Smart city initiatives are being promoted across the world to address major urban challenges, and they all share a common belief in the transformative power of digital technologies. However, the pace of innovation in smart cities seems to be much slower than the rapid and profoundly disruptive transformations brought about by digital innovation in many other domains. To develop new insights about the main causes behind this relatively modest success, this study provides a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on the connection between major smart city challenges and the essential properties of digital innovation. The review involved the qualitative analysis of 44 research papers reporting on smart city innovation practices and outcomes. The results characterize five major challenge categories for smart city innovation: Strategic vision; Organizational Capabilities and Agility; Technology Domestication; Ecosystem Development; and Transboundary Innovation. This study also explores the connections between these challenges and concrete digital innovation practices in smart city initiatives. The main conclusion is that current innovation practices in smart cities are not properly aligned with what the research literature commonly describes as core properties of digital innovation and that this might be a major cause behind the limited progress in smart city initiatives.

Anomalies on road pavement cause discomfort to drivers and passengers, and may cause mechanical failure or even accidents. Governments spend millions of Euros every year on road maintenance, often causing traffic jams and congestion on urban roads on a daily basis. This paper analyses the difference between the deployment of a road anomalies detection and identification system in a “conditioned” and a real world setup, where the system performed worse compared to the “conditioned” setup. It also presents a system performance analysis based on the analysis of the training data sets; on the analysis of the attributes complexity, through the application of PCA techniques; and on the analysis of the attributes in the context of each anomaly type, using acceleration standard deviation attributes to observe how different anomalies classes are distributed in the Cartesian coordinates system. Overall, in this paper, we describe the main insights on road anomalies detection challenges to support the design and deployment of a new iteration of our system towards the deployment of a road anomaly detection service to provide information about roads condition to drivers and government entities.

The main aim of this paper is to present how to transform user requirements models into a software architecture for mobile applications. The technique (called "4SRS") is essentially based on the mapping of UML use case diagrams into UML object diagrams. UML sequence, activity, and state diagrams and other artifacts can also be considered within the transformation decisions. The applicability of this technique is illustrated by presenting some results from an e-government mobile application. The development of mobile applications typically follow a service-oriented approach. A service is a software entity running on one or more machines and providing a particular type of function to a priori unknown clients. These services must communicate with each other, whose combination makes up a service-oriented architecture. The communication can involve either simple data passing or it could involve two or more services coordinating some activity. Some means of connecting services to each other is needed, so workflow is a critical part of making services effective. When those services react to changes on user context, application are context-aware. For mobile applications, the definition of the underlying service-oriented software architecture must consider the services themselves as user requirements, as well as the mobile operators entry-points and the final clients interfaces, and use them to characterize the platform.

Mobile payments still remain essentially an emerging technology, seeking to fill the gap between the envisioned potential and widespread usage. In this paper, we present an integrated mobile service solution based on the near field communication (NFC) protocol that was developed under a research project called MobiPag. The most distinctive characteristic of Mobipag is its open architectural model that allows multiple partners to become part of the payment value-chain and create solutions that complement payments in many unexpected ways. We describe the Mobipag architecture and how it has been used to support a mobile payment trial. We identify a set of design lessons resulting from usage experiences associated with real-world payment situations with NFC-enabled mobile phones. Based on results from this trial, we identify a number of challenges and guidelines that may help to shape future versions of NFC-based payment systems. In particular, we highlight key challenges for the initial phases of payment deployments, where it is essential to focus on scenarios that can be identified as more feasible for early adoption. We also have identified a fundamental trade-off between the flexibility supported by the Mobipag solution and the respective implications for the payment process, particularly on the users’ mental model.