Software-Intensive Systems for Smart Cities: from Ensembles to Superorganisms

Smart cities infrastructures can be considered as large-scale, software-intensive systems exhibiting close sinergies among ICT devices and humans. However, current deployments of smart city technologies rely on rather traditional technologies. This chapter introduces a novel perspective in which large-scale ensembles of software components, ICT devices, and humans, can be made working together in an orchestrated and self-organized way to achieve urban-level goals as if they were part of a single large-scale organism, i.e., a superorganism. Accordingly, we delineate our vision of urban superorganisms and overview related application areas. Finally, we identify the key challenges in engineering selforganizing systems that can work as a superorganism, and we introduce the reference architecture for an infrastructure capable of supporting our vision.