CityZen: A Cost-Effective City Management System with Incentive-Driven Resident Engagement

Cities typically face a wide gamut of management and maintenance problems. Existing automated sensor based solutions are prohibitively expensive to deploy. Furthermore, these solutions need to be complemented by incorporating human judgment for accurate, timely and cost-effective city-related event identification. To this end, this work proposes City Zen, which is a novel platform for event reporting and analytics to engage residents towards city management through incentives. Key contributions include: (a) the City Zen platform with an app for enabling authenticated residents to report events in a city for end-to-end integrated smart city management, (b) Differentiated incentive management based on types and priorities of events, quality and timeliness of event reports as well as resident intent, and (c) a social dashboard for searching events and subscribing for event alerts with additional ability to provide feedback on the event reports. Ongoing pilots and our performance study indicate that the platform indeed performs city management cost-effectively depending on the incentive mechanisms used for engaging residents.