An IoE and Big Multimedia Data Approach for Urban Transport System Resilience Management in Smart Cities

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Jan 9;21(2):435. doi: 10.3390/s21020435.

Abstract

Today, the complexity of urban systems combined with existing and emerging threats constrains administrations to consider smart technologies and related huge amounts of data generated as a means to take timely and informed decisions. The smart city needs to be prepared for both expected and unexpected situations, and the possibility to mitigate the effect of the uncertainty behind the causes of disruptions through the analysis of all the possible data generated by the city open new possibility for resilience operationalization. This article aims at introducing a new conceptualization for resilience and presenting an innovative full stack solution to exploit Internet of Everything (IoE) and big multimedia data in smart cities to manage resilience of urban transport systems (UTS), which is one of the most critical infrastructures of the city. The approach is based on a novel data driven approach to resilience engineering and functional resonance analysis method (FRAM), to understand and model an UTS in the context of smart cities and to support evidence driven decision making. The paper proposes an architecture taking into account: (a) different kinds of available data generated in the smart city, (b) big data collection and semantic aggregation and enrichment; (c) data sense-making process composed by analytics of different data sources like social media, communication networks, IoT, user behavior; (d) tools for knowledge driven decisions able to combine different information generated by analytics, experience, and structural information of the city into a comprehensive and evidence driven decision model. The solution has been applied in Florence metropolitan city in the context of RESOLUTE H2020 research project of the European Commission.

Keywords: Internet of Everything; big data analysis; big multimedia data; complex system; disaster resilience; evidence driven decision support system; functional resonance analysis method; smart resilient city; tree value logic.