Trajectory Pattern Mining for Urban Computing

Urban computing is the process of acquisition, integra- tion, and analysis of big and heterogeneous urban data to tackle the major issues that cities face today, including air pollution, energy consumption, traffic flows, human mobility, environmental preservation, commercial activities and savings in public spending. From a technological viewpoint, Cloud computing can play an essential role by helping city administrators to quickly acquire new capabilities and reducing initial capital costs by means of a comprehensive pay-as-you-go solution. In fact, by providing applications, infrastructure, networking, sys- tems software, middleware and maintenance, Cloud computing lowers the barrier of entry and enables city managers to deliver high quality services to their citizens. Working on such a research activity, we recently developed a Cloud- based framework specifically designed for developing urban computing solutions for smart cities. The framework includes software layers for data management, service composition and application execution, integrated in a Cloud platform that interacts with data source generators like sensors, smart phones and other wireless devices. The framework includes a set of services allowing users to gather, collect, process, and analyze urban data in order to model social and environmental behaviors.