A Cloud-based Architecture for Citizen Services in Smart Cities Zaheer Khan and Saad Liaquat Kiani Faculty of Environment and Technology University of the West of England Bristol, UK Email: {zaheer2.khan,saad2.liaquat}@uwe.ac.uk Abstract—With continuous increase in urban population, the need to plan and implement smart cities based solutions for better urban governance is becoming more evident. These solutions are driven, on the one hand, by innovations in ICT and, on the other hand, to increase the capability and capacity of cities to mitigate environmental, social inclusion, economic growth and sustainable development challenges. In this respect, citizens’ science or public participation provides a key input for informed and intelligent planning decision and policy making. However, the challenge here is to facilitate public in acquiring the right contextual information in order to be more productive, innovative and be able to make appropriate decisions which impact on their well being, in particular, and economic and environmental sustainability in general. Such a challenge requires contemporary ICT solutions, such as using Cloud computing, capable of storing and processing significant amount of data and produce intelligent contextual information. However, processing and visualising contextual information in a Cloud environment is not straightforward due to user profiling and contextual segregation of data that could be used in different applications of a smart city. In this regard, we present a Cloud-based architecture for context-aware citizen services for smart cities and walkthrough it using a hypothetical case study. Keywords-Context-awareness; Smart cities; Citizen science; Public awareness; Decision-making I. I NTRODUCTION Smart cities include several applications where socio- technical interaction between citizens and pervasive devices a.k.a Internet of Things (IoT) is often needed. A continuous monitoring of these interactions can provide: i) evidence based urban planning, policy-making and collaborative deci- sion making support, and ii) raise environmental awareness that can eventually result in behavioural change based on the information of citizens daily life usage of these inter- connected devices. Furthermore, these IoT can also facilitate environmental data gathering in order to mitigate envi- ronmental challenges. For instance, environmental sensors can automatically collect data from the environment e.g. noise, air quality etc. Similarly, citizens can participate in environmental data collection using smart phones resulting in promoting the concept of citizen science. However, such monitoring, citizen’s engagement, information processing, visualisation and decision making require sufficient com- puting resources for data storage and real-time processing. The need for such resources becomes more evident when a city is considered as a single unit dealing collectively with challenges related to environment, socio-economic, security, health and well-being of citizens, education, public services, etc. Such challenges necessitate cross-thematic data harmonisation and integration and coordination between various departmental boundaries in order to monitor and model future smart cities. For instance, cities face challenges of urbanisation, and it is expected that by 2020 up to 80% of population will be living in cities [1] that puts enormous pressure on the limited resources of cities including energy, water, transport, housing, public services etc. It also becomes challenging for ICT to manage such monitoring and support smart planning and facilitate better governance for socio-economic growth and sustainable urban development. Such a system requires large storage and processing power in order to capture, store, process and generate required necessary real-time information to end users. Cloud computing [2] promises to handle this monitoring challenge and can provide necessary storage and computing facilities at comparable costs [3]. For example, Komninos N, et al. [4] review technologies for smart cities by introducing a short to long-term roadmap towards smart cities. In addition to Cloud computing, these technologies include future internet, visualisation, sensors, RFIDs, semantic web, linked data and ontologies for smart cities [4]. Citizens can perform two roles: i) information recipients for better awareness of their surroundings, and ii) data collectors. Citizens may not need to collect the data all the time and at different locations (e.g. when travelling) and only need to receive information that is more related to their profile and contextual needs. Such a requirement, on the one hand, reduces the amount of data to be captured and processed. On the other hand, new filtering and computa- tional services need to be developed in order to fulfil this requirement. In this regard, smart city based context-aware services [5] for citizens can help them to better use their environment by getting awareness about their surroundings and available services. However, using Clouds and develop- ing context-aware user services for participatory monitoring to support better decision making is not straightforward and raises several research challenges such as user profiling and 2012 IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing 978-0-7695-4862-3/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/UCC.2012.43 289 2012 IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing 978-0-7695-4862-3/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/UCC.2012.43 315