Ontologies for Simulating Smart Cities: the KnOCS Project

Developing smart cities is a multifaceted effort spanning technological challenges that require innovative tools to facilitate their effective and practical deployment. Among such tools, simulators play a pivotal role by enabling the testing, analysis, and optimization of urban systems in controlled, risk-free environments before real-world implementation. Despite their potential, however, the current literature reveals a gap in engineering simulators for modeling and analysing the behaviour of smart cities in a comprehensive and machine-understandable manner. This goal can be reached through ontologies, which offer expressiveness and interoperability, allow for more accurate representations of urban dynamics, ensure alignment with real-world semantics, and provide the flexibility required by urban scenarios. The present contribution reports on the ongoing project KnOCS – Knowledge Oriented City Simulator, a novel framework that integrates discrete-event simulators with ontologies to support comprehensive modeling and analysis of smart city evolutions.