facility management services in smart cities: trends and perspectives

Abstract

A Smart City can be defined as a complex socio-technical system in which services are optimized by the use of digital telecommunication technologies for the benefit of its inhabitants and business activities. The Smart City topic is today at the centre of many debates at European and international levels, also for the potential impact of the innovation of urban services within the overall performance of cities. Literature and virtuous cases of Smart Cities at the European level envisage optimization and innovation scenarios for traditional Urban Facility Management (UFM) services, based on the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in particular Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data management. Although the interest in the transition of the cities towards Smart Cities by administrations is growing, this transformation process appears to be still experimental and not much supported by shared knowledge references and tools. In light of this premise, the contribution - that is part of the PRIN research “Metropolitan cities: economic-territorial strategies, financial constraints and circular regeneration” - introduces the main results of the study conducted on a sample of 21 cities at the European scale with the aim of deepening and analyzing: (i) current innovation scenarios of UFM services enabled by ICTs that allow information sharing (Big Data flows) and a continuous monitoring of infrastructures and physical assets at the urban scale; (ii) characteristics and main trends in the implementation by public administrations of information platforms for the provision of smart UFM services and, more in general, for the smart management of cities; (iii) the potentialities of Milan, investigating the evolution of the offered smart urban services and of the adopted cognitive tools to manage city information, highlighting main trends, strengths and possible scenarios of improvement.