Big Data Analytics for Smart Cities

Resumen

Cities generate huge volumes of data that are diverse in nature and are generated on a daily basis. These data types involve the environment, energy, transport, and economic data. This includes structured and unstructured data which needs to be processed and understood to become valuable. Many governments are considering adopting the smart city concept in their cities and implementing big data applications that support smart city components to reach the required level of sustainability and improve living standards. By managing and analysing big data, smart cities will be able to tackle formidable problems and ascend to a state where better and more informed decisions will be taken resulting in enhanced economic and environmental outcomes leading to a better quality of life.Smart cities utilise multiple technologies to improve the performance of health, transportation, energy, education, and water services leading to higher levels of comfort for their citizens. This involves reducing costs and resource consumption in addition to more effectively and actively engaging with their citizens. One of the recent technologies that have a huge potential to enhance smart city services is big data analytics. As digitisation has become an integral part of everyday life, data collection has resulted in the accumulation of huge amounts of data that can be used in various beneficial application domains. Effective analysis and utilization of big data is a key factor for success in many business and service domains, including the smart city domain.This special issue aims to explore the opportunities, challenges, and benefits of incorporating big data applications for smart cities. In addition, it attempts to identify the requirements that support the implementation of big data applications for smart city services. There are opportunities are available for utilising big data in smart cities; however, there are still many issues and challenges to be addressed to achieve better utilisation of this technology. We hope that the issue can serve as a forum for researchers and industries for the future progress and development of smart cities in the context of big data.