International Journal of Information Management 49 (2019) 489–490

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Information Management

Editorial

Application of soft computing and machine learning in the big data analytics for smart cities and T

factories

The ever-increasing pervasiveness of Internet connections and the green computing), and/or the computation and storage resources, and
miniaturization of hardware, together with the success of new dis- even by planning the allocation of data intensive activities to data
tributed computing and storage architectures, such as cloud, fog, mo- centers or machines under the constraints of good performance, high
bile, and edge computing, have paved the way for a new generation of availability and/or resiliency. These two aspects are emerging chal-
data-centric applications, potentially able to the revolutionize in- lenges since they have an impact on the way organizations adopt the
formation society. Data gathering and sharing are particularly pivotal upcoming solutions of big data analytics to leverage the data in their
to our society with the proliferation of the Internet of Things and social business processes, and novel solutions are required in order to address
networks, and the consequent data processing and information in- these issues, since the traditional means have been proved to be in-
ference are equally important and pose several non-trivial challenges. adequate.
In fact, such a vast availability of data requires novel means for the Soft computing and machine learning are promising technologies
extraction of information and the making of such data/information able to make changes in the way that people and companies will use the
useful for multiple aims, spanning from the improvement of the city big data analytics solutions for knowledge centered activities, such as
management, the realization of smart cities, the increasing of industrial learning organizations, health care (patients as well as health workers
competitiveness, to the fight against terrorist organizations, just to give and managers), business intelligence, security in organizations, etc. The
some concrete example. On the one hand, the need to store and ex- cutting-edge benefit of soft computing and machine learning consists in
change a large amount of data has led to a radical rethinking of data- addressing how the organizational theory can exploit these advanced
base systems, resulting in NoSQL solutions, and the evolution of com- information processing and management concepts within the context of
munication protocols and computing infrastructures, making cloud big data analytics, so as to prompt its application to smart cities and
computing, and its variants, very popular and widespread. A similar factories, and to investigate the impact of these technologies on the
research and technological advance is mandatory also in the way data internal organization structures and dynamics of enterprises, as well as
are processed, and information is inferred. Novel approaches and re- of societal organizations involved in these application domains.
search fields are emerging, such as big data analytics, sentiment ana- Therefore, this special issue collects contributions on how the use of
lysis, or deep learning, where soft computing and machine learning are machine learning and soft computing may lead to better customer ex-
extensively applied for data mining, in order to handle the scale of the periences and services, which may help businesses achieve on improved
data sets, the geographical distribution of the interacting systems, and performance, with respect to big data analytics within the context of
the expressiveness of the processing means, etc. A non-marginal aspect smart cities and factories. Aligning with the high-quality standards of
also consists in the extraction of the hidden knowledge within these International Journal of Information Management (IJIM), we were
vast data sets and the exploitation of the mentioned approaches to highly selective and accepted only the top contributions in this special
design advanced solutions where applications can learn from data to issue after a rigorous review process. Out of the received 15 submis-
extract knowledge from past experiences, and to make decisions and sions, only 5 have been selected considering the suggestions from no
predictions based on such obtained knowledge. less than three reviewers and judging that the presented research work
Last but not least, big data analytics raises serious management reflects the current research trends and key issues related to bringing
challenges when data are accessed, managed or governed, related to together experiences intersecting the two fields of soft computing and
privacy, security, governance and ethical aspects. This is further ex- machine learning to address the key issues related to data mining in the
acerbated when such solutions are applied to the case of smart cities current large-scale data sharing infrastructures for big data analytics in
and factories. However, apart from security and privacy, some parti- smart cities and factories, by also highlighting the economical im-
cularly important aspects that are typically neglected are the following plications of such novel concepts and applications. The accepted papers
considerations. On the one hand, there is the data governance, which are introduced below:
consists in categorizing, modelling and mapping the data as they are
captured and stored, and proper means to optimize such a process are • The paper “A study on forecasting electricity production and con-
needed in order to maintain a high quality of the mined and analysed sumption in smart cities and factories” by Gellert, Florea, Fiore,
data. On the other hand, the cost minimization of the big data analytics Palmieri, and Zanetti (2019) investigates the prediction of the
consists in properly managing the execution of the big data processing electricity production and consumption in buildings, specifically a
in sophisticated data centers by reducing the cost/operational ex- household with photovoltaics and energy storage system, by using
penditures in terms of the consumed energy (within the context of the Markov chains, stride predictors and also their combination. The

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.08.003
Received 4 August 2019
Available online 16 September 2019
0268-4012/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Editorial International Journal of Information Management 49 (2019) 489–490

study has been conducted on the data recorded by the FENECON assistance of the Editor-in-Chief, Yogesh Dwivedi, and the journal edi-
Energy Management System. torial staff throughout the process of bringing out the special issue.
• The paper “PTZ-surveillance coverage based on artificial in-
telligence for smart cities” by Eldrandaly, Abdel-Basset, and Abdel- References
Fatah (2019) presents a new enhanced Artificial Intelligence algo-
rithm, called Enhanced FireFly Algorithm (EFA), for adjusting the Eldrandaly, K. A., Abdel-Basset, M., & Abdel-Fatah, L. (2019). PTZ-surveillance coverage
orientation of Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) surveillance cameras within the based on artificial intelligence for smart cities. International Journal of Information
Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.04.017.
context of a smart city deployment in Egypt.
•
Gellert, A., Florea, A., Fiore, U., Palmieri, F., & Zanetti, P. (2019). A study on forecasting
The paper “Machine learning based digital twin framework for electricity production and consumption in smart cities and factories. International
production optimization in petrochemical industry” by Min, Lu, Liu, Journal of Information Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.01.
006.
Su, and Wang (2019) describes a solution for constructing a digital Lee, K. M., Yoo, J., Kim, S.-W., Lee, J.-H., & Hong, J. (2019). autonomic machine learning
twin based on the petrochemical industrial Internet of Things, where platform. International Journal of Information Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
machine learning and a practice loop for information exchange ijinfomgt.2019.07.003.
Li, D., Deng, L., Lee, M., & Wang, H. (2019). IoT data feature extraction and intrusion
between the physical factory and a virtual digital twin model are
detection system for smart cities based on deep migration learning. International
exploited to realize production control optimization. Journal of Information Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.04.
• The paper “IoT data feature extraction and intrusion detection 006.
Min, Q., Lu, Y., Liu, Z., Su, C., & Wang, B. (2019). Machine learning based digital twin
system for smart cities based on deep migration learning” by Li,
framework for production optimization in petrochemical industry. International
Deng, Lee, and Wang (2019) discusses the feature extraction and Journal of Information Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2019.05.
intrusion detection algorithm applied to the Internet of Things for 020.
smart city realizations, based on deep migration learning model that
combines deep learning model with intrusion detection technology. Christian Esposito
⁎

• The paper “autonomic machine learning platform” by Lee, Yoo, University of Napoli “Federico II”, Italy
E-mail address: [email protected].
Kim, Lee, and Hong (2019) is about an autonomic machine learning
platform which automatically tunes the decision factors during the
Florin Pop
developing of machine learning applications.
University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
E-mail address: [email protected].
We hope that the readers will find the papers in this special issue
informative and useful for their research or industrial practice. The Jun Huang
guest editors wish to thank the authors of all the submitted manu- Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China
scripts, and the reviewers who provided a thorough evaluation of the E-mail address: [email protected].
submitted manuscripts in a timely manner. We appreciate the

⁎
Corresponding author.

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