The Urban Cloud: Linking city services, cloud computing, and the Physical Internet to achieve smart city objectives

Urban logistics operations have become more complex and problematic for cities. The last mile delivery situation, driven by the growth in eCommerce purchases, is creating congestion and sustainability problems that cities must address if they are to meet the expectations of their citizens for a socially enjoyable and sustainable living space. This working paper explores the potential restructuring of how cities manage their infrastructure to achieve these objectives. Building on the fact that cities have increasingly built intelligence into their infrastructures through the installation of sensors, the paper examines the potential for reorganizing the management of this infrastructure using cloud computing three layers of Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as a Service architecture as a model