Facets of a Smart City: Computational and Experimental Techniques for Sustainable Urban Development

The permanent growth of urbanization will bring the world's urban population to more than 68% of the world's population by 2050. This means that urban problems will be elevated to a higher level than today. Improper and increasing consumption of natural resources, increasing waste, malapropos design of urban environments, asymmetric development of the urban area, infrastructure problems, low productivity, and inadequate quality of life are some of the urban problems that must be solved seriously and quickly. City 4.0 is a solution that has been implemented to solve the urban area and urbanism problems. City 4.0, in which using smart digital technologies in the context of industry 4.0 creates quicker control, real-time information flow, and more sustainable urban planning in urban management. It keeps the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and requirements while meeting the current needs of people in all areas, such as economic, environmental, and social areas. To achieve sustainable urban development goals and overcome barriers, City Information Modeling (CIM), in which information modeling techniques are used to prepare dynamic modeling, simulation, visualization, and analytics to present realtime responses for stakeholders' demands, has been coming out. In this chapter, focusing on information modeling technologies, the necessary definitions for a smart and sustainable city are provided, and by presenting the specifications of city 4.0, the information modeling technologies used in it including blockchain, cloud computing, fog/mist computing, edge computing, Building Information Modeling (BIM), spatial information technology, cyber-physical systems, and digital twin are described. At the end of this chapter, the characteristics of the city model (CI model) are stated in the context of CIM and the challenges and barriers that must be overcome to increase the quality of life are addressed

Smart city can be characterised by its advanced facilities in the areas of transportation, water supply, disaster management, electricity, pollution control, drainage and waste management etc. Out of all these, energy is the most critical requirement. Electricity is an essential resource in current era. High penetrations of communication standards and technologies have broadened the scope of integration of existing power infrastructure with ICT infrastructure. The most fundamental prerequisite of empowerment is energy. A grid carries electrical energy from the power generation division to consumer premises. The grid can be termed as ‘’Smart” if it is capable of making decisions with its computational proficiencies. These proficiencies are essential for optimization and reliable operation of the Smart grid. Energy efficiency, power quality, fault diagnosis, self-healing, economy, security, sustainability and reliability are the fundamental requirements of the power system. Smart grid is one of the biggest technological revolutions around the world. It will play a pivotal role in changing people’s lives. Smart grid can be termed as an ‘inclusive technology’. Smart Grid technology has transformed the energy sector. It is characterized by full duplex flow of energy and information with self-healing capability. Smart grid is an integrated energy system with automation and regulation. Integration of renewable energy resources with the power grid is the biggest challenge for the traditional grid system. Instability and variability are the two critical challenges for integrating renewable energy resources. Lack of real time information is also one of the critical factors for monitoring renewable energy resources. This paper describes the IoT based prototype design of a smart solar power system. In this paper, a solar minigrid is considered. The prototype is designed using IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.11 standards. It can be used for IoT based home area network of smart grid technology. This paper is anticipated to provide an inclusive and experimental study of IoT based renewable power system as an essential component of Smart city.

 Urban road traffic at the intersection causes severe congestion problems and causes delays for road users. Contending excessive delays at signalized intersections due to traffic flow fluctuations has been recognized as one of the most challenging issues for traffic engineers. The objective of this paper is to compare the conventional signal design method (Ex: Webster and trial cycle method) and sophisticated method using branch and bound algorithm of signal optimization technique. For a long time, traffic delays, recursive branch and bound algorithm techniques prove an important time optimization method of urban three legged regional traffic signal. This paper provides useful information about signal time optimization techniques based on the demographical features and existing traffic conditions and draws a corresponding flow chart. In this article, one of the busiest three legged intersections was selected in the city of Raipur. Practise has proven that in optimisation signal design branch and bound algorithm of signal optimization has better performs in terms of signal optimization cycle length.

Sustainable urban development explains as 'scientific development' that meets the needs of the present without compromising with the future. It can be achieved by focusing on improvement, progress, and possible changes in the dimension of environment and social consideration. With expanding urbanization, the environmental quality is depleting worldwide. Like any other developing country, urbanization in India is also a rapidly growing phenomenon, where people tend to move to urban areas for better living standards. This ultimately has put more stress on the urban areas/regions. The Himalayan region, one of the most marginalized mountain regions of the world, has been experiencing rapid urban growth in recent times. In the Eastern Himalaya, Sikkim is one of the biodiversity hotspots of India with high species richness. Here the loss of biodiversity has been attributed in particular to overpopulation and anthropogenic activities. Being the capital of Sikkim, Gangtok has become one of the most rapidly urbanized towns of the state due to available urban facilities and basic amenities. Despite rapid urban growth and unplanned construction of houses and hotels, the pressure of heavy influx of tourists and other seasonal migrants have put pressure on the carrying capacity of Gangtok town. This imposed a major impact on different natural resources. Among those, it has a significant impact on water sources and water supply catchment areas. The present research has been carried out through a designed experimental questionnaire, which covers the different aspects of water quality, water supply quantity and source of water in Gangtok Municipal Corporation (GMC) in the last 2 decades. The results show that natural water sources have been decreased. Now in all wards of the municipal area, the municipality has provided a water supply. However, only a few numbers of houses have their own supply from natural springs. The results further indicate that rapid economic development, changing environment, and climate variability has increased the vulnerability of natural resources. Therefore, it is very important to understand the emerging issues related with natural resources for sustainable development. 

With the increasing space between need and supply of natural resources, ‘sustainability’ became the talk of the hour. The escalating population worldwide has called for a judicial approach towards the usage of all kinds of non-renewable and natural resources. In the race of the crisis of natural resources, water has marked a striking position over the decades. The deficit for this elixir could be blamed on both natural and anthropogenic causes. For the latter, choosing the unsustainable path for a long time has made the crisis scenario worst than ever. The available amount of water would have been sufficient had it been well-governed, regulated, supervised and used in a prudential manner. India also has its fair share of water scarcity, especially in the Indian Himalayan Region, along with many other countries of the world. The alarm of deteriorating water was neglected for the longest time in IHR. Both the eastern and western Himalayan states have their own story to tell about the crisis. Even after having common reasons aiding the scarcity, there is end number of region-specific factors as well. Certainly, those factors must be studied and taken into consideration. Rapid urbanization in this fragile ecosystem has added to the aspects of water scarcity. It is very necessary to have a unique and specific solution for all the states. Despite the contribution mountains make towards feeding and sourcing a large number of perennial rivers, the health of the mountainous ecosystem still remains inconspicuous. The rate at which water scarcity is increasing might lead to a situation where the term ‘water’ becomes an endangered concept of the future generation. So, working towards making a sustainable environment is a pressing priority. This review paper has shed light on many factors of water scarcity across the states of the Indian Himalayan Region, along with a comparative study on issues of both the eastern and western belt of IHR.

 Environmental sustainability has become an important problem due to irrational consumption of natural resources and extensive wastes generation. Urbanisation and industrialization have led to a substantial increase in the amount of industrial wastes and their inappropriate disposal leads to serious environmental impacts. Construction industry has the potential for using these wastes in accordance with the sustainability of the environment. In view of the above, the present study explores the effectiveness and bulk utilization of ferrochrome slag, a sort of industrial waste used as a geo-material to improve soil strength by controlling foundation settlement. To investigate the strength and deformation properties of strip footing lying on ferrochrome slag waste, a series of model load tests with varying geotextile depths were conducted. Furthermore, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based computational model has been used for the prediction of settlement for different parameters and geotextile layers. The use of computational models provides a new technique for accurately and cost-effectively predicting footing settling. The findings show that using ferrochrome slag as a ground improvement material is a cost-effective and environmentally friendly way to recycle industrial waste and that AI-based computational models are highly effective at predicting footing settlement and can be used as a reliable tool for preliminary assessments. It also directs towards a clean and environmentally friendly city near the industrial area. 

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the problem of waste disposal has surfaced with much severity due to the ever-increasing population, rapid urbanization, continuing industrialization, and change in lifestyle, and also to some extent through universal digitalization. These factors have collectively amounted to the generation of enormous volumes of toxic/non-toxic wastes, domestic, agricultural, medical, commercial, industrial, mining, electronic, radioactive, etc. Waste management specifies the sum total of activities and actions essential to handle waste from its origin to its ultimate clearance. In a broader approach, it targets the collection, transportation and disposal of garbage, sewage, and other waste products, simultaneously taking care of its generation, characterization, and minimization too. Though source reduction and reuse, animal feeding, recycling, composting, fermentation, landfills, incineration, and land application are the eight key groups of traditional waste management practices, the modern approach can encompass other aspects like waste management policies with the legal and regulatory framework. Moreover, in recent years, many sophisticated methods are employed to successfully manage these wastes, including biological reprocessing, recovery and recycling, dumping in a sanitary landfill, waste to energy, bioremediation, plasma gasification, and disposal in ocean or sea etc. The advancement that is being made in waste disposal methods is still not adequate. Both developing as well as the least developed countries still have many important issues that need to be resolved related to waste disposal wherein some of the most critical ones include lack of political will to tackle the problem, absence of a planned national policy related to solid waste management, feeble implementation of rules and regulations, paucity of funds dedicated to mitigating the problem, lack of mass awareness and or educational programmes at all levels, and ignorance about a ‘circular economy. Needless to say, even the developed countries continue to grapple with the problem of a speedy and secure mode of waste management. As the waste load increases incessantly, it becomes more and more challenging for humans to find a wholesome method of waste disposal that can help maintain a cleaner environment and support sustainable development. Therefore, the need of the hour is an integrated waste management approach with ‘All for Environment’ attitude. 

Building a smart power grid is essential to supporting advanced city infrastructure. A smart grid can be defined as a computer-driven power grid that integrates efficiently and safely the actions of all connected entities: power plants and consumers. The modern concept of smart grid management targets a real-time balance of the inherent variability in the power production from renewable sources. Consequently, short-term forecasting of power production became a key task in providing smartness to the grid. Accurate forecasts allow computers to take control actions to balance the grid. In this context, this chapter focuses on intra-hour forecasting of photovoltaic (PV) power. A brief introduction to solar irradiance variability is presented firstly. Then, a survey on the performance of solar irradiance forecasting models is conducted. It is motivated by the commonsense observation that the accuracy of forecasting the output power of a PV plant is highly conditioned by the accuracy of forecasting the solar resource. The second part of the chapter includes a review of several models for short-term forecasting the output power of a PV plant. A critical survey on the metrics used for measuring the accuracy of the forecast is presented as well. The chapter ends with a case study on short-term forecasting of PV power, namely on the specific climate of southeastern Pannonia Plain. The study is conducted with high-quality data measured on the Solar Platform of the West University of Timisoara, Romania. 

Cities are powerful engines for globalization nourished by intensive social skills and sky-high concentrations of expertise. Environmental sustainability is discussed comparable to all parts of our lives – from making eco-homes and ecologically cognizant networks to sourcing sustainable food, sustainable power, low effect furniture, and apparel. This article presents a broad writing audit carried out and provides a comprehensive run-through in the field of sustainable environment in the matter of elementary foundations and inferences, importance and evolution, primary factors, the impact of environmental change, scope, materialize factual and technological runs also future arranging. The existing sustainable environment prototypes and their approaches have been analyzed in various pieces of literature and are also discussed and presented in this paper.This also aims to investigate the extent to which the concept of sustainability is linked to the preservation, reclamation, and adaptation of historic structures in the United Kingdom, before presenting a list of 15 guiding principles culled from a variety of sources by the author and his understudies and colleagues. They are sorted into five flawed but supportive categories. The study found that the applied theoretical exploration into sustainable cities hereafter is esteemed of high tolerance and significance. Adding to this, the suggested holistic approach is credited to be the predominant of all times. Not only are these, the sustainable activities that are visualized for better ecology are also given likely to reduce the amplified human warmth stress. This can be nullified by increasing vegetation mass in urban areas, which comes up with the Eva transpiration and shading benefits. This research study also focuses on presenting the Sixth mass extinction, issues, and its solutions operating in the various fields under the sun. The current study concludes that “Diversity is the key”.