Volunteers in the Smart City: Comparison of Contribution Strategies on Human-Centered Measures

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scenario-independent design principle for resource management in smart city services, balancing user contribution, privacy, fairness, and social welfare, evaluated through different algorithms across scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design principle based on public good theory for resource management in smart cities, with a comparative evaluation of algorithms on human-centered measures.

Findings

Algorithms exhibit trade-offs between privacy, fairness, and social welfare.

Scenario-specific algorithm selection can optimize user participation and satisfaction.

The design principle aids in choosing suitable resource management strategies for smart city applications.

Abstract

Several smart city services rely on users contribution, e.g., data, which can be costly for the users in terms of privacy. High costs lead to reduced user participation, which undermine the success of smart city technologies. This work develops a scenario-independent design principle, based on public good theory, for resource management in smart city applications, where provision of a service depends on contributors and free-riders, which benefit from the service without contributing own resources. Following this design principle, different classes of algorithms for resource management are evaluated with respect to human-centered measures, i.e., privacy, fairness and social welfare. Trade-offs that characterize algorithms are discussed across two smart city application scenarios. These results might help Smart City application designers to choose a suitable algorithm given a scenario-specific set of requirements, and users to choose a service based on an algorithm that matches their preferences.