A Self-Adaptive Framework for Sustainable Smart Cities

The transition from traditional siloed to intelligent cities allows for the deployment and management of information and communication technologies in the urban context to be driven by holistic sustainability requirements rather than technical ones such as feasibility and fragmented, siloed operational patterns. This work proposes a multi-dimensional decision-making framework to manage a smart city as an urban cognitive Cyber–Physical System (CPS) across environmental, economic, and social sustainability pillars, metrics and their trade-offs. A methodology based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), specifically adopting Deep Q-Networks (DQNs), is proposed to represent and assess sustainability pillar dependencies and their interplay. A case study on Low-Power Wide-Area Network planning, deployment and management in a Sicilian municipality has been developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in dealing with the dynamics and non-linear dependencies of the sustainability pillars.