Adopting an Open Smart City Platform: A Survey

Abstract

Many municipalities adopt nowadays smart technologies offering smart services to their citizens towards the vision of a smart city. Different research works have revealed that the realisation of a smart city and its smart services creates a complex, multi-layered, and multi-dimensional environment with multiple stakeholders. In these surveys, technology requirements have been defined and several platforms were examined, and in most cases reference architectures have been proposed. However, these surveys mostly focus on the technology, while city governance is not effectively addressed via the requirements defined. In this work, we claim that the main goal should be to support digital transformation using technologies for developing smart, creative, innovative, and sustainable cities. Thus, eight open source platforms have been analysed against a set of governance-based and technology-driven requirements extracted and refined from earlier works. This survey provides a reference framework that enables policy makers, developers, researchers, and end-users to adopt a city governance strategy via an open source platform with the required technological features to realise a smart city research, investment, and innovation project.