Big Data and Machine Intelligence in Software Platforms for Smart Cities

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are playing an important role in the development of software platforms for Smart Cities to improve city services, sustainability, and citizen quality of life. Smart City software platforms have a significant role to transform a city into a smart city by providing support for the development and integration of intelligent services. Big data analytics is an emerging technology that has a huge potential to enhance smart city services by transforming city information into city intelligence. Despite this,it has attracted attention in a rather restricted range of application domains, and its joint application with self-adaptation mechanisms is rarely investigated. In this Ph.D. research, in collaboration with the Smart Cities and Communities Lab. of the Italian national agency ENEA, we focus on the design and development of a software platform for smart city based on self-adaptation, as realized in the IBM MAPE-K (Monitor, Analyze, Plan, and Execute over a shared Knowledge) control loop architecture model, and on machine intelligence, as provided by a big data analytics framework. This last is introduced in between the analysis and planning modules of the MAPE-K control loop model. We will evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with a real showcase in the public lighting domain.