC Microgrid Cluster

by Abdul Wahid, Javed Iqbal, Affaq Qamar, Salman Ahmed, Abdul Basit, Haider Ali and Omar M. Aldossary

Sustainability 2020, 12(17), 6918; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12176918 - 25 Aug 2020

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2622

Abstract

Extension of the main grid to remote areas is economically not feasible. To electrify remote areas, one of the best choices is to install Renewable Energy Sources (RES) as a distributed generation (DG) and thus form a microgrid (MG) in islanded (Stand-alone) mode. In islanded mode, the MG has no support from the national grid. Thus, the overloading of islanded DC MG can collapse DC bus voltage and cause fluctuation in the load. Therefore, the power sharing and the interconnection among the microgrid (MG) cluster are necessary for reliable operation. Many methods for power sharing also aim at minimizing circulating currents which cannot be avoided when every MG feeds their load locally. Therefore, the proper power balancing among generation, loads, and in between MG cluster is challenging in islanded topology. This paper presents an intelligent controller for power sharing among PV-based MG clusters with load management of connected load during power deficiency. The priority is given to the local critical load of each MG. The second priority is given to the remaining load of the respective MG. The least priority is given to the loads connected to the neighboring MGs. The results show that the power continuation to the power-deficient load has been maintained when another MG has surplus power. The circulating current losses between the MG cluster has been fully avoided during no power sharing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Planning and Smart City Decision Management)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

21 pages, 933 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Named Data Networking for Efficient IoT-based Disaster Management in a Smart Campus

by Zain Ali, Munam Ali Shah, Ahmad Almogren, Ikram Ud Din, Carsten Maple and Hasan Ali Khattak

Sustainability 2020, 12(8), 3088; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12083088 - 12 Apr 2020

Cited by 41 | Viewed by 4298

Abstract

Disasters are uncertain occasions that can impose a drastic impact on human life and building infrastructures. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a vital role in coping with such situations by enabling and integrating multiple technological resources to develop Disaster Management Systems (DMSs). In this context, a majority of the existing DMSs use networking architectures based upon the Internet Protocol (IP) focusing on location-dependent communications. However, IP-based communications face the limitations of inefficient bandwidth utilization, high processing, data security, and excessive memory intake. To address these issues, Named Data Networking (NDN) has emerged as a promising communication paradigm, which is based on the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architecture. An NDN is among the self-organizing communication networks that reduces the complexity of networking systems in addition to provide content security. Given this, many NDN-based DMSs have been proposed. The problem with the existing NDN-based DMS is that they use a PULL-based mechanism that ultimately results in higher delay and more energy consumption. In order to cater for time-critical scenarios, emergence-driven network engineering communication and computation models are required. In this paper, a novel DMS is proposed, i.e., Named Data Networking Disaster Management (NDN-DM), where a producer forwards a fire alert message to neighbouring consumers. This makes the nodes converge according to the disaster situation in a more efficient and secure way. Furthermore, we consider a fire scenario in a university campus and mobile nodes in the campus collaborate with each other to manage the fire situation. The proposed framework has been mathematically modeled and formally proved using timed automata-based transition systems and a real-time model checker, respectively. Additionally, the evaluation of the proposed NDM-DM has been performed using NS2. The results prove that the proposed scheme has reduced the end-to-end delay up from

2 %

10 %

and minimized up to

20 %

energy consumption, as energy improved from

3 %

20 %

compared with a state-of-the-art NDN-based DMS. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Planning and Smart City Decision Management)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

18 pages, 1799 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Smart City Development in Taiwan: From the Perspective of the Information Security Policy

by Yung Chang Wu, Rui Sun and Yenchun Jim Wu

Sustainability 2020, 12(7), 2916; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12072916 - 6 Apr 2020

Cited by 14 | Viewed by 4443

Abstract

A smart city is developed through the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, big data, mobile Internet, and other new generation technologies regarding information and communication, and data resources in various fields are integrated and applied. The issue of information security in the network era is the strategic focus, as well as the focus of people’s attention, during Taiwan’s smart city construction. Information security policies are the information security guidelines for organizations, and are key to the organization’s information security performance; moreover, such policies show the organization’s support and commitment to the information security of smart cities. This paper discusses the model of information security policy in Taiwan’s smart cities, uses Path Analysis to explore the characteristics of information security policy in smart cities, and examines the relationship between the formulation, implementation, maintenance, and effectiveness of information security policies. Furthermore, this study examines the impact on the effectiveness of organizational information security policies and information security performance from the following aspects: The length of information security policy publication time, policy review, policy advocacy, employee compliance, fair law enforcement, etc., which are all concrete manifestations of the formulation, implementation, and maintenance of information security policy models. Through a questionnaire survey, the correlation between various assumptions, as well as the relationship between organizational information security characteristics, information security policies, and the effectiveness of information security, are verified one by one during the implementation of information security policies. Finally, conclusions and implications are put forward. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Planning and Smart City Decision Management)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Review

Jump to: Research

23 pages, 3960 KiB

Open AccessReview

Futuristic Sustainable Energy Management in Smart Environments: A Review of Peak Load Shaving and Demand Response Strategies, Challenges, and Opportunities

by Bhagya Nathali Silva, Murad Khan and Kijun Han

Sustainability 2020, 12(14), 5561; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145561 - 10 Jul 2020

Cited by 54 | Viewed by 9048

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) notion pioneered the implementation of various smart environments. Smart environments intelligibly accommodate inhabitants’ requirements. With rapid resource shrinkage, energy management has recently become an essential concern for all smart environments. Energy management aims to assure ecosystem sustainability, while benefiting both consumers and utility providers. Although energy management emerged as a solution that addresses challenges that arise with increasing energy demand and resource deterioration, further evolution and expansion are hindered due to technological, economical, and social barriers. This review aggregates energy management approaches in smart environments and extensively reviews a variety of recent literature reports on peak load shaving and demand response. Significant benefits and challenges of these energy management strategies were identified through the literature survey. Finally, a critical discussion summarizing trends and opportunities is given as a thread for future research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Planning and Smart City Decision Management)

► Show Figures

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Urban Planning and Smart City Decision Management

Share This Special Issue

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Keywords

Published Papers (5 papers)

Research

Review

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI