Camille Rosenthal-Sabroux

Smart City and Value Creation

During the latest five years, the label smart city has been spreading all over the world, impacting on urban strategies in both large and small towns. To face the increasing problems of urban areas, local public government, companies, not-for-profit organizations and the citizens themselves embraced the idea of a smarter city, using more technologies, creating better life conditions and safeguarding the environment. However, today the smart city panorama appears very confused. No acknowledged smart city definition exists till now and several cities defining themselves smart completely lack of a strategic vision about their smart future. This first chapter is the introduction of this book collecting several contributes from different academic studies all over Europe. The aim of this work is to offer a large vision about the smart city phenomenon and to compare researches and considerations regarding how to define a smart city, how to design a smart strategy and how to measure if smart actions really are able to create public value for citizens and a better quality of life in urban spaces. This chapter introduces the most important themes regarding the smart city and further deepened in the ten chapters of the book.

Developing an “Intelligent” DSS for the multicriteria evaluation of railway timetables: problems and issues

ABSTRACT Given a Railway network, a Rolling stock and a Timetable (RRT), it is a very difficult task to ex ante evaluate the loss of quality of the service offered to travelers in case of incidents. We have designed a System for Robustness Evaluation (SRE) to measure the effects of incidents. This system starts from the RRT then the decisions of the dispatchers, in case of incident, are simulated by an expert system. After the incidents are resolved, the resulting perturbed timetable is analysed along five criteria. This system is now completed. It appears as an integrated multicriteria decision support system which constitutes a very useful tool, both to appreciate the interest of investments intended to improve the network or the rolling stocks, and to guide the choice of a timetable. Moreover, starting from this case and according to our experience, we discuss some problems and issues met during the development of multicriteria DSSs.

Recommendations to Improve the Smartness of a City

The concept of “smart city” has not yet been clearly defined. However, there are six characteristics/categories for classifying this kind of cities and compare them: smart economy , smart mobility, smart environment, smart people , smart living and smart governance. However, being “smart” is a challenge increasingly important for many cities or communities. This is of particular interest in the domain of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and for such systems where there are economic, social, and other issues. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that attempt to help identifying the actions to be implemented to improve the smartness of a city. Recommending such actions is an emerging and promising field of investigation. Usually, recommender systems try to predict the rating that a user would give to an item (such as music, books, …) he has not yet considered, using a model built from the characteristics of an item (content-based approaches) or the user’s social environment (collaborative filtering approaches). In this chapter, we present a framework for a recommender system for cities. The scope of this research work is to take advantage from recognized “smart cities” and to make same actions for city who wants to become “smart”. The followed method is: having a list of characteristics of a “smart city”, and having a city which wants to become “smart”, which actions must be implemented to become “smart” regarding the characteristics of “smartness”. This framework uses the actions already implemented in smart cities to enhance the smartness of a given city. The main idea is to recommend to the city the actions already implemented in those smart cities that are similar (the similarity between two cities is based on some indicators such as air quality, water consumption, etc.) as the actions to be implemented in the said city. This is done by (1) Pre-treating the indicators values of a given smart city category (only one among the six), (2) Matching the indicators corresponding to this category, (3) Returning to the city the actions to be implemented in a given order (according to the preferences of the city which needs help, for example). Thus, the city will be able to improve its smartness.

Multicriteria approach for intelligent decision support in supervisory control

In the framework of integrated automation, this work concerns the top level of the management and supervision of complex automated systems. When a process is being disturbed, the supervisory function modifies the established production planning, in accordance with different norms and constraints. The operator remains beside the regulated process controls to perform manual operations. The number of potential actions and the conflicting nature of some objectives make his task complex: he must reach quantitative and qualitative objectives with imperfect and temporal information. To assist him, we study a decision support model following a multicriteria approach involving the supervision problem. AI techniques and DSS are used to develop the aid tool. The Spinning Reserve problem encountered by “Electricité de France” is studied and used as support. To test our concepts, we develop the CASTART experimental support based on a synergy between the user, the problem, and the resolution models.