The future of urban models in the Big Data and AI era: a bibliometric analysis (2000–2019)

Abstract

This article questions the effects on urban research dynamics of the Big Data and AI turn in urban management. Increasing access to large datasets collected in real time could make certain mathematical models developed in research fields related to the management of urban systems obsolete. These ongoing evolutions are the subject of numerous works whose main angle of reflection is the future of cities rather than the transformations at work in the academic field. Our article proposes grasp the scientific dynamics in areas of research related to two urban systems: transportation and water. The article demonstrates the importance of grasping these dynamics if we want to be able to apprehend what the urban management of tomorrow's cities will be like. To analyse these research areas’ dynamics, we use two complementary materials: bibliometric data and interviews. The interviews conducted in 2018 with academics and higher education officials in Paris and Edinburgh suggest avenues for hybridization between traditional modelling approaches and research in machine learning, artificial intelligence and Big Data. The bibliometric analysis highlight the trends at work: it shows that traffic flow as well as transportation studies are focussing more and more on AI and Big Data and that traffic flow studies are arousing a growing interest among computer scientists, while, so far, this interest is less pronounced in the water research area, and more especially regarding water quality. The differences observed between research on transportation and that on water confirm the multifaceted nature of the developments at work and encourage us to reject overly hasty and simplistic generalisations about the transformations underway.

Appendix

Lexical queries used to retrieve Big Data, AI and Machine Learning publications

Logic Based AI	TS = ("knowledge representation*" OR "expert system*" OR "knowledge based system*" OR "inference engine*" OR "search tree*" OR "minimax" OR "tree search" OR "Logic programming" OR "theorem prover*" OR ("planning" AND "logic") OR "logic programming" OR "lisp" OR "prolog" OR "deductive database*" OR "nonmonotonic reasoning*")
Connectionist AI	TS = ("artificial neural network*" OR "Deep learning" OR "perceptron*" OR "Backprop*" OR "Deep neural network*" OR "Convolutional neural network*" OR ("CNN" AND "neural network*") OR ("LSTM" AND "neural network*") OR ("recurrent neural network*" OR ("RNN*" AND "neural network*")) OR "Boltzmann machine*" OR "hopfield network*" OR "Autoencoder*" OR "Deep belief network*" OR "adversarial neural network*" OR "generative adversarial network*" OR ("ANN$" AND "neural network*") OR ("GAN$" AND "neural network*"))
Big Data	TS = ("Big Data*" OR Bigdata* OR "MapReduce*" OR "Map$Reduce*" OR Hadoop* OR Hbase OR "No SQL" OR "NoSQL" OR "NoSQL Database" OR Newsql OR Big Near/1 Data OR Huge Near/1 Data OR "Massive Data" OR "Data Lake" OR "Massive Information" OR "Huge Information" OR "Big Information" OR "Large-scale Data*" OR "Largescale Data*" OR Petabyte OR Exabyte OR Zettabyte OR "Semi-Structured Data" OR "Semistructured Data" OR "Unstructured Data")
Machine Learning, else	TS = ("Machine* Learn*" OR "Support Vector Machine$" OR "Support Vector Network$" OR "Random Forest$" OR "Genetic Algorithm$" OR "Bayes* Network$" OR "belief network$" OR "directed acyclic graphic*" OR "supervised learn*" OR "semi$supervised learn*" OR "unsupervised learn*" OR "reinforcement learn*" OR "turing learn*") NOT TS = ("knowledge representation*" OR "expert system*" OR "knowledge based system*" OR "inference engine*" OR "search tree*" OR "minimax" OR "tree search" OR "Logic programming" OR "theorem prover*" OR ("planning" AND "logic") OR "logic programming" OR "lisp" OR "prolog" OR "deductive database*" OR "nonmonotonic reasoning*" OR "artificial neural network*" OR "Deep learning" OR "perceptron*" OR "Backprop*" OR "Deep neural network*" OR "Convolutional neural network*" OR ("CNN" AND "neural network*") OR ("LSTM" AND "neural network*") OR ("recurrent neural network*" OR ("RNN*" AND "neural network*")) OR "Boltzmann machine*" OR "hopfield network*" OR "Autoencoder*" OR "Deep belief network*" OR "adversarial neural network*" OR "generative adversarial network*" OR ("ANN$" AND "neural network*") OR ("GAN$" AND "neural network*") OR ("Big Data*" OR Bigdata* OR "MapReduce*" OR "Map$Reduce*" OR Hadoop* OR Hbase OR "No SQL" OR "NoSQL" OR "NoSQL Database" OR Newsql OR Big Near/1 Data or Huge Near/1 Data OR "Massive Data" OR "Data Lake" OR "Massive Information" OR "Huge Information" OR "Big Information" OR "Large-scale Data*" OR "Largescale Data*" OR Petabyte OR Exabyte OR Zettabyte OR "Semi-Structured Data" OR "Semistructured Data" OR "Unstructured Data"))