The way citizens interact with cities affects overall life quality. Their participation in social decisions is of paramount importance for helping on public decisions that affect governance, regulation and education. This interaction has the potential of being boosted within the scope of smart and digital cities, especially by recent advances in blockchain technology. This work introduces insights about how smart cities’ concepts and innovative technologies can help society to face daily challenges for improving citizens’ awareness. Digital technologies are able to drive social and economic development by employing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to promote innovation. In this context, e-governance, in conjunction with disruptive concepts such as blockchain, is showing up as a fundamental tool for a decentralized democracy. This study reviews, discusses, raises open points and presents suggestions towards an efficient, transparent and sustainable use of technology, applied to future cities.

Cities are constantly transforming and, consequently, attracting efforts from researchers and opportunities to the industry. New transportation systems are being built in order to meet sustainability and efficiency criteria, as well as being adapted to the current possibilities. Moreover, citizens are becoming aware about the power and possibilities provided by the current generation of autonomous devices. In this sense, this paper presents and discusses state-of-the-art transportation technologies and systems, highlighting the advances that the concepts of Internet of Things and Value are providing. Decentralized technologies, such as blockchain, are been extensively investigated by the industry, however, its widespread adoption in cities is still desirable. Aligned with operations research opportunities, this paper identifies different points in which cities’ services could move to. This also study comments about different combinatorial optimization problems that might be useful and important for an efficient evolution of our cities. By considering different perspectives, didactic examples are presented with a main focus on motivating decision makers to balance citizens, investors and industry goals and wishes.

This paper presents an Evolution Strategy (ES) based algorithm, designed to self-adapt its mutation operators, guiding the search into the solution space using a Self-Adaptive Reduced Variable Neighborhood Search procedure. In view of the specific local search operators for each individual, the proposed population-based approach also fits into the context of the Memetic Algorithms. The proposed variant uses the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure with different greedy parameters for generating its initial population, providing an interesting exploration-exploitation balance. To validate the proposal, this framework is applied to solve three different NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problems: Open-Pit-Mining Operational Planning Problem with dynamic allocation of trucks; Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem with Setup Times; and the calibration of a hybrid fuzzy model for Short-Term Load Forecasting. Computational results pointed out the convergence of the proposed model and hi...

The smart city debate will still be the scope of business, policy-making and territorial planning in the following years. Based on that, the paper aims to propose an interdisciplinary conceptualization of smart territories. The goal is to promote the contrary movement of megacities creation and also consolidate the geographical aspect of smartness. The concept was formulated based on the elements of sustainable territorial development, strategic spatial planning and smart governance. In addition, taking hand of a parallel literature review, the study explores the potential of creating complementary cryptocurrencies as a strategy of territorial planning. This term was built based on already existing complementary currency systems in distributed ledger technologies scope. The idea provided presents a great potential for poverty alleviation by bringing together financial and digital inclusion.

This paper introduces state-of-the-art possibilities for using smart contracts capabilities for governance. Assisted by blockchain, the use of these tools can provide a transition that society currently needs due the huge amount of information that reaches citizens. The core mechanism of this study lies within the scope of smart accounts and digital identities. These topics enclose smart cities trends that seek to increase citizens’ participation in the social decision making process, in a transparent way that is usually managed throughout decentralized systems. We define a set of available features that can automatically guide the flow of resources, after the conclusions of voting processes also conducted on trusted environments of distributed ledgers. By presenting innovative ideas and didactically describing the possibilities, we aim to promote awareness of blockchain capabilities among readers, students, decisions makers and, mainly, the younger generation.