Scope

A Smart City is an urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information that is used to manage assets and resources efficiently. It integrates information and communication technology (ICT), and various physical devices connected to the network (IoT) to optimize the efficiency of city operations and services. A smart city is powered by “smart connections” for various items such as street lighting, smart buildings, distributed energy resources (DER), data analytics, and smart transportation.

Topics

There are various complex optimization problems in a Smart City. The aim of this special session is to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to present the latest developments of swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms for optimization and scheduling in smart cities, exchanging new ideas and discussing open research questions and future directions. Original contributions that provide novel modelling approaches, algorithmic frameworks, and applications to this topic are very welcome. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Traffic signals control and optimization.

• Intelligent parking spot allocation.

• Public transport route planning and scheduling.

• Electric vehicles, and Charging pile planning and configuration.

• Smart building and Smart home.

• Urban water and gas supply system optimization.

• Emergency crowd evacuation.

• Internet of things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS).

• Retail distribution in urban area.

• Energy optimization and scheduling in urban area.

• Other topics in smart city.

Submission

Please follow the IEEE WCCI 2022 instruction for authors and submit your paper via the IEEE WCCI 2022 online submission system (https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/IEEEWCCI2022/). Please specify that your paper is for the Special Session on "Swarm Intelligence and Evolutionary Algorithms for Optimization and Scheduling Problems in Smart Cities".

Important Dates

• Title and Abstract Paper submission: 31 January, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE).

• Full Paper submission: 14 February, 2022 (11:59 PM AoE).

• Decision notification: 26 April, 2022.

• Final paper submission: 23 May, 2022.

• Conference: 18 July - 23 July, 2022.

Competition

According to our recent study in https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9170901, one clear aspect that is lacking in the domain of Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is the availability of common libraries for benchmarking and comparing different algorithms. A vast majority of publications apply proposed algorithms on their own generated artificial networks and/or networks from the authors’ cities/countries without comparing with previous work. This poses a huge challenge in identifying the state-of-the-art in TSC. Having benchmark libraries containing networks of different sizes and under different conditions (under-saturated, saturated, and over-saturated) would ensure that a proposed algorithm is properly evaluated and would provide the research community with a baseline against which algorithms could be fairly evaluated. This competition provides the first attempt to introduce instances of different sizes to be tackled using metaheuristic algorithms. All competition files could be accessed at: https://www.researchgate.net/project/2022-WCCI-CEC-Competition-on-Urban-Traffic-Signal-Control-Problems.

Organizers

• Kaizhou Gao, Macau Institute of Systems Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology, kzgao[at]must.edu.mo

• Mohammed El-Abd, American University of Kuwait, melabd[at]auk.edu.kw