Advances in Orchestrating Sustainable Smart Cities (Part 1)

Rapid urbanization is a global megatrend with 66 percent of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050. The staggering exponential increase in urbanization is leading to more people migrating to major cities in the search of better opportunities and quality of life. Cities need to increase the efficiency in which they operate and use their resources sustainability in order to meet the demands imposed by rapid urbanization. The challenge is to continue providing basic resources such as sufficient fresh water; cleaner energy; transportation alternatives to commute efficiently from one place to another; adaption to changing climatic conditions; safety and security; while also ensuring economical, social, and environment sustainability. These challenges represent a huge opportunity for a paradigm shift that will require the need for data processing, analysis, and security close to the connected "things" i.e., towards the edge of the network in-order to support the growing smart city ecosystem. This paradigm shift will lead to an explosive growth of independent, owned and operated things and services including gateways, repeaters, smart infrastructure, and systems. Such a paradigm needs to be architected in a way that is easy to operate and dramatically simplifies the management of service offerings through scalable orchestration and proper automation. It must allow management, integration, and deployment of different tenants (such as services and things independently owned) within the smart city ecosystem in a uniform way. It should also have a suitable policy framework, letting specific stakeholders have access to data produced by other tenants, and analyze and extract values from the data. In order to address these challenges, this special issue solicits high quality original research papers (including smart city experience papers) that made significant contributions to the state-of-the-art in "method and techniques to build sustainable smart city solutions" research area. The call for papers received a number of submissions. After a two-phase peer review process, we have accepted five high-quality papers related to the aforementioned areas of interest which will be published in the October-December 2017 as Part 1. The papers in this issue are briefly summarized.