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Top1. Introduction
The increasing level of urbanization and growth in size and number of cities in different parts of the world has resulted in both challenges and opportunities. New ways for city planning are needed (Axelsson & Granath, 2018). Many governments at different levels – regional, national, international, have initiated programs on digital and smart cities (Anthopoulos, 2017). The initiatives contribute to national and international health, economy, infrastructure, resources and transportation to provide high quality of comfort to their citizens. Smart city has become one of the most promising, prominent and challenging application in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Internet of Things (IoTs) and Big Data analytics, but has been criticized for not being able to hold if promises (Anthopoulos, Janssen & Weerakkody, 2016). Smart Cities employ information and communication technology (ICT) to improve city operations and services and connect to citizens. IoT can be used to collect high quality data (Chatterjee, Kar & Gupta, 2018) and big data analytics can make sense of the data (Chong, Habib, Evangelopoulos & Park, 2018). Anthopoulos & Reddick (2016), it is found that six dimensions: people, government, economy, mobility, environment and living enhancing the urban life style. Smart cities can play a significant role to deal with these urban challenges. Lee and Lee (2014) provides a typology of different kinds of smart services ranging from automation to transformative. Today’s cities are shifting and transforming into test beds where solutions driven by information and communication technologies (ICT) impact people interactions and vice versa (Gottschalk et al., 2016). Among various application areas of smart cities like smart water, energy, buildings, health, intelligent traffic management system (ITMS) can have significant impact on day to day life of the citizen (Anthopoulos & Reddick, 2016).
The limited capacity and uneven use of the existing transportation infrastructure can lead to the severe traffic congestion and in increasing travel times. The problems of road traffic can be resolved by either improving the existing road infrastructure or by using ITMS to improve the usage of existing infrastructure. The latter might require less investment and at the same time can reduce pollution and energy consumption and improve travelling time and convenience. For example in (http://urbact.eu/steering-real-time-city-through-urban-big-data-and-city-dashboards-0) and (Amaral et al., 2016) the smart city of Rio de Janeiro draws together real-time data streams from thirty agencies and try to manage a large, complex city. The dashboards are used by the city managers and analyst to monitor the system or the city how it works as a whole.
In addition to the economic advantages, one of the most critical consequences of traffic congestion impact the operation of emergency services, such as medical, fire, rescue operations and police services etc. These services demand efficient and timely response of emergency vehicles. Further, in parallel to the growth of population existing road sizes are not expanded in the same proportion. As a result, vehicle crashes are more often happened in the narrow, congested roads as the drivers or the travellers want to go fast to avoid congestion on road. In turn, it affects the social aspects of the city life. Finally, due to the modern city life-style demands shorten commuter journey, reliable and accurate traffic prediction, early detection of bottlenecks on road, parking management becomes more important.