It is forecasted that by 2020, 80% of the of the World’s population will live in cities, this will place an increasing strain on urban resources and services and as such there is expectations for the development of next generation infrastructures to make cities “smarter”. Data is key to achieving this and as cities become increasingly instrumented and interconnected, large number of diversity and rapidly expanding data channels will result. Data from embedded systems will rise from 2% of the digital universe in 2013 to 10% in 2021, this requires Cyber-Physical System (CPS) architectures that are capable of adapting and dealing with the scale.
Smart Cities have a foundation in a number of core elements, namely people, business, transport, communication, water and energy that when interconnected form a complex “system of systems”. The inability to combine CPS to construct complex, cooperative, heterogeneous large-scale systems results in sub-optimal interaction between people and systems, and the failure to leverage the entire value and potential of all available data.