Embracing Modern Technologies and Urban Development Trends: Initial Evaluation of a Smart City Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Abstract

The development of smart cities becomes increasingly reliant on leveraging modern technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data, cloud computing, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). While the importance of applying such technologies has been widely recognized, they might not have been effectively discussed in the early design phase. As a widely applied planning and architecting tool, traditional Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (EAF) are not always able to meet requirements of urban development in an expected way. This might be alleviated by applying a smart city-oriented EAF which supports discussion of modern techniques in the early design phase. In the EU smart city project +CityxChange, an EAF was proposed to address such issues. In this article, we focus on an initial evaluation of the EAF proposed in the +CityxChange project according to the Design Science Research (DSR) method. We discuss how the EAF has enhanced the widely used EAF (i.e., The Open Group Architecture Framework, TOGAF for short) by extending its layer-based Enterprise Architecture (EA). We also present a sample scenario demonstrating how the EAF can be used.