Browsing by Subject "Smart cities"

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    Smart cities; analyzing themes and concepts of smartness in urban environments
    (2019-07) Yousefimehr, Ali
    Cities are grappled with a plethora of socio-political and environmental problems that necessitate the new type of solution models and strategies; such as, environmental pollution, scarcity of resources, cyber-attacks, and traffic congestion. These challenges, alongside constant population growth and densification in urban areas, have fostered cities to embrace and seek smart solutions which forced them to develop responsive and intelligent approaches to create economically viable, socially livable and environmentally sustainable cities. In the same vein, the smart city notion has gained particular traction in urban design and planning contexts. Yet, the definition and application of smart cities varied among academicians, practitioners, and urban planners. Smart cities are mainly characterized by the pervasive application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in city functions, to deliver and provide efficient, safe, and reliable urban services to citizens. Following the ever-increasing focus in smartness in city planning, this research aims to review, explore, and analyze the smart city concept within the literature, followed by the complementary analysis of the pertinent smart city cases and smart city initiatives. Through identifying dominant domains in smart city platform, this study reveals the previous and current efforts of smart initiatives within the scope of smart urban practices, and provide a set of comparable implications for future researchers, architects and urban planners in the field.
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    Understanding and predicting trends in urban freight transport
    (IEEE, 2017-05-06) Mrazovic, P.; Eravci, Bahaeddin; Larriba-Pey, J. L.; Ferhatosmanoğlu, Hakan; Matskin, M.
    Among different components of urban mobility, urban freight transport is usually considered as the least sustainable. Limited traffic infrastructures and increasing demands in dense urban regions lead to frequent delivery runs with smaller freight vehicles. This increases the traffic in urban areas and has negative impacts upon the quality of life in urban populations. Data driven optimizations are essential to better utilize existing urban transport infrastructures and to reduce the negative effects of freight deliveries for the cities. However, there is limited work and data driven research on urban delivery areas and freight transportation networks. In this paper, we collect and analyse data on urban freight deliveries and parking areas towards an optimized urban freight transportation system. Using a new check-in based mobile parking system for freight vehicles, we aim to understand and optimize freight distribution processes. We explore the relationship between areas' availability patterns and underlying traffic behaviour in order to understand the trends in urban freight transport. By applying the detected patterns we predict the availabilities of loading/unloading areas, and thus open up new possibilities for delivery route planning and better managing of freight transport infrastructures. © 2017 IEEE.