Modelling and Implementing Smart Universities: An IT Conceptual Framework

Abstract

The smart city concept has been gaining momentum in the scientific community because of its potentially huge impact on citizens’ quality of life. However, expectations have not yet been met in practice. This is firstly due to the sheer breadth of such projects and secondly to the lack of methodologies available to guide the development of flexible and sustainable platforms over time. In this work, we propose to address these issues by using a university campus as a less complex mock-up version of a city. Despite differences between them, we find services that are common to both, and a medium-sized city’s population is comparable to that of a university community. We propose an IT conceptual framework to model and implement smart university projects, which supports the design of a platform that is both in line with the strategic plans of universities and is flexible, sustainable, stable, and sufficiently modular to support the addition of different value-added services over the years. Our framework is based on a service provision model materialised in an IT architecture and managed following a methodology to integrate IT components that ensure the insertion of new, smart initiatives of value to the community, aligned with the university’s needs, via a value-added service planning process. The results are presented in the University of Alicante case study and the SmartUA project.