Smart City Transition Pillars With Layered Applications Architecture

Smart cities provide smart services that rely on flexible infrastructure that responds to challenges posed by the rapid growth of urbanization. Nonetheless, the smart city concept is still emerging and not mainstreamed worldwide due to technological, economic, and governance obstacles. This paper reveals the essence of smart cities. It demonstrated the requirements for implementations and discussed four smart applications considering the required input data and produced services. We proposed and illustrate smart city main pillars: transition entities (Governmental Entities, Private Sector Investors, and Ad-Hoc Research Units), list of policies standards and protocols (Holistic, Flexible, Applicable, Sustainable, Integration, Highly Obliged ), the components that should govern by regulations. The paper also demonstrated the proposed smart city architecture layers, including the infrastructure layer, Application Layer, Services Layer, the big data clouds, and the end-users. Moreover, it provides a pure exploration of expected challenges and responsibilities for real breakthroughs in smart city implementations.