Abstract
A smart city can be defined as a city exploiting information and communication technologies to enhance the quality of life of its citizens by providing them with improved services while ensuring a conscious use of the available limited resources. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for the smart city, namely, the Smart City Service System. The framework proposes a vision of the smart city as a service system according to the principles of the Service-Dominant Logic and the service science theories. The rationale is that the services offered within the city can be improved and optimized via the exploitation of information shared by the citizens. The Smart City Service System is implemented as an ontology-based system that supports the decision-making processes at the government level through reasoning and inference processes, providing the decision-makers with a common operational picture of what is happening in the city. A case study related to the local public transportation service is proposed to demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the framework. An experimental evaluation using the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) has been performed to measure the impact of the framework on the decision-makers’ level of situation awareness.
Highlights
As the term smart city gains wider and wider popularity, there is still confusion about what a smart city really is, and many different definitions have been proposed so far
The Smart City Service System (SCSS) defines a city as a complex system of services that demands a holistic view of all its components to face the increasing challenges of modern cities
The SCSS relies on an ontological model defined using the NeOn methodology by integrating existing ontologies, that allows for the rapid development and adaptation of the services by exploiting the data shared by the citizens
Summary
As the term smart city gains wider and wider popularity, there is still confusion about what a smart city really is, and many different definitions have been proposed so far. Public institutions must be the hub that connects and coordinates all these players Along with this process, a smart city needs to face many daunting challenges, like crowded traffic, waste management, energy consumption, safety, and security, with the aim to make effective use of its resources and improve the life quality of its citizens [2,3,4]. Our ontological framework aims at supporting the inference processes that make easier to have a deep comprehension of the situation and to predict its evolution, which is the prerequisite for making good decisions, leading to good governance of the smart city. We evaluate the improvement in the situation awareness gained by the decision-makers when using the proposed framework in the context of a road transport company that shares its data with the city.
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