This collection covers a range of topics related to smart and digital cities. The book’s four parts (18 chapters) lead the reader from theories to simulations to social science discussions, all related to the subject. Each chapter comes from a research paper on a particular area with extensive references.

The book’s subtitle reveals its themes. The first eight chapters, in Part 1, lay out the foundation needed to build and study a smart city, including algorithms to solve different types of network problems such as scheduling, optimizing in cost, and finding shortest paths, among others.

The second part, comprised of three chapters, deals with some simulation studies. It presents a simulation and evaluation of a model for assistive smart city and vehicular network simulations, followed by a discussion of a smart city simulation using low-power wide-area network (LoRaWAN) technology.

Part 3 studies the social science aspect of smart cities. It mostly looks at how digital technologies can help in areas such as voting, government decision-making, smart contracts, urban planning, and judicial and legislative processes.

The last part presents some models or systems of services that a smart city would need, for example, connecting services in urban and rural areas, adopting optimal energy trading policies, using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in various industries, and managing cities with digital systems, such as for parking and vehicle routing.

The book presents a good model for studying the issues of smart and digital cities. It contains studies of some fundamental theories in algorithms and computational intelligence, along with some simulation studies. The book also touches on the social sciences and day-to-day services needed in a smart city.

The subject of smart and digital cities is a huge one, encompassing a wide variety of areas: natural sciences (including environmental sciences), engineering, social sciences, humanities, and others. From this perspective, what the book covers is a limited subset of the topics. The simulations and the data quoted in the chapters are mostly from Brazilian cities. The scenario will likely vary when applying it to other places and different cultures.

While most of the chapters give readers abundant data and information to think about and possibly pursue, some of the presented research and implementations are relatively thin in content, for example, chapter 17.

This is a good reference book for academics and urban planners who study smart and digital cities. It provides data and references to various tools and related issues.