Swarm Intelligence and IoT-based Smart Cities: a Review

Smart cities are complex and large distributed systems characterized by their heterogeneity, security, and reliability challenges. In addition, they are required to take into account several scalability, efficiency, safety, real-time responses, and smartness issues. All of this means that building smart city applications is extremely complex. Swarm Intelligence is a very promising paradigm to deal with such complex and dynamic systems. It presents robust, scalable and self-organized behaviors to deal with dynamic and fast changing systems. The intelligence of cities can be modeled as a swarm of digital telecommunication networks (the nerves), ubiquitously embedded intelligence (the brains), sensors and tags (the sensory organs), and software (the knowledge and cognitive competence). In this chapter, swarm intelligence-based algorithms and existing swarm intelligence-based smart city solutions will be analyzed. Moreover, a swarm-based framework for smart cities will be presented. Then, a set of trends on how to use swarm intelligence in smart cities, in order to make them flexible and scalable, will be investigated.