Rashid Mehmood

Enterprise systems: are we ready for future sustainable cities

Purpose – This paper aims to revisit the adoption reasons of enterprise systems (ES) and supply chain management systems (SCMS) and to explore the new dimensions of sustainability required to be added in the whole process of adoption of these systems. Moreover, it aims to explore the benefits of ES to organizations and to relate these benefits to the ES adoption in future sustainable city settings. Future cities will have micro-industries requiring dynamic interactions and will be dependent on efficient supply chains. The recent developments in information and communications technology (ICT) such as cloud computing through its dynamic, on-demand and service-based delivery are making it possible to achieve those goals for supply chains. The ES in general and more specifically SCMS have integrated organizations into one seamless mesh. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a framework for adoption of sustainable ES in a smart city setting. The framework, firstly, is presented at a macro-level, pa...

A smart disaster management system for future cities

Smart cities have recently become the mainstream approaches for urbanisation. Environmental, social and economic sustainability, digital inclusion and high quality of life are considered important elements in smart cities design. Emergency response system and resilience are among the most crucial dimensions of smart and future cities design due to the increase in various disruptions caused by frequent manmade and natural disasters such as September 2001 and Philippines Typhoon Haiyan 2013. Disasters cause great economic and human losses each year throughout the world. Transportations and Telecommunications play a crucial role in disaster response and management. Our research is focused on developing emergency response systems for disasters of various scales with a focus on transportation systems. We have proposed and evaluated a disaster management system that uses Intelligent Transportation Systems including Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), mobile and Cloud Computing technologies. In this paper, we report our recent work on two major evacuation strategies, Demand Strategies (DS) and Speed Strategies (SS), which provide better evacuation results in smart cities settings.

Autonomic Transport Management Systems—Enabler for Smart Cities, Personalized Medicine, Participation and Industry Grid/Industry 4.0

Today’s societies are facing great challenges in transforming living environments in a way better serving people’s demands of the future. A key point in this transformation is reinventing cities as smart cities, where the core services are integrated in a way that ensures a high quality of life while minimizing the usage of resources [Smart cities in Europe. Serie Research Memoranda 0048, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics 1]. Setting up smart cities resp. transforming cities to smart cities includes the development of smart transport systems as a main service all other services rely on. Thinking about current mega trends like Individualization of Products (Mass Customization) in so called Industry grid also known as Industry 4.0 [Umsetzungsempfehlungen fur das Zukunftsprojekt Industrie 4.0 2] (Industrie 4.0 describes the industry in the 4th industrial revolution to customized mass production after mechanization, mass production, digitalization [Map ‘n’ tag. Thinking highways 3]), Personalized Medicine or the need of better support for disabled and older people in an aging society, the interconnection of involved bodies is a premise. In virtual world this means integration of data networks and ICTs in the physical world this means establishing individual and personalized transport services that cover individual mobility and individual distribution of goods. To ensure the best utilization of infrastructure while having less employable people in an aging society a high grade of automation and information integration is needed. We call this a smart transport system as the next step in development of today’s intelligent transport systems (ITS) and propose establishing this ITS of the future as an autonomic system to meet all the different requirements and ensure a high reliability of the overall system. Reliability is essential since most other services of the living environment smart city, will rely on transport systems. This chapter gives an overview on state of research based on current literature and recent publications of the authors (see references) and focus on the ICT system needed to manage transportation the autonomic transport management system.

Framework for an Autonomic Transport System in Smart Cities

Abstract Today the concept of smart cities is discussed in scientific society and politics. A core function of smart cities is transportation. This paper gives a short overview on the concepts for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) for smart cities and proposes a framework for the design of an autonomic transportation system that provides personalized mobility services to its users in a smart city setting. The transportation poses extreme environment for ICT systems due to fast moving vehicles and users, requiring real-time acquisition and high performance processing of large scale data, and rapidly changing communication networks topologies and node densities. The aim of this paper is to propose a framework that will act as a reference for the design of future transportation systems that are able to cope with the ever rising system complexities and users’ demands. Therefore, a backbone system providing information at different levels was designed following the principles of a corporative ICT that were proposed in [1]. The framework fulfills the main requirement providing suitable information about the local decision engines in vehicles and infrastructure interacting in smart cities traffic systems.

Increasing Sustainability of Road Transport in European Cities and Metropolitan Areas by Facilitating Autonomic Road Transport Systems (ARTS)

The frequent failure of road transportation networks, resulting from traffic incidents, system overloading and lack of optimised support systems is becoming a problem in keeping modern cities functioning, because those incidents affect both, personal mobility and transportation of goods including everyday commodities. Inefficient systems lead to a waste of resources (infrastructure and energy). Therefore not only efficiency of vehicles but efficiency of whole systems needs to be considered to increase sustainability in road transportation. This paper shows the approach using Autonomic Road Transport Systems (ARTS) and gives an overview on upcoming challenge for vehicle manufacturers and scientific society.

Transportation evacuation strategies based on VANET disaster management system

The September 2001 attacks and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster are examples of manmade and natural disasters which have revealed the importance of having a disaster management system in place. A great deal of advisory and policy documents need to be developed by various government authorities. The Intelligent Transportation Systems and Services (ITSS) are set to play a crucial role in responding to emergencies and large-scale disasters. n nIn previous works, we have proposed and evaluated an intelligent disaster management system based on the emerging ICT technologies such as Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) and Cloud Computing with a focus on transportation in urban environments. Also, we have developed a tool to examine previous proposed intelligent system performance in improving the transportation evacuation strategies, and Demand Strategy (DS) has been shown as one of the various evacuation strategies to measure the improvements. In this paper, we applied and evaluated another transportation evacuation strategy called Speed Strategy (SS), independently for traffic network. In addition, the driver response to the emergency situations and their behaviors in travel choices may be difficult to quantify theoretically, however, driver response to evacuation pre-plans is part of the tool design and we present the importance of this factor through various evacuation strategies.

An intelligent disaster management system based evacuation strategies

The increasing urgent need of emergency response systems cannot be underestimated due to the many manmade and natural disasters in recent years, such as the recent Philippines storm, Typhoon Haiyan 2013, and September 2001 attacks. The transportation and telecommunication systems have witnessed a great improvement throughout the last decades. In our previous works, we proposed and evaluated an intelligent disaster management system based on emerging ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) technologies with a focus on transportation environments; the proposed system used Vehicular Ad hoc Network and Cloud computing technologies. Given this trend, in this paper, we investigate the potential of the proposed system to improve the transportation evacuation strategies. We develop a tool to facilitate the use of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) measures in simulated evacuations. An increase in the possibility of saving lives and properties has been noticed when modelling the impact of a disaster on a city data based on applying evacuation strategy plan such as Demand Strategy (DS). Substantial benefits in terms of improved and balanced traffic flow are achieved.