Making Cities Smarter—Optimization Problems for the IoT Enabled Smart City Development: A Mapping of Applications, Objectives, Constraints

One of the prime aims of smart cities has been to optimally manage the available resources and systems that are used in the city. With an increase in urban population that is set to grow even faster in the future, smart city development has been the main goal for governments worldwide. In this regard, while the useage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques covering the areas of Machine and Deep Learning have garnered much attention for Smart Cities, less attention has focused towards the use of combinatorial optimization schemes. To help with this, the current review presents a coverage of optimization methods and applications from a smart city perspective enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). A mapping is provided for the most encountered applications of computational optimization within IoT smart cities for five popular optimization methods, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, artificial bee colony optimization and differential evolution. For each application identified, the algorithms used, objectives considered, the nature of the formulation and constraints taken in to account have been specified and discussed. Lastly, the data setup used by each covered work is also mentioned and directions for future work have been identified. This review will help researchers by providing them a consolidated starting point for research in the domain of smart city application optimization.