Explainable Artificial Intelligence into Cyber-Physical System Architecture of Smart Cities: Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities

The demand for smart cities stems from the increasing urbanization, limitations on resources, and the aspiration to establish metropolitan areas that are more habitable, adaptable, and interconnected. The integration of Cyber physical Systems (CPS) into smart cities has proven advantageous across diverse areas, such as healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing but as the intricacy of CPS Architecture escalates, the cognitive processes involved in decision-making get progressively convoluted, hence posing a challenge in comprehending and elucidating the system's conclusions in Smart Cities. To enhance the comprehensibility of judgements, it is imperative to combine the CPS architecture with XAI. To visualize the benefits of this integration, the authors carried out a comprehensive analysis utilizing the Scopus database. Diverse search queries were formulated and executed to acquire pertinent articles. Following the search, a total of 24 papers pertaining to the integration of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) were chosen for analysis. A comprehensive evaluation of these publications and a meta-analysis of the results received from the Scopus database allowed for a deep grasp of the topic. The importance of XAI and CPS in Smart Cities rests in their ability to enhance decision-making, promote transparency, and increase efficiency. This study examines the factors that come before and the outcomes that result from combining XAI and CPS, encompassing the technologies involved, the difficulties faced, and the potential advantages. Furthermore, this study highlights the urgent necessity to incorporate XAI with CPS, as evidenced by the research findings published in the Scopus database.