Smart cities and enabling technologies: influences on urban Facility Management services

Abstract

The application of innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to the field of Urban Facility Management (UFM) outlines new possibilities for optimizing existing services and for developing new services based on the key concepts of: Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, information sharing and smart applications. Such ICT-based services could potentially be able to: transform the demand for infrastructures and physical assets; participate to requalification processes; influence the sustainability of the built environment as well as the economic value of urban areas. Starting from this premise, the paper deals with the contents and the current results of an ongoing research whose aim is to propose sets of classification and coding rules and a framework for identifying, analysing and linking Smart Cities (SC) domains and sub-domains, related UFM services and the various levels of enabling ICT technologies. The application of the proposed framework to a selected representative sample made up by both European Initiatives (e.g. H2020 projects) involved with SC solutions at the urban scale and virtuous cases of cities that have implemented smart solutions, allows to collect, allocate and process information, in a unified way, in order to:• identify and describe the current main trends within each of the SC domains (e.g. mobility, energy, waste, building, governance) and sub-domains;• implement a taxonomy of UFM services, including related characterising parameters and stakeholders;• identify and analyse, according to reading keys, smart UFM services that may have meaningful impacts (accessibility, transport, land-use, etc.) on urban areas;• draw the current innovative scenarios of smart UFM services enabled by ICTs, characterized by information sharing (Big Data flows) and by the integration of physical and digital infrastructures and assets;• highlight the emerging and widespread enabling technologies for smart UFM services, related to each of the layers of the technological infrastructure (e.g. sensing, network, platform, analytics, applications);• investigate the possibility of the creation of context-aware communities through the inclusion of multiple social components.The research, which is part of the PRIN research “Metropolitan cities: economic-territorial strategies, financial constraints and circular regeneration”, aims at providing interpretive keys and structured information, useful to study, evaluate and compare possible influences and impacts of the smart UFM services on the sustainability of the urban environment and on the dynamics of property values. The scenario that emerges from the analysis is inscribed in the broader framework of the circular economy where, with the support of ICTs -based services, cities can put in place virtuous processes to reduce, recycle and reuse waste.