Bibliometric Mapping of Trends, Applications and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence in Smart Cities

INTRODUCTION: The continued growth of urbanization presents new challenges. This, in turn, will lead to pressure for sustainable environment initiatives, with demands for more and better infrastructure in the diminishing space available and improved quality of life for city dwellers at a more affordable cost. Smart Cities are part of the solution to the growing challenges of urbanization. The adoption of new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming cities, making them smarter, faster, and predicting opportunities for improvement. OBJECTIVES: This study is conducting a detailed bibliometric survey to investigate the applications and trends of Artificial Intelligence research for different areas of smart cities and emphasizing the potential effects and challenges of AI adaptation in smart cities over the past 30.5 years. METHODS: For this study, the Scopus database was used to collect a total of 1925 documents published between 1991-2021 (July). The bibliometric analysis includes document types, subject categorization, document growth, as well as top contributing sources, countries, authors, and funding sponsors. It also analyses keywords, abstracts, titles, and characteristics of most cited documents. RESULTS: The analyzed findings of this research study reflect not only the significance of AI technology for various applications within numerous sectors in the smart city but also major obstacles in AI research for various sectors of smart cities. CONCLUSION: The research demonstrates that AI has the ability to construct today’s and tomorrow’s smart cities, but that each region’s potentials, conditions, and circumstances must be addressed in order to achieve a smooth internet city development.