Nexus Services in Smart City Ecosystems

According to market research, the number of smart cities is increasing rapidly. Information and communication technologies (ICT) provide the smart infrastructure that is the foundation for all the key themes related to a smart city, such as smart economy, smart governance, smart mobility, smart health, smart buildings, and smart water. As such, a smart city is constituted of various infrastructure components that form a complex system of systems, which is essential to collaborate effectively. Services play a central role in this vision of smart cities, as they are used as building blocks for effective collaboration, i.e., to achieve interoperability between heterogeneous parties and independence from the underlying infrastructure. In order to cope with the problem of complexity and the scalability in smart cities’ systems, a solution is to provide autonomous, collaborating services that have situation awareness and are able to adapt dynamically to the changing needs of the environment forming a nexus of services. In this research, we propose a nexus model for smart cities’ services collaboration by using the role modeling approach enhanced by the introduction of service teamwork roles. The teamwork roles definition is inspired both by human and agent team working models. We determine the dominant teamwork roles that prevail during service group cooperation, where the main goal of each role is to intervene and “act as a connector” during collaboration to keep the team of component services consistent with the goal of the group–team. The teamwork functionality is applied through the introduction of a new layer in the architecture of smart cities and is exploited to overcome some of the aforementioned problems. A case study that presents how teamwork roles could affect and benefit the service collaboration in a smart city environment is also provided.