Challenges to the Development of Smart City Systems

The technological empowerment of cities as a way of facing challenges to their sustainability and quality of life of population has gave rise to the realization of the smart city concept. Smart cities typically encompass several distributed systems engaged in complex relationships, including the integration and interaction with other systems towards providing new functionalities. However, these systems are highly heterogeneous, developed with different technologies and data formats, and owned by distinct organizations and agencies within the system, thereby challenging the development of value-added applications. A way of addressing these issues is by holistically viewing a smart city as a system-of-systems (SoS), a set of complex systems with their own purpose and collaborating with each other to fulfill common global missions. In this perspective, we herein discuss how smart city systems could be holistically viewed as a complex SoS. We also shed light on some challenges related to the development of this type of systems in the context of smart cities.