Ana Paula Chaves

Software Platforms for Smart Cities: Concepts, Requirements, Challenges, and a Unified Reference Architecture

Information and communication technologies (ICT) can be instrumental in progressing towards smarter city environments, which improve city services, sustainability, and citizens’ quality of life. Smart City software platforms can support the development and integration of Smart City applications. However, the ICT community must overcome current technological and scientific challenges before these platforms can be widely adopted. This article surveys the state of the art in software platforms for Smart Cities. We analyzed 23 projects concerning the most used enabling technologies, as well as functional and non-functional requirements, classifying them into four categories: Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Big Data, and Cloud Computing. Based on these results, we derived a reference architecture to guide the development of next-generation software platforms for Smart Cities. Finally, we enumerated the most frequently cited open research challenges and discussed future opportunities. This survey provides important references to help application developers, city managers, system operators, end-users, and Smart City researchers make project, investment, and research decisions.

A Collective Intelligence Based System for Visualizing Problems in Public Roads

The emergence of Web 2.0 made knowledge sharing via Internet an easy task. Collective intelligence leverages this knowledge shared to solve problems. Using collective intelligence along with IT (Information Technology) techniques in transportation systems can make them more secure, efficient and reliable without changing existing physical structures. The products generated by this combination are known as ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems). This paper presents an application that uses the concept of ITS and collective intelligence to enable users to visualize possible problems on bus lines due to traffic conditions. The application is part of the project UbiBus, which focuses on bringing solutions together to improve services provided to public transportation users in Brazil.

Context-Based Notification Supporting Distributed Software Teams Management and Coordination

Global Software Development introduced many competitive advantages, however, these advantages brought new challenges together, specially when we talk about communication issues and, consequently, collaborative work participants coordination and management. In this sense, awareness techniques and context management can be used to offer information to project participants, making them perceive the context where workspace actions are occurring. This paper presents DiSEN-Notifier, a notification manager that uses contextual data to send information to collaborative work participants within a distributed software engineering environment. DiSEN-Notifier uses event-based notification, and does not require users to request the information. It also identifies - based on context - who are the participants interested on a specific information keeping them aware of any change at the moment it occurs.