MARSC: A Macro-Architecture for Smart Cities

The Information and Communication Technologies facilitate the daily life. In the same way, the Smart City concept is helping mitigate the hurdles triggered by an increasing population and rapid urbanization, and so increasing quality of life and socio-economic development. The Smart City concept is based on the use of new technologies to improve traditional services provided to citizens. This approach not only targets the prosperity of citizens, but also the economic progress and sustainability of the city. In order to correctly integrate the various elements of smart cities applications, new architectures are proposed in the literatures. These new architectures opened the way on how to design the Smart Cities concept; however they gave rise to some new challenges. In this way, this article gives a survey of architectures proposed in the literature and a comparison between them. The study of state of the art allows us to highlight relevant challenges rose when smart cities concept is merged with information technologies. Finally, we propose MARSC with its formal representation, which includes and allows generalizing all the concepts introduced by the studied architectures. Indeed, this new Macro-Architecture could be viewed as the one that include all the architectures and theirs properties.