Cross-cutting urban system architecture for social and environmental sustainability

A major objective of our research is to elicit a reference urban system architecture and supporting technologies so that innovative urban services can easily be implemented and experimented. Further, the reference architecture should be adaptive so that it can be configured according to the need of the cities.

Toward that goal, we will undertake a pragmatic approach, where early versions of the architecture will be elaborated according to the design of specific urban services (such as the ones discussed in the previous section) and based on the resulting integration of our technologies. Then, a reference, generic urban system architecture will be elicited in light of our research findings and the lessons learnt from our experiments.

Another major objective of our architectural design is to study the inter-dependency of the proposed research contributions so as to inform their respective development and thus enhance their overall efficacy. Given the importance of sensing within the city, as illustrated by the scenarios sketched in the previous sections, the basic cross-cutting research questions to be investigated include:

  • How to ease urban data analytics through custom sensing ?
  • How to inform urban sensing using custom data analytics ?

Related studies will be undertaken as our research on the specific topics elaborated in the next sections progress. The latter may further be revised in a second step to incorporate advances from other tasks and benefit from one another.

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