ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Cities
Sec. Innovation and Governance
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsc.2025.1623412
Design and Evaluation of a Decentralized Urban Governance System with Embedded AI and Blockchain-Enabled IoT
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of the Americas, Quito, Ecuador
- 2universidad diego portales, Santiago, Chile
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The increasing complexity of smart urban environments demands governance sys-tems capable of autonomous decision-making, secure validation, and transparent traceability. This work presents the design and functional validation of a decentralized computational architecture for urban governance, focusing exclusively on its technical feasibility without involving real-world policy implementations. The proposed system integrates Internet of Things (IoT) devices, lightweight embedded Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, and blockchain-based smart contracts to enable automated, auditable, and fault-tolerant decision-making. The evaluation is carried out in a controlled environment equipped with Raspberry Pi boards, physical sensors, and actuators representing key urban infrastructure. Governance actions—such as adaptive lighting and traffic signal control—are inferred locally through embedded AI, validated through blockchain smart contracts, and executed only when validation logic is satisfied. Five operational scenarios of increasing complexity were conducted. The system consistently achieves response times between 230–360 ms, AI inference accuracy from 95% to 81%, and blockchain validation rates above 83%. It also recovers from hardware or connectivity failures in under 10 seconds. This study confirms the technical viability of distributed governance architectures powered by embedded intelligence and decentralized validation mechanisms.
Keywords: Decentralized Urban Governance, Embedded Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain-based Validation, Resilient IoT Infrastructure, artificial intelligence
Received: 05 May 2025; Accepted: 20 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Villegas, Gutierrez, Govea and Palacios. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: William Villegas, University of the Americas, Quito, Ecuador
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