Data Sets, Modeling, and Decision Making in Smart Cities: A Survey

Cities are deploying tens of thousands of sensors and actuators and developing a large array of smart services. The smart services use sophisticated models and decision-making policies supported by Cyber Physical Systems and Internet of Things technologies. The increasing number of sensors collects a large amount of city data across multiple domains. The collected data have great potential value, but has not yet been fully exploited. This survey focuses on the domains of transportation, environment, emergency and public safety, energy, and social sensing. This article carefully reviews both the data sets being collected across 14 smart cities and the state-of-the-art work in modeling and decision making methodologies. The article also points out the characteristics, challenges faced today, and those challenges that will be exacerbated in the future. Key data issues addressed include heterogeneity, interdisciplinary, integrity, completeness, real-timeliness, and interdependencies. Key decision making issues include safety and service conflicts, security, uncertainty, humans in the loop, and privacy.