Call for Papers (CfP)
smart cities and CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES (SCCI) TRACK
at the 42nd ACM SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTING (SAC 2027)
https://www.sigapp.org/sac/sac2027/
April 5-9, 2027
Gwangju, South Korea
at the 42nd ACM SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTING (SAC 2027)
https://www.sigapp.org/sac/sac2027/
April 5-9, 2027
Gwangju, South Korea
Smart cities are characterized as an innovative city that uses ICT to improve citizens' quality of life and efficiency within cities. Smart cities can be explained in terms of a complex of services exchanged by a network of actors interconnected in order to share knowledge, resources, competencies, and capabilities to perform better solution. Critical Infrastructures have emerged as an important cornerstone in Smart Cities.
Critical infrastructures (CI) are technical systems that are designed to distribute energy, information, water, goods and people, and are essential for the quality of everyday life. A major disturbance in services provided by the critical infrastructures can result in a severe strain on business, government and society in general. Furthermore, critical infrastructures often constitute a variety of hardware, software and communication technologies. However, their deployment is a large-scale and costly effort. Therefore, methods, techniques, tools and recommendations related to the implementation of critical infrastructures based on quality perspectives (security, safety, reliability, robustness, privacy, legal topics) are essential. Special considerations should be also given to secure communication, data manipulation (including storing and processing) and overseeing the entire infrastructure. Additionally, an ability to extract the essence of current critical infrastructures into models, which will enable simulation of their behaviour under stress from different circumstances that can emerge in the future is important. This would allow detection of weak and strong spots of these infrastructures before their implementation, and effectively also the prevention of the weak ones.
In this track, we aim to provide a platform for discussing approaches, models, results and case studies or experience reports addressing a broad range of issues related to critical infrastructures. Research challenges include how to design, build and deploy critical infrastructures and the impact on performance. Papers can include and discuss various research methods and can be based on case studies, quantitative and quantitative methods, design science as well as experiments and simulation. In addition, practical oriented research and experience reports are encouraged.
The conference covers the development, assessment, operation, and maintenance of smart cities and critical infrastructures. Main topics include, but are not limited to:
Foundation and technologies for Smart Cities and Critical Infrastructures
System-of-systems paradigm in Critical Infrastructure analysis and design
IoT in Smart Cities and Critical Infrastructure
Digital Twins for Smart Cities
Sustainable design of Smart Cities
LLM and Deep Learning Application in Smart Cities and Critical Infrastructures
LLM-based Applications in Smart Cities
Fine-tuning LLMs for Critical Infrastructures
Deep Learning models for Smart Cities
LongChain and RAG in in Smart City applications
LLM as a service in Smart Cities
Analytics in Smart Cities and Critical Infrastructures
Digital Forensics in Smart Cities
Distributed and real-time monitoring and control
Cyber-physical threats and vulnerability analysis
Data Mining approaches
Visualization approaches
Data management in Smart Cities and Critical Infrastructures
Data-driven techniques for engineering dependable systems
Big Data analysis techniques to support Critical Infrastructures
Data quality management in Smart Cities
Data management systems Critical Infrastructures
Data alignment for networks of Critical Infrastructure
Quality aspects in Smart Cities and Critical Infrastructures
Model-based dependability analysis, design, and assessment
Qualification, assurance, and certification methods and tools
Fault detection, tolerance and recovery mechanisms
Resilient and fault-tolerant hardware and software architectures
Safety and security guidelines, standards and certification
Identification of system bottlenecks and points of failure
Testing, verification, and validation methods and tools for Critical Infrastructures
Trust modelling for Critical Infrastructures
Services and Applications for Smart Cities and Critical Infrastructures
Application of IoT for Smart Cities
Experiments and case studies in the context of Critical Infrastructures
Risk assessment services in Smart Cities
Legal compliance tools and techniques, cyber security and privacy requirements
We welcome original unpublished work in areas related to critical infrastructures. The submitted manuscripts should present a substantial contribution. We welcome research papers as well as reports on innovative industrial applications and tools. We allow submission in the full papers and Student Research Competition (SRC) competition categories:
Full papers are limited to a maximum of 10 pages (8 pages are included in the conference registration + up to 2 additional pages at extra charge per page). Submissions of less than 4 pages with no substantial contributions might be desk-rejected. Please note that some submissions might be accepted as posters due to acceptance rate constraints. Please note that Posters are limited to a maximum of 3 pages (2 pages are included in the conference registration + up to 1 additional page at extra charge per page). All submissions must initially be submitted as regular papers.
Student Research Competition (SRC): This program is open for graduate students currently enrolled in University or College and have active ACM and SIGAPP student membership. Abstracts must be authored by a single student only. Faculty advisor(s) cannot be listed as co-authors on the submission or on the final poster presentation. No group projects are allowed. Students are invited to submit research abstracts, of maximum 3 pages in ACM camera-ready format, to the submission system. Abstracts must address original and unpublished research work related to the SCCI track, with emphasis on the innovation behind the research idea. The submission should address the research problem being investigated, the proposed approach and research methodology, and sample preliminary results of the work. In addition, the abstract should reflect on the originality of the work, innovation of the approach, and applicability of the results to real-world problems. Submission of the same abstract to multiple tracks is not allowed. Authors of selected abstracts will have the opportunity to share and discuss their research work through poster and oral presentations and compete for the three top-winning places as selected by the SRC committee. Please refer to https://www.sigapp.org/sac/sac2027/src_program.php for the full details and instructions for the submission to SRC.
ACMs new open access publishing model for ACM Conferences. Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 1,800 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 70-75%).
Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial or discretionary waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the APC Waivers and Discounts Policy. Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.
For full submission guidelines and the submission website, please follow the instructions on the ACM SAC 2027 website carefully.
All submissions will be subjected to a double-blind review. Therefore, all submissions must be appropriately anonymized as follows: Author’s names and affiliations must not be visible anywhere in the paper. Acknowledgments should be anonymized or removed during the review process. Self-citations should be included where necessary but must use the third person.
Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper.