CFP: Special Issue on Next-Generation Software for Smart, Resilient and Sustainable Cities

Cities are undergoing a profound digital transformation, evolving into software-intensive ecosystems where physical infrastructure, cyber-physical systems, intelligent services, and AI-driven decision-making continuously interact. While smart cities have been widely discussed from the perspectives of Internet of Things, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and urban informatics, considerably less attention has been devoted to the software engineering and distributed systems challenges posed by these large-scale, long-lived, and mission-critical systems. Today's urban software must integrate heterogeneous technologies, evolve continuously, operate across cloud-edge-IoT infrastructures, support digital twins, satisfy stringent security and privacy requirements, and remain resilient under changing environmental, social, and operational conditions. These challenges call for advances in software architectures, engineering methodologies, quality assurance, lifecycle management, DevOps, MLOps, and AI-enabled software engineering.

The primary objective of this special issue is to explore how modern software engineering principles, practices, and tools can support the development, operation, evolution, and maintenance of next-generation urban software systems. The focus is on engineering software that is trustworthy, scalable, maintainable, adaptive, secure, and sustainable throughout its lifecycle. The theme is particularly timely. Cities worldwide are investing heavily in digital infrastructure, AI-enabled public services, connected mobility, digital twins, and resilience. At the same time, governments and industries face increasing pressure to deliver software systems that are interoperable, explainable, resilient to cyber threats, environmentally sustainable, and capable of evolving over decades. These emerging requirements make software engineering a critical enabling discipline for future urban systems.

The issue will encourage contributions from both academia and industry that report engineering solutions, empirical studies, industrial experiences, architectural practices, and evidence-based lessons learned. By fostering collaboration across software engineering, AI engineering, cyber-physical and distributed systems, and urban digital infrastructures, the special issue aims to establish a comprehensive reference for engineering the software backbone of future cities.

We invite papers on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Urban Software Architectures: Novel architectural paradigms for Smart City platforms, including Microservices, Service-Oriented Architectures, and the Cloud-to-Edge-to-IoT continuum for integrated urban data management.
• Resilience, Reliability and Fault Tolerance: Software engineering techniques for ensuring continuous availability, graceful degradation and self-healing in critical urban systems (e.g., transportation, energy grids, water management).
• AI and Machine Learning Engineering: Methods for the development, testing, and responsible deployment of AI/ML models and pipelines in urban services (e.g., traffic prediction, resource optimization) and agentic AI for implementing smart city services.
• Digital Twins of Urban systems: Software architectures, distributed platforms, and engineering methods for building and operating Digital Twins of urban systems, enabling real-time monitoring, simulation, and data-driven decision making.
• Security and Privacy: Designing software for urban data protection - Privacy and Security by Design - and for mitigating cyber-physical attacks on urban IoT systems and critical infrastructure, and mechanisms to protect the privacy of individual citizens.
• Continuous Integration, Delivery and Evolution: DevOps and DevSecOps practices, tools and methods, deployment and long-term evolution of urban software and sensing systems, and prompt addressing of data infrastructure and architecture issues.
• Quality of Service: Metrics, standards, and frameworks for evaluating the performance, efficiency, and sustainability of Smart City applications.
• Green and Sustainable Software Engineering: Methods, metrics, and tools for measuring, reducing, and reporting the environmental footprint of urban software systems — including energy consumption of AI inference at the edge and agentic software, sustainable software design patterns, and life-cycle assessment of urban digital infrastructure.
• Human-Centric Systems Engineering: Software platforms, co-design methods and participatory engineering processes for citizen engagement, civic participation, accessibility and inclusion in urban digital services.
• Interoperability, Openness, and Urban Data Spaces: Software engineering approaches for integrating heterogeneous sensors, legacy systems, and cross-agency open data. - Urban Software Testing, Verification and Validation: Methods and tools for testing, verifying, and validating complex urban software systems in realistic conditions.

Submission Instructions

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the IEEE Software Author Information page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal system, and be sure to select the special issue name, “Special Issue: Next-Generation Software for Smart, Resilient and Sustainable Cities" Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.