Building a Framework for Smart Cities: Strategy Development

Abstract

Smart city initiates the promise to address current problems of climate change, fossil fuels, and others. Decision makers call for innovative strategies to transform cities to smart ones. The transformational process to smart cities is hard, complex, and repetitive. We propose a generalized development process of smart city strategies as a support to the different stakeholders and which is validated with examples of smart city initiatives. In addition, a web-based platform is proposed for strategy formulation, sharing, and simulation. It allows stakeholders to communicate, design, and share strategies for smart city development and it is based on ontologies for a formal design and representation of strategies. A group of stakeholders, especially researchers and decision makers, test the proposed framework in a case of strategy formulation related to educational domain in a Tunisian city. They also evaluate the framework. The preliminary results of the use of the framework show that the latter has been useful for stakeholders in the process of strategy development. It facilitates the process and removes limits. The use of ontologies helps in formal design, representation, adaptation, and sharing of strategies.