Page 671 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

3) The demand granularity of the information resources and fusion results are quite different,
together with the distributed resources, inconsistent interfaces, and passive decision
services. The information resource interfaces are different, as well as the different user
requirements, and distributed service resources. When facing up with great environmental
and disaster events, many problems appear, including which data are needed, which
sensors can supply the data, which models are in need, and where the models can be found.
The non‐uniform service interfaces at present are not able to satisfy the complex task
requirements, and the active service‐focused mode is also absent, resulting in problems of
passive and untimely decisions. The problem of refined decision‐making in smart
sustainable cities is shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7 – The problem of refined decision‐making in smart sustainable cities

Briefly, the scale of information resources in cities is increasing dramatically, together with the
multiple demands from the environment and disaster monitoring. There is an urgent need for
establishing an integrated information management infrastructure to implement resource
integration, fusion processing, and management service for smart sustainable cities. Through the
infrastructure, the heterogeneous observation resources can be combined via the Internet, to form
the dynamic coupling mechanisms for collaborative observations, maximize the use of observation
resources, provide the task‐driven service mode based on the space and time information, and
greatly improve the integrated management and service level. During the process, the sustainable
monitoring of the environmental safety, the quick response during serious disaster events, and the
transformation from the anytime, anybody, anywhere, anything (4A) service to the flexible right
time, right body, right place, right thing (4R) service can be completed.

2.3 Technologies of IMSSC

Compared with the digital city management, from the technical level, the integrated management
for smart sustainable cities is to realize the transformation from the online management based on
the Internet to the real‐time dynamic management on the basis of IoT, from the sensing
management of every single sensor to the collaborative management of multiple sensors, from the
island of the industrial model management to the model web management of the application
decisions [b‐Balazinska].
To be specific, IMSSC consists of the observation web, service web, and model web technologies.

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 661