Service-Oriented Architecture for Big Data Analytics in Smart Cities

A smart city has recently become an aspiration for many cities around the world. These cities are looking to apply the smart city concept to improve sustainability, quality of life for residents, and economic development. The smart city concept depends on employing a wide range of advanced technologies to improve the performance of various services and activities such as transportation, energy, healthcare, and education, while at the same time improve the city's resources utilization and initiate new business opportunities. One of the promising technologies to support such efforts is the big data technology. Effective and intelligent use of big data accumulated over time in various sectors can offer many advantages to enhance decision making in smart cities. In this paper we identify the different types of decision making processes involved in smart cities. Then we propose a service-oriented architecture to support big data analytics for decision making in smart cities. This architecture allows for integrating different technologies such as fog and cloud computing to support different types of analytics and decision-making operations needed to effectively utilize available big data. It provides different functions and capabilities to use big data and provide smart capabilities as services that the architecture supports. As a result, different big data applications will be able to access and use these services for varying proposes within the smart city.