The Future of Data Analysis in Smart Cities - Research Article

International Journal of Distributed

Sensor Networks
2018, Vol. 14(9)
Classification of incoming calls for Ó The Author(s) 2018
DOI: 10.1177/1550147718801703
the capital city of Slovenia smart journals.sagepub.com/home/dsn

city 112 public safety system using

open Internet of Things data

Valerij Grasic1, Andrej Kos2 and Biljana Mileva-Boshkoska3,4

Abstract
There are many natural conditions in the world, such as floods and earthquakes that cause major accidents. The actual
question is how to anticipate and predict such events, which enables us to prepare ourselves in advance. We are inter-
ested in the advance classification of incoming calls to the smart city 112 public safety system for Ljubljana, the capital
city of Slovenia, and the whole country. We used open Internet of Things data for Ljubljana and the whole of Slovenia
for the years 2013–2016. Using different classification methods, different models were obtained and compared with each
other. We have provided a report on how accurate the forecasts are and what classification result differences occur
when different models or data of the capital city or the whole of Slovenia are used. The results obtained are a sound
basis for further work on improving the classification in advance of incoming calls to the smart city 112 public safety
system.

Keywords
Public safety, 112, smart city, classification, Internet of Things

Date received: 5 January 2018; accepted: 27 August 2018

Handling Editor: Aitor Almeida

Introduction such as the 112 public system,4 are becoming increasingly

There are many natural conditions in the world, such
as floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis, which lead to
major damage and casualties. Information on such
events is collected by 112 public safety systems and
next-generation systems of 112 systems (NG112).1,2 A
significant amount of research has been invested
throughout the world in efforts to predict, monitor,
and help involved people both in the control rooms
and on the ground.
Public safety is also a topic dealt with in smart cities
initiatives.3 Current research is used to improve situational
awareness4 for various events and dangers. The growing
use of social media during crises offers new information
sources from which the right authorities can enhance emer-
gency situational awareness. Crowdsourcing platforms,
interesting. In Sakaki et al.,5 they investigate the real-time
interaction of events and propose an algorithm to monitor
tweets and to detect a target event. They devise a classifier
of tweets based on features such as the keywords in a
tweet, the number of words, and their context.
The first question of interest is how to establish such
a system for the natural crisis and disaster, but also for
1
Iskratel, Kranj, Slovenia
2
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana,
Slovenia
3
Faculty of Information Studies, Novo Mesto, Slovenia
4
Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Corresponding author:
Valerij Grasic, Iskratel, Ljubljanska 24A, 4000 Kranj, Slovenia.
Emails: valerij.grasic@gmail.com; valerij.grasic@iskratel.si

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2 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
other various events with the aim to increase the situa-
tional awareness. The answer has been sought by
engagement of social media,6 and depicting ways to
deal with crisis management.7 The second question that
arises is how to anticipate the range of events, disasters
and accidents in advance as we do not know to what
extent these disasters and various events will occur in
society and nature.
One way to address these questions is using open
Internet of Things (IoT) data to increase situation
awareness. The area of open IoT data has not yet been
explored exhaustedly so far. The advantage of such
sensors (open IoT data) is that they are already there,
and their data can be used.
In this article, we explore how these disasters and
various events will affect the number of incoming calls
to 112 public safety system. In contrast to the case in
Sakaki et al.,5 where they use social networks and tweet
analysis, we will in our case use open IoT data for this
purpose and classify incoming data according to the
volume of incoming calls.
The goal of the research is to find out to what extent
we can use open IoT data for forecasting of 112 calls
and what is the accuracy of such forecasts. The
obtained information will be helpful for special ser-
vices, as it will allow to mitigate risks in advance and
plan the usage of available sources at hand. Based on
this, the ambulances, the police, and other involved
parties can be prepared in advance for disasters.
Hence, the proposed solution can improve the situation
awareness.
Our goal is to define a classifier for forecasting the
number of incoming calls to the 112 public safety system
of the capital city Ljubljana. We will use open IoT data
for the city and also the whole of Slovenia for the years
2013 till 2016. Using different classification methods, we
prepare different models and then compare them with
each other. We are interested in how accurate the fore-
casts are, and what the classification results differences
are when we use different models or data for Ljubljana,
the capital of Slovenia, and for the whole country.
Related work
The current work on the topic of smart cities and pub-
lic safety has attracted a lot of attention in the world
and is ongoing. In Santa Cruz, California, USA, local
authorities analyze historical crime data.8 Each day,
the analytical tools generate a list of 10 places where
property crimes are more likely to occur; police efforts
are then focused on these places even if the officers are
not responding to a specific emergency. In 2015, Natal,
a city in north-eastern Brazil, joined the IEEE Smart
City initiative. This smart city initiative9 aims to
improve public safety. A Blueprint for Smart Public10
by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) also contains public safety as an essential ele-
ment of a smart city. It deals with firefighters, emer-
gency, and rescue teams.
The issue that is currently increasingly relevant is cli-
mate change since it is very likely11 that extreme heat
waves and heavy rainfall events will become more fre-
quent. In Jabareen,12 conceptual frameworks for resili-
ent urban and other communities with the goal of
making cities more flexible are covered.
IoT for smart cities is studied in Abreu et al.13 In
Brookes and Hutton,14 various aspects of Public Safety
and Emergency Services regarding IoT are presented.
Another increasingly relevant dilemma is the use of
social networks. The detection of events for emergency
calls to 112 using social networks in real time is given.15
The issue of obtaining data can be solved using crowd-
sensing data, as discussed in Sakaki et al.5 Researchers
are also working to increase situational awareness. A
social media crisis mapping platform and statistical
analysis were used in Middleton et al.4 to generate a
real-time crisis map. Crisis management is studied in
Middleton et al.7 How to increase situational awareness
is discussed in Yin et al.6
Prediction and risk modeling are also topics of
investigation. Natural disasters, such as floods, are one
subject. In Hossain et al.,16 a 5-day forecast of river lev-
els inside Bangladesh was presented. The risk model
for a short period (2 or 3 days) is given in Ma et al.17
In Duan et al.,18 a model of regional flood risk assess-
ment with factors including rainfall, topography, water
density, and population density is presented, and gross
domestic product (GDP) was selected to build the
model. Other prediction models were also studied. In
Ballesteros et al.,19 the authors evaluate the ability of
existing forecasting techniques to predict future safety
values: predicting crime, safety indexes, and persona-
lized context safety. An emergency call center with a
fuzzy-based decision support system that aids in
resource planning is presented in Barrientos and
Sainz.20 In Merkuryeva et al.,21 the state-of-the-art in
flood forecasting and simulation applied to a river
flood analysis and risk prediction is presented.
Traffic modeling is also covered when dealing with
call centers, such as the 112 public safety system. There
are traffic models for calls to the first level (where all
the calls are collected) and models for calls at the sec-
ond level (calls forwarded to firefighters, ambulances,
and police). The general model for a given hour using
the Poisson model is given in Tandberg et al.22 In
Aschenbruck et al.,23 a traffic study and modeling of
calls to the 112 public system based on real-time data
are made. In Jasso et al.,24 linear regression was used
for traffic prediction. Similarly, in the case of the
Portland Oregon area (USA),25 by additionally using
spatial distribution of calls and attribute selection
Grasic et al.
(stepwise regression), regression is used. Traffic models
for calls to the police are given in the literature.26–28 In
Olligschlaeger,26 weapons-related calls are dealt with,
with the city being split into smaller parts. Traffic mod-
els for rescue calls are given in Zuidhof29 and Viglino.30
In Zuidhof,29 Poisson’s call distribution is used. In
Viglino et al.,30 attributes such as day of the week, holi-
days, holidays, times of epidemics, and longer time
trends were used for forecasting, with 17 attributes
together. The model was applied to 1.8% of the French
population.
This article is organized as follows. First, the public
safety system in Slovenia is described. Then we explain
the used data sets and the classification techniques.
Finally, we provide the results from the classification
and conclude.
Public safety system for the smart city
112 Public safety system in Slovenia
112 System in Slovenia. 112 is the common emergency
telephone number that can be dialed free of charge
from any stationary or mobile phone. In addition to
the conventional 112 system,2 the system may include
other features, such as eCall and NG112. eCall pro-
vides automated emergency calls from cars. NG1121
enables calls using VoIP, text messaging, instant messa-
ging, real-time text, pictures, and videos; it can also
provide emergency services with more data, such as
telemetric and health data.
The 112 system operates in two levels. On the first
level, the operator in the control room accepts a call to
the 112 system. On the second level, if necessary, this
operator transfers the call to one of the emergency ser-
vices, such as firefighters, ambulances, and police. At
present, there are 13 regional 112 public safety system
centers in Slovenia. Figure 1 shows the distribution of
these regional centers.
Public safety system architecture for smart cities
The public safety system architecture32 for smart cities
integrates different types of incoming incident and
emergency requests, external interfaces, and warning
devices. Incoming requests can be from eCall, 112 calls,
video surveillance systems, and open data or from vari-
ous types of sensors or IoT devices. In addition, the
telephone information is considered as information
generated by a human sensor. Such a system can be
operated for different use cases for the given integrated
solution (e.g. safe city, smart city, 112 emergency sys-
tem). Within the system, there are parts for receiving
the input signals (event handling), prediction modules
(e.g. module for prediction of numbers of incoming
calls to 112 system), the Public Information and
3
Figure 1. Map of Slovenia with regional 112 public safety
centers.31
Notification System (PINS) and the operators’ work-
place. The public safety system architecture is shown in
Figure 2.
Incoming data. In general, any sensor or external system
can be used as an input to the system. Depending on
the data received, the system or the operator checks the
extent of the danger. In the next step, the relevant sce-
nario is to be executed manually or automatically; if
notification is necessary, it is made.
The system can accept data from different sensors
intended for floods, for example, water level, the
amount and intensity of precipitation, the type of preci-
pitation, wind speed and direction, the temperature and
relative humidity of the air, as well as absolute and rela-
tive atmospheric pressure. The data can be obtained
directly from the sensors, or from organizations that
collect sensor data. In addition, the system enables the
accepting and processing of data of other types of sen-
sors that are not intended for floods, such as sensors
for natural gas, fire, and earthquakes. Data can be
received from systems for eCall, 112 calls, NG112 calls,
and others.
Working operator. 112 operators in the control room,
working at the first level, receive and process all types
of incoming requests in the system. They enter the main
characteristics of the incident into the system database,
perform analysis, and transfer the data on the accident,
including the incident report, to appropriate emergency
dispatch services. The operators’ dashboard is shown
in Figure 3.
Prediction module for the 112 system. With the prediction
module for the 112 system, we wish to predict (includ-
ing conducting classification, regression, etc.) the
4 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
Figure 2. Public safety system architecture.32
number of calls to the system for different cases (e.g.
for rain, floods, mild weather, summer, winter, etc.).
With this, we can prepare the plan for the emergency
system (number of employees) as well activities for risk
mitigation. With its prediction system and more accu-
rate assessment, this module provides an improvement
for public safety.
Notification system. Public warning is the capability to
bring to the immediate attention of all people who
might be directly impacted following the onset, or pre-
dicted onset, of an emergency, so that they can take
action to mitigate the impact of this incident. The
PINS is intended for mass communication for national,
regional, and local approaches.
Data preparation for the simulation
Predispositions for the data preparation
We began with these starting points for the data
preparation:
 We are interested in the data for the smart city of
Ljubljana, but we will also use the data for the
whole country. The city’s population is 15% of
the total population of the country. The number
of incoming calls to the system 112 is 25% of all
calls.
 In our case, the real data observed were the sta-
tistics about the total number of all incoming
calls to the regional 112 centers per day. Due to
the purpose of unification, the number of incom-
ing calls for the whole country will be taken as
the dependent attribute. Based on this, classifica-
tion is made.
 We obtained data from publicly available
sources; these were open data sources.31,33,34
 We left the data retrieved as they were. However,
from the obtained IoT open data, we removed
for each data instance the data about the year,
the month, and the day within the month.
Instead, we added information about the day of
the week and whether the data are taken during
the working day or the weekend.
Incoming calls to the 112 system
The most significant damage caused by natural disas-
ters in Slovenia in recent years has been due to floods,
fires, drought, storms (strong wind), and a series of
landslides and heavy snow; sleet was also a significant
factor. For example, in 2013, the damage due to
drought was estimated at 0.3% GDP (106 million
Grasic et al. 5

Figure 3. Operator dashboard: (a) incoming emergency request and (b) warning zone with warning devices on GIS map.
6 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Table 1. Weather stations observed with statistics for 2015.

Nr. 112 regional center Weather station Inc calls 2015 Inc calls (%) Lon Lat ALT (m)

1 Brezice (BR) Airport Cerklje 21,938 5.1 15.5184 45.8987 154

2 Celje (CE) Celje 41,827 9.7 15.2259 46.2366 242
3 Koper (KP) Airport Portoroz 32,379 7.5 13.6160 45.4753 2
4 Kranj (KR) Airport Brnik (Ljubljana) 36,981 8.6 14.4728 46.2178 364
5 Ljubljana (LJ) Ljubljana 108,401 25.2 14.5124 46.0655 299
6 Maribor (MB) Airport Maribor 52,917 12.3 15.6821 46.4797 264
7 M. Sobota (MS) Murska Sobota 20,700 4.8 16.1913 46.6521 187
8 Nova Gorica (NG) Bilje 24,297 5.7 13.6243 45.8954 55
9 Novo mesto (NM) Novo mesto 28,244 6.6 15.1773 45.8018 220
10 Postojna (PO) Postojna 21,475 5.0 14.1928 45.7661 533
Total (1–10) 389,159 90.5
Total (2015) 430,147 100.00

Euro) and due to floods estimated at 2% GDP (650
million Euro) in 2014. On this basis, we have defined
the parameters for the data sets. In addition, other data
parameters were added, such as day data and traffic
accidents data.
The main data used were the number of incoming
call to the 112 emergency system for the whole of
Slovenia. Since Slovenia has 13 regional 112 centers,
we attempted to evenly allocate the data according to
the centers. Figure 4 shows a map of Slovenia with (a)
weather stations33 and (b) rivers with stations.33
Open IoT data
We classify the open IoT data into four groups: day
data (G1), weather data (G2), river discharge data (G3)
and accident data (G4). Each group contains multiple
attributes. In Figure 4, maps of Slovenia with weather
stations and rivers with stations are shown.
Day data. We used day data: weekday (1—Monday,
7—Sunday), and weekend classification (1—Workday,
2—Saturday, 3—Sunday).
Weather station data. We chose weather stations from
places where the 112 regional centers are located. In
2015, these 112 regional centers had about 90% of all
incoming calls within the state. Weather stations with
statistics for the year 2015 are shown in Table 1.
For each station, we have prepared 16 parameters
for each day: average, maximum, and minimum daily
temperature (C), average wind speed (m/s), cloudiness
(%), humidity (%), amount of rainfall (mm), height of
snow (cm), height of new snow (cm), sunshine duration
(h), flag for strong and stormwind (0—no, 1—yes), flag
for thunderstorm (0—no, 1—yes), and flags for freezing
rain, hail, or frost (0—no, 1—yes). Weather data were
obtained from the open data system of the National
Meteorological Service of Slovenia.33
When we checked all the data, we found that some
data do not exist (height parameters of new snow and
sunshine duration, for the weather stations at Brezice
and Kranj), so we removed these two attributes. This
did not significantly affect the final results.
River discharge data. Data on river discharge were
obtained from the open data accessible system33 of the
National Meteorological Service of Slovenia. We took
the data from rivers and stations with the highest dis-
charges. The data are presented in Table 2. For each
station, longitude (Lon), latitude (Lat), and altitude
(ALT) in meters are given. In addition, hinterland
(Hint) for the entire Slovenia territory (in %) is given.
It can be seen that the sum of the hinterland is
54,159 km2, which is more than twice the whole surface
area of Slovenia, which is 20,273 km2. This is because
some rivers’ hinterlands are in neighboring countries:
the Mura River also flows in Hungary, the Drava in
Austria, and some of the hinterland of the Sava River
is in Croatia.
From the open data source,33 the data for each sta-
tion were available: mean monthly discharge (daily
average), the smallest monthly discharge (daily average
with day present), and the highest monthly discharge
(extreme discharge with day present). We used the mean
monthly discharge for each day in the month, with cor-
rections for smallest and most extreme discharges for
the given day and the day’s close. The discharge was
measured in m3/s.
Traffic accident data. We obtained traffic accident data
from the Slovenian police force.34 Only total data were
available: statistics for the distribution of traffic per
month and days of the week. We distributed month
data for each day evenly. Since statistics show that acci-
dents are distributed differently depending on the day
of the week, we additionally corrected each day’s traffic
data. Specifically, about 15% accidents are on each day
Grasic et al.
Figure 4. Map of Slovenia with (a) weather stations33 and (b) rivers with stations.33
from Mondays to Thursdays, 16.7% on Fridays, 13.3%
on Saturdays and 10% on Sundays. We use two para-
meters of statistics: the number of accidents and the
number of people involved in accidents.
Preparing data for classification
The last stage of data preparation is to prepare data for
classification. The classification task is performed as
follows:
7
 We take open IoT data for the period from 2013
(January) to 2016 (March). Each data record
represents one day of data. In total, the obtained
data consist of 1186 data instances.
 The minimum number of incoming calls per day
in that period for the whole of Slovenia is 890;
the maximum number is 9538; the average is
1478.90.
 For each data record, we defined two classes
according to the number of incoming calls. We
8 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Table 2. River stations observed.

Nr. Station River Hint (km2) Hint (%) Lon Lat ALT (m)

1 G. Radgona Mura 10,197 50.3 16.0002 46.6815 202

2 Borl Drava 14,662 72.3 16.0011 46.3713 201
3 Videm Dravinja 764 3.8 15.9079 46.3687 209
4 Radovljica Sava 908 4.5 14.1701 46.3404 408
5 Sentjakob Sava 2285 11.3 14.5872 46.0844 268
6 Hrastnik Sava 5177 25.5 15.0955 46.1221 194
7 Catez Sava 10,187 50.2 15.6149 45.8935 137
8 Suha Sora 566 2.8 14.3307 46.1624 329
9 Radenci Kolpa 1191 5.9 15.0966 45.4650 175
10 Moste Ljubljanica 1762 8.7 14.5492 46.0557 281
11 Veliko Sirje Savinja 1842 9.1 15.1972 46.0923 190
12 Podbocje Krka 2238 11.0 15.4602 45.8651 146
13 Solkan Soca 1573 7.8 13.6599 45.9819 52
14 Podroteja Idrijca 113 0.6 14.0354 45.9871 327
15 Dolenje Vipava 317 1.6 13.9060 45.8665 82
16 C. Mlin Reka 378 1.9 14.0655 45.6552 342

Table 3. Data sets with attributes used.

Group Group name LJ data set SLO data set

G1 Day Day (2) Day (2)

G2 Weather Weather data for Ljubljana (16) Weather data for Slovenia (16 3 1024)
G3 River Sava Sentjakob, Ljubljanica Moste (2) All rivers (16)
G4 Accidents Accidents data (2)
Total attributes 20 176

defined one class with two different values
(class2: regular, urgent) and another class with
four different values (class4: small, normal, big-
ger, urgent). There are two values in class2 in
order to distinguish regular traffic from urgent
traffic, when the operators are informed that
urgent incoming traffic is on the way. In the case
of the four values in class4, we further distin-
guish regular traffic into small, normal, and big-
ger traffic. In such a way, the operator can
additionally distinguish the incoming traffic.
The boundaries between the individual classes
were set to 1250, 1450, and 1700 incoming calls.
 From all the data obtained, we have defined two
data sets. One for Ljubljana, which we called the
LJ data set; it consists of 20 attributes of data.
The other is the SLO data set, which consists of
all the prepared data attributes; it consists of 176
data attributes. Table 3 shows the structure of
both data sets used. All the attributes that are
included in the LJ data set represent a subset of
the SLO data set. The LJ data set is only a sub-
set (containing 20 attributes) of the SLO data set
(containing a total of 176 attributes).
Figure 5 shows the distribution of incoming calls per
day for the whole country for the period 2013–2016.
The x-axis of the histogram starts with the minimal
number of calls, which is 890 and ends with the maxi-
mal number of daily calls which is 9538. The y-axis
indicates the number of days from 2013 to 2016 when
the certain number of incoming calls was achieved. For
example, 890 calls per day happened 11 times during
2013–2016. Figures 6 and 7 show the distributions of
incoming calls converted into four and two classes,
respectively, for both LJ and SLO data sets.
Simulation by classification
Classifications used
For the classification,35,36 we have used the Weka
tool.37–39 Classifiers used and compared to each other
are Naı̈ve Bayes, Support Vector Machines (LibSVM),
boosting classifier (AdaBoostM1), tree classifier J48,
and a class for constructing a forest of random trees
(Random Forest). In addition, we used the zero rule
(ZeroR), which relies on the target and ignores all
predictors.
Grasic et al. 9

Figure 5. Incoming calls distribution from minimum to a maximum number of calls per day for the whole country for a given
period 2013–2016 (x-axis: distribution of calls according to the volume of calls; y-axis: how many times the given number of calls has
been made).

Table 4. Classification results for class with four distinctive values (class4) (the best results are in bold).

Data set Method Acc (%) Prec Rec F1 ROC

LJ ZeroR 34.65 0.120 0.347 0.178 0.495

Naı̈ve Bayes 40.64 0.432 0.406 0.383 0.664
LibSVM 39.29 0.531 0.393 0.305 0.536
AdaBoostM1 40.39 0.284 0.404 0.327 0.579
J48 44.44 0.443 0.444 0.443 0.624
Random Forest 51.60 0.527 0.516 0.511 0.740
SLO ZeroR 34.65 0.120 0.347 0.178 0.495
Naı̈ve Bayes 39.21 0.434 0.392 0.365 0.671
LibSVM 34.57 0.120 0.346 0.178 0.499
AdaBoostM1 39.71 0.282 0.397 0.318 0.570
J48 44.27 0.441 0.443 0.441 0.628
Random Forest 53.63 0.554 0.536 0.531 0.756

For each classification method, we have used 10-fold
cross-validation. The data pool for a given fold was the
same for examining different classifiers. Therefore, the
results are comparable.
Simulation results
The results of the simulation are presented in Tables 4
and 5. For each simulation case, we have checked the
cost function values: accuracy (Acc), precision (Pre),
recall (Rec), F1 measure (F1), and receiver operating
characteristic (ROC) curve.
Classification accuracy (Acc) is the ability to predict
categorical class labels. It is the simplest scoring mea-
sure. Accuracy calculates the proportion of correctly
classified instances. The evaluation measures used were
based on TP (true positive), FP (false positive), and FN
(false negative). TP is a rate of true positives, that is, of
instances correctly classified as a given class. It means
that the value of the actual class is yes and the value of
the predicted class is also yes. FP is a rate of false
positives, that is, of instances falsely classified as a
given class. It represents cases when the value of the
actual class is no, and the value of the predicted class is
yes. FN is a rate of false negatives, that is, instances fal-
sely classified as negative. It represents cases when the
value of the actual class is yes, and the value of the pre-
dicted class is no.
Precision is the number of correct results divided by
the number of all positive predicted results. The for-
mula is precision = TP/(TP + FP). Recall, also
called sensitivity, is the ratio of the correctly predicted
positive observations to all the observations in the
actual class—yes. The formula is recall = TP/
(TP + FN). The F1 measure is the weighted average
of precision and recall. Therefore, this score takes both
false positives and false negatives into account. The for-
mula is F1 measure = 2 * (recall * precision) / (recall
+ precision). ROC curve depicts the performance of a
classification algorithm as the classification threshold is
varied. ROC area approaching 1 means the best classi-
fier and 0.5 means random guessing.
10 International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

Table 5. Classification results for class with two distinctive values (class2) (the best results are in bold).

Data set Method Acc (%) Prec Rec F1 ROC

LJ ZeroR 87.77 0.770 0.878 0.821 0.491

Naı̈ve Bayes 81.20 0.850 0.812 0.828 0.755
LibSVM 87.77 0.770 0.878 0.821 0.500
AdaBoostM1 88.03 0.871 0.880 0.828 0.750
J48 87.27 0.855 0.873 0.862 0.659
Random Forest 90.13 0.891 0.901 0.880 0.815
SLO ZeroR 87.77 0.770 0.878 0.821 0.491
Naı̈ve Bayes 72.85 0.875 0.728 0.773 0.784
LibSVM 87.77 0.770 0.878 0.821 0.500
AdaBoostM1 87.69 0.840 0.877 0.843 0.765
J48 88.03 0.872 0.880 0.876 0.682
Random Forest 90.22 0.895 0.902 0.879 0.853

Figure 6. Incoming calls converted into four classes (classes from the left to the right: small, normal, bigger, and urgent) for both LJ
and SLO data sets. Numbers represent the number of incoming calls for given classes.

best solution. However, there are situations when the

Figure 7. Incoming calls converted into two classes (classes
from the left to the right: regular and urgent) for both LJ and
SLO data sets. Numbers represent the number of incoming calls
for given classes.
best solutions differ.
It seems that in general, binary classification (class2)
gives better results than multiclass classification with
four classes (class4). The accuracy is better for binary
classification, but also other parameters behave simi-
larly. From the classification methods, Random Forest
provides the best results in all the cases. For different
situations, J48, AdaBoostM1, and Naı̈ve Bayes also
give good results.
From the results obtained with ROC, we conclude
that it is the best to use only the class with two values
(class2) and with more data attributes (SLO data set).
The best performer when using ROC is always
Random forest.

Discussion of the simulation results

The basic questions for the discussion of the simulation
results are which class type (class2, class4), which data
sets (LJ, SLO), and which method are better to use.
There is not one answer, but many; there is not one
Conclusion
In this article, the classification of incoming calls for
the smart city 112 public safety system based on open
IoT data was presented. We describe the system, the
Grasic et al.
procedure of data preparation, and the simulation. We
confirmed that it is possible to carry out classification
based on open IoT data. The main contribution of the
paper was the classification of the incoming calls. We
showed that method and class type are also relevant.
As the best data set has been shown to be the one for
the whole country, not only the capital city, and the
best class type was with two values only. The Random
Forest method has proved to be the best method for all
the scenarios.
Because the field of data mining is still evolving, it is
to expect that there will be more and more proposals
and new possibilities in the direction of public safety for
smart cities. New challenges are how to further increase
the accuracy of the classification. Another interesting
topic is how to expand the forecasting of incoming calls
toward police and rescue services, for example, with
data about epidemics and crime. As a whole, the results
obtained are a good basis for further work on improv-
ing the classification in advance of incoming calls to the
smart city public safety system.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial sup-
port for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article: The authors acknowledge the financial support from
the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding
‘‘Algorithms and Optimization Procedures in
Telecommunications’’), the Ministry of Education, Science
and Sport of Slovenia (project »Ekosmart« - Smart City
Ecosystem) and the Ministry of Economic Development and
Technology (project »5G Safety« - 5G Enabled Public Safety
Services and Applications). We also acknowledge funding
from the Slovenian Research Agency via program Complex
Networks P1–0383.
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