4. Fundamental research issues for Smart Sities
From the point of view of systems and control theory, a Smart City is a highly dynamic stochastic hybrid system [9] with a multitude of issues that can only be successfully addressed through a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together researchers from engineering, computer science, and the social sciences. The following provides an outline of some of the major research areas that are clearly involved in the effort to transform the Smart City vision described above into a reality. (1) Sensing and cooperative data collection. Clearly, this is the starting point for a Smart City and, in fact, for any CPS. A key challenge here is the highly inhomogeneous and distributed nature of the data sources we are interested in, as well as of the sensing devices charged to interact with them and with each other in a cooperative manner. A sensor network may be viewed as a control system encompassing three main tasks: coverage control, data source detection, and data collection. The interactions among these three tasks are important and define significant tradeoffs. (2) Security, safety, privacy, and energy management in the collection and processing of data. As illustrated in Fig. 1, the entire process of data collection and processing is subject to constraints—some strictly physical (such as limited energy, mostly in wireless network settings), and some imposed by legal, cultural, and economic principles and regulations.
