Building Smart Cities and Intelligent Societies in Australia with the Aid of Internet of Things, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Countries around the world are facing urban planning challenges in fast-growing areas. As a developed country, Australia has a sound social system, with laws, rules and regulations. Rapid growth has brought new development opportunities, but also accompanied by serious social planning and decision-making issues. In some fast-growing areas, investments for infrastructure cannot keep up with the rapid population growth due to inaccurate data and other factors. As a result, sometimes it’s becoming very hard and challenging for the government to make the best decision for investments in order to achieve the maximum potential. Embracing emerging technologies, to build smart cities in Australia, to improve governance and decision making has become critical. This thesis explores challenges we are facing in fast-growing areas in Australia and how emerging technology-aided strategy making, community consultation and smart governance can help building a smart city. We demonstrate in-depth in how emerging technologies like Internet of Things and Big Data can improve a city’s operation efficiency and assisting decision-makers to solve challenging leadership, planning and decision-making issues. This thesis demonstrates by using these technologies how a planning decision or a community consultation which currently take months to process could be reduced to days, or how an operational decision which currently takes a week could be reduced to a day.