Attribution Confidence in Shared Smart-City Infrastructure

This evidence synthesis examines uncertainty-aware attribution in multi-tenant urban cloud and IoT platforms. It argues that the appropriate object of evaluation is the coupled system of sensors, ecological processes, data platforms, vendors, agencies, algorithms, and affected communities, not a model score in isolation. The review brings together the assigned studies with established work on uncertainty, robustness, provenance, and governance. Across these literatures, a common problem emerges: an optimized service can create privacy, security, and distributional harms that are invisible in its technical objective. The proposed framework separates evidence quality, model behavior, decision policy, and operational monitoring, then asks how each layer changes under distribution shift, adversarial pressure, or incomplete information. It recommends evaluation by slices and repeated trials, explicit reject and escalation policies, preservation of data and reasoning lineage, and prospective monitoring tied to defined actions. The result is a research agenda for systems that are efficient enough to use but also bounded enough to audit. No new experiment is claimed; the article develops a comparative conceptual model and identifies tests that would make future empirical claims more credible.

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