Preface

The current era of urbanization requires strong strategies and innovative planning to modernize urban life. Cities play a primary role in various aspects of social and economic development worldwide, and have a huge impact on the environment. A city is a large and permanent human ecosystem that provides services and opportunities to its citizens. Promoting sustainability has been a major challenge for urban cities. The aim of sustainable cities is to ensure that cities can respond to their inhabitant's needs through sustainable solutions to socio-economic problems. The major challenge for cities worldwide is to have optimal solutions for transportation linkages, mixed land uses, and high-quality urban services with long-term positive effects on the economy.

Many cities are enhancing quality and performance of urban services by being digitalized, intelligent and smarter. Many of the new approaches related to urban services are based on harnessing technologies, including information and communication technologies (ICT), helping to create what some call "smart cities." Over the last two decades, the concept of "smart city" has become more and more popular in scientific literature and international policies. Smarter cities start from the human capital side, rather than blindly believing that ICT can automatically create a smart city. Approaches towards education and leadership in a smart city should offer environments for an entrepreneurship accessible to all citizens. The stakeholders and policymakers are exploring solutions to deliver new services in an efficient, responsive and sustainable manner for a large population. This book explores various dimensions of the possible services available for making a city smart.

Making a smart city is an emerging strategy to mitigate the problems generated by urban population growth and rapid urbanization. There is very little academic literature in this context, with much of it focused on the definition of smart cities. The growth of an intelligent decision support system presented in the literature has given rise to various computational methods. The amalgamation of these two concepts in literature is still very scarce in research. This book aims to provide a better understanding of the concept of smart cities and the application of an intelligent decision support system. Based on analysis of existing information there are eight critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy context, people and communities, economy, built infrastructure, and natural environment. This book will focus on the application of the decision support system in managing these eight crucial aspects of smart cities.

Our intent in writing this book was also to provide a source that covers the stage-by-stage integration of the four key areas involving planning, physical infrastructure, ICT infrastructure and deploying the smart solutions necessary for city transformation. With this as the motivation, this book provides the application of an intelligent decision support system for effectively and efficiently managing the transformation process, which can aid various supply chain stakeholders, academic researchers and related professionals in building smart cities. Various chapters of this book are expected to support practicing managers during the implementation of smart solutions for city transformation.

Chapter 1 deals with the development of an IoT-based smart agriculture device which can be a useful product and proven game changer in Next Gen Agriculture. Aided by the internet of things, this automated smart irrigation system maintains the adequate amount of water needed by crops by monitoring the amount of moisture, temperature and humidity in the soil. Temperature and humidity data is then maintained in a database for use in crop rotation and to help farmers select the appropriate crops. It will also benefit farmers by making it possible to monitor crop irrigation from a distant location, which in turn saves farmers time and reduces their workload. Chapter 2 describes a decision support system (DSS) for smart cities. Using standard mathematical and statistical models, DSS analyzes complex data, thereby producing the required information. Since the amount of information generated/used as input always deals with big data, it requires classificational analysis. Establishing an integrated command and control center as part of the Smart City Mission of creating an intelligent traffic system is discussed and illustrated with a case study. Chapter 3 evaluates the potential interleavers for burst error control and interference mitigation, whose possibilities for use in UAV communications are yet to be investigated. Hence, the idea of employing interleavers for interference mitigation in UAV communications is envisioned and analyzed. More specifically, we explore the role of ITI in UAV communication for this purpose. The chapter also provides a decision support system used for interleaver assignment to each UAV that is applicable within the smart city framework. Chapter 4 describes the difficulties faced when enhancing the consistency and sustainability of facilities for city residents, and also presents the characteristics of the ecosystem in smart cities. In this context, a DSS based on the development of the model of the analytical hierarchical process integrated into the logic representation system has recently become increasingly relevant. The DSS is positioned to be a unique benefit as a constantly evolving tool to prepare and complete exponential growth using IT infrastructure, cloud computing, web-based apps, and everything-as-a-service (XaaS) for the development of new mathematical models, artificial intelligence and data storage. Included in the chapter are decisions, decision modeling and decision management principles, support mechanisms for decision making and collaborative systems, as well as how they can assist in smart city planning initiatives.

Next, Chapter 5 discusses how technology enhancements that include social sustainability are driving the development of smart city economies. Blockchain technology, also known as "digital ledger," is the building block for these smart cities, and the demand for it is increasing at a very rapid rate in all sectors and markets. This chapter describes the challenges which hinder the adoption of blockchain technology in smart cities and provides valuable solutions for solving them using fuzzy step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and weighted aggregated sum product assessment (WASPAS). These aim to determine the weight of each challenge and its importance and provide a rank to different solutions which will help in addressing them. The study is validated by taking Indian cities into consideration. Chapter 6 discusses the implementation of a DSS in modeling a smart city supported by the internet of things (IoT), cloud services, artificial intelligence (AI), and everything-as-a-service (XaaS), which position it ahead of many other software. The primary purpose of this chapter is to identify the challenges which hold back the use of DSS in smart cities and to provide optimal solutions to them by using a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is a fuzzy MCDM method. The results have been validated using the case of smart cities in northern India.

Next, Chapter 7 highlights the changes that have been implemented to help people adapt to new age technology. Those in different sectors have been forced to learn new ways of working; for example, smart cities which were only in the planning and policy development stage suddenly saw "Jugaad" technology playing a role in it. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to engender understanding of the barriers to using technology in the education sector. Since there are many stakeholders to consider in this sector, it is impossible to consider all dimensions in one study. The aim is to determine the barriers faced by teacher's training through an online teaching platform. The DEMATEL technique is a multicriteria decision-making tool to further establish the cause-and-effect between the criteria. It is necessary to remove the antecedents of the consequents and establish a better education system that leads to smart education for smart cities. Chapter 8 describes modern technology, from IoT to news. The integration of these innovations will turn industry 4.0 into industry 5.0 in the context of smart city technologies.

Next, Chapter 9 presents a framework for developing smart child safety using the internet of things; and Chapter 10 implements deep learning and transfer learning algorithms to predict soil moisture for smart city application, both with and without the effect of data augmentation. Chapter 11 presents the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the sustainable development of smart cities toward futuristic communication. In the context of "smart life," Chapter 12 proposes a new framework in which the value of knowledge is defined not only by competitiveness and productivity, but also by consumer demand. It is based on a quantitative study of 300 traditional product users in a digital environment. Synergies between technological, social, and economic systems are highlighted in the contributions. The concluding Chapter 13 presents surveys and analyses of smart city projects, as well as recommendations on how to sustain them while balancing the Earth, people, and profits. Furthermore, new technical implementations are recommended...