A Low Cost IoT Cyber-Physical System for Vehicle and Pedestrian Tracking in a Smart Campus.

Human tracking and traffic monitoring systems are required to build advanced intelligent, innovative mobility services. In this study, we introduce an IoT system based on low-cost hardware that has been installed on the campus of the University of Malaga, in Spain. The sensors gather smart wireless devices (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi) anonymous information and environmental noise level around them. This research studies the spatio-temporal behavior of people and noise pollution in the campus as a short-scale Smart City, i.e., a Smart Campus. Applying specific machine learning algorithms, we have analyzed two months of captured data (61 days). The main findings from the analysis show that most university community members move through the campus at similar hours, generating congestion problems. In addition, the campus suffers from acoustic pollution according to regulations; therefore, we conclude that the proposed system is useful for gathering helpful information for the university community members and managers. Thanks to its low cost, it can be easily extended and even used in other similar environments, allowing democratic access to Smart City services as an excellent added value.

Scheduling deferrable electric appliances in smart homes: a bi-objective stochastic optimization approach.

In the last decades, cities have increased the number of activities and services that depends on an efficient and reliable electricity service. In particular, households have had a sustained increase of electricity consumption to perform many residential activities. Thus, providing efficient methods to enhance the decision making processes in demand-side management is crucial for achieving a more sustainable usage of the available resources. In this line of work, this article presents an optimization model to schedule deferrable appliances in households, which simultaneously optimize two conflicting objectives: the minimization of the cost of electricity bill and the maximization of users satisfaction with the consumed energy. Since users satisfaction is based on human preferences, it is subjected to a great variability and, thus, stochastic resolution methods have to be applied to solve the proposed model. In turn, a maximum allowable power consumption value is included as constraint, to account for the maximum power contracted for each household or building. Two different algorithms are proposed: a simulation-optimization approach and a greedy heuristic. Both methods are evaluated over problem instances based on real-world data, accounting for different household types. The obtained results show the competitiveness of the proposed approach, which are able to compute different compromising solutions accounting for the trade-off between these two conflicting optimization criteria in reasonable computing times. The simulation-optimization obtains better solutions, outperforming and dominating the greedy heuristic in all considered scenarios.

Exact and heuristic approaches for multi-objective garbage accumulation points location in real scenarios.

Municipal solid waste management is a major challenge for nowadays urban societies, because it accounts for a large proportion of public budget and, when mishandled, it can lead to environmental and social problems. This work focuses on the problem of locating waste bins in an urban area, which is considered to have a strong influence in the overall efficiency of the reverse logistic chain. This article contributes with an exact multiobjective approach to solve the waste bin location in which the optimization criteria that are considered are: the accessibility to the system (as quality of service measure), the investment cost, and the required frequency of waste removal from the bins (as a proxy of the posterior routing costs). In this approach, different methods to obtain the objectives ideal and nadir values over the Pareto front are proposed and compared. Then, a family of heuristic methods based on the PageRank algorithm is proposed which aims to optimize the accessibility to the system, the amount of collected waste and the installation cost. The experimental evaluation was performed on real-world scenarios of the cities of Montevideo, Uruguay, and Bahía Blanca, Argentina. The obtained results show the competitiveness of the proposed approaches for constructing a set of candidate solutions that considers the different trade-offs between the optimization criteria.

BiPred: A Bilevel Evolutionary Algorithm for Prediction in Smart Mobility.

This article develops the design, installation, exploitation, and final utilization of intelligent techniques, hardware, and software for understanding mobility in a modern city. We focus on a smart-campus initiative in the University of Malaga as the scenario for building this cyber⁻physical system at a low cost, and then present the details of a new proposed evolutionary algorithm used for better training machine-learning techniques: BiPred. We model and solve the task of reducing the size of the dataset used for learning about campus mobility. Our conclusions show an important reduction of the required data to learn mobility patterns by more than 90%, while improving (at the same time) the precision of the predictions of theapplied machine-learning method (up to 15%). All this was done along with the construction of a real system in a city, which hopefully resulted in a very comprehensive work in smart cities using sensors.