Alerts and Notifications for Smart Citizens

Abstract

Smart cities function on the premises of efficiency and transparency. One of the key requests of smart citizens is to be informed, through modern, digital and personalized means, of issues that might affect them: utility cut-offs, changes in public transportation, exceeding levels of pollutants and so on. In this research, we implement an extension — to an existing smart city notification platform — that consists of a notification and alert module build as a chatbot for Facebook Messenger. We describe the sources of notification data, how we designed the chatbot and current possibilities for users to interact with it and be notified. We also relate on future plans on improving the chatbot.