Future Internet-Enabled Resilient Cities

Dear Colleagues,

With an ever-increasing concentration of people, assets, and opportunities in urban areas, cities have to address a progressively complex variety of shocks and strains to guarantee development gains and promote opportunities in terms of economic and well-being wealth. A significant part of the efforts in terms of urban resilience has been concentrated on managing catastrophe menace and the impacts of climate change. However, recent examples have demonstrated how economic crises, health epidemics, and unrestrained growth have a great impact on the ability of a city to withstand progress and provide services for its citizens—accentuating the need for a new approach to resilient urban development.

For many major cities in the world, strengthening urban resilience is a multibillion-dollar agenda that necessarily implies the adoption of Next Generation Internet (NGI) technologies that should facilitate the creation and adoption of new services and economical models aimed and designed to fulfill the needs of future resilient cities. Thus, in addition to collecting and analyzing information from city infrastructures (including energy, water, waste, mobility, communications) to be able to make the best decisions, it is compulsory to create cyber-physical systems that anticipate disruptive situations and adapt themselves to continue offering their services upon the appearance of such scenarios. Moreover, social collaboration platforms enabled by NGI technologies should also be exploited in order to promote a change in the mainstream economical models and enable circularity. In this sense, the promising 5G and beyond communication technologies, fog/cloud-based artificial intelligence, and security-by-design solutions, acting as catalysts for the Tactile Internet, have to be put into practice to facilitate the fluid exchange and transaction of experiences, data, and/or any kind of cyber-physical asset.

The Special Issue aims to present high-quality research and recent technology advances towards future Internet-enabled resilient cities. Relevant topics include all aspects of Next Generation Internet systems in the city domain targeting the increase of resiliency of the urban ecosystems, according to the following framework: (1) sensing of and actuation on aspects of the physical world provide the basis; (2) Next Generation Internet architectures integrate sensor networks and support processing and control loops on the edge and in the cloud; (3) security and data quality schemes enable resilient data exchange; (4) raw data are processed to become information, information is combined, and knowledge is extracted, enabling the understanding of current situations and the prediction of future ones; (5) applications in different domains utilize this understanding to efficiently react in real time or analyze past situations to improve future behavior; (6) new and more resilient economical and relational models are enabled based on fluid exchange of cyber-physical assets among people, companies, entities, and/or administrations in the city ecosystem; (7) applications use new ways of interacting with citizens and facilitating data access and visibility through non-traditional interfaces or extend those currently used.

You are invited to submit original papers that present significant advances of the state of the art regarding future Internet-enabled resilient cities, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Next Generation Internet architectures for resilient cities.
• NGI-enabled resilient city services.
• Fluid exchange of cyber-physical assets in the resilient city.
• IoT for mission-critical services and infrastructures of the resilient city.
• 5G and beyond resilient communication networks.
• Machine-learning-enabled knowledge extraction for resilient cities.
• NGI-enabled circular and collaborative economy in the resilient city.
• Digital twins for the resilient city.
• Blockchain technology applied to the resilient city.
• Novel and intuitive interfaces of the Tactile Internet for citizen empowerment.
• Novel monetization and business models for resilient city data and services.
• Practical experiences in resilient cities.
• Research infrastructures for resilient cities.

Prof. Dr. Luis Sanchez
Prof. Dr. Jorge Lanza
Prof. Dr. Luis Muñoz
Prof. Dr. Jaeho Kim
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Next Generation Internet
• Cyber-physical asset
• Resilient city
• Circular economy