Distributed and scalable platform architecture for smart cities complex events data collection: Covid19 pandemic use case

For decades, numerous names have been given to boost an urban city: digital city, green city, smart cities and the list goes on. They are all accompanied with ideas and propositions to enrich citizens life quality, by employing latest information technology to improve environment’s sustainability, through better energy usage, targeting problems affecting infrastructure costs, automation and efficient human resources distribution. Consequently, cities governors provide plans and conceive laws so society including individuals and organizations collaborate in a cycle of providers and consumers to make steps ahead toward smarti-fication of the city in which they all operate. Hence, hundreds of cities around the world are living example of what a smart cities could be resembling in terms of information technology advancement and everyday usage. Each application or to be general system serve and exist for a specific purpose, using mobile applications and small sensors together to cooperate and deliver a value imposing a huge economical and social value and significant source of data. However, most of this applications are tied to specific domains and solely designed to solve predefined problems. Thus, for a decision maker point of view, decisions’ the cost becomes high to correlate multiple data flow in different shapes. As a solution, in this paper we propose a system that is based on abstracting city events of different backgrounds—social, urban and natural, we chose to call them complex space time events. Furthermore, we present its architecture and how it plays with its external actors, and finally, we explain a use case instance made specifically to counter Covid19 pandemic spread and retain public order.