Big data analytics and smart cities: applications, challenges, and opportunities

Urban environments continuously generate larger and larger volumes of data, whose analysis can provide descriptive and predictive models as valuable support to inspire and develop data-driven Smart City applications. To this aim, Big data analysis and machine learning algorithms can play a fundamental role to bring improvements in city policies and urban issues. This paper introduces how Big Data analysis can be exploited to design and develop data-driven smart city services, and provides an overview on the most important Smart City applications, grouped in several categories. Then, it presents three real-case studies showing how data analysis methodologies can provide innovative solutions to deal with smart city issues. The first one is an approach for spatio-temporal crime forecasting (tested on Chicago crime data), the second one is methodology to discover mobility hotsposts and trajectory patterns from GPS data (tested on Beijing taxi traces), the third one is an approach to discover predictive epidemic patterns from mobility and infection data (tested on real COVID-19 data). The presented real-world cases prove that data analytics models can effectively support city managers in tackling smart city challenges and improving urban applications.