Smart City Evaluation Research Articles

RETRACTION: Challenges and Vulnerability Evaluation of Smart Cities in IoT Device Based on Cybersecurity Mechanism

RETRACTION: A. O. Almagrabi, “,” Expert Systems 40, no. (2023): , https://doi.org/10.1111/exsy.13113. The above article, published online on 01 September 2022 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor‐in‐Chief, David Camacho; and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The article was submitted as part of a guest‐edited special issue. Following publication, it has come to the attention of the journal that this article was not reviewed in line with the journal's peer review standards. Furthermore, some of the figures included in this article are inadequately presented and insufficiently discussed. As a result, the research described cannot be reproduced. The editors have therefore decided to retract this article. The author was informed of the decision to retract but was unavailable for comment.

Constructing a standard system of city sustainable development assessment technology based on the SDGs

Given the rapid development of China’s new urbanization, cities with different locations and varying functional positioning, resource endowments, and development stages have insufficient scientific and applicable technical tools for implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). City managers and policymakers must urgently establish SDG benchmarks to diagnose city development. Moreover, successful experiences from similar cities regarding sustainable development and self-improvement must be learned from to promote diversified, sustainable development across the country. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data and 5G are widely used in smart cities. Therefore, there is a growing need for “knowledge-based, personalized and intelligent” technologies to support monitoring, evaluation, and decision-making processes facilitating sustainable development in cities. This paper uses standardization as the theoretical support and technical basis. This approach can help clarify the sustainable development processes in China and clarify the evaluation results of and provide data on horizontal city comparisons, which can be used to develop evaluation technology for sustainable development in cities and construct a standardized system. The results provide a standard framework for intelligent assessment and decision-making regarding cities’ sustainable development capabilities in China. Evaluating major international standardization institutions reveals that the practices of Chinese national standards should be fully absorbed and integrated to guide the evaluation of smart, resilient, and low-carbon cities. To this end, an indicator library of city sustainable development is proposed to provide standard evaluation technology methods. Finally, analyzing the response relationship of the indicator library to SDGs reveals the need for a standardized knowledge map of sustainable development assessment techniques and methods from the perspective of integrated management for sustainable development in cities.

An Improved Laplacian Gravity Centrality-Based Consensus Method for Social Network Group Decision-Making with Incomplete ELICIT Information

With the advancement of information technology, social media has become increasingly prevalent. The complex networks of social relationships among decision-makers (DMs) have given rise to the problem of social network group decision-making (SNGDM), which has garnered considerable attention in recent years. However, most existing consensus-reaching methods in SNGDM only consider local network information when determining the influence of DMs within the social network. This approach fails to adequately reflect the crucial role of key DMs in regulating information propagation during the consensus-reaching process. Additionally, the partial absence of linguistic evaluations in the decision-making problems also poses obstacles to identifying the optimal alternative. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved Laplacian gravity centrality-based consensus method that can effectively handle incomplete decision information in social network environments. First, the extended comparative linguistic expressions with symbolic translation (ELICIT) are utilized to describe DMs’ linguistic evaluations and construct the incomplete decision matrix. Second, the improved Laplacian gravity centrality (ILGC) is proposed to quantify the influence of DMs in the social network by considering local and global topological structures. Based on the ILGC measure, we develop a trust-driven consensus-reaching model to enhance group consensus, which can better simulate opinion interactions in real-world situations. Lastly, we apply the proposed method to a smart city evaluation problem. The results show that our method can more reasonably handle incomplete linguistic evaluations, more comprehensively capture the influence of DMs, and more effectively improve group consensus.

A Bidirectional Research Method to Design a Smart City Evaluation System

This paper develops a two-way research method – both top-down and bottom-up – to define a “standard but tailored” assessment framework for smart cities, based on shared smart city concepts, but designed to respond to different needs of each city. The method aims not to design a measurement standard, but to define a process able to create the best smart city measurement system. It is based on a standard framework but tailored on each city – with its own features, problems, values, and ideas about the quality of life. This method overcomes the limitations of using standard framework, as it links smart city assessment tools to local policies but giving to the tool the authoritativeness deriving from the scientific literature and the robustness acquired from international nest practices. An empirical implementation supports the theoretical background and allows to validate the method, as it has been successfully implemented in Genoa, a medium-sized city in Italy looking for its own performance measurement system that allows comparison with other smart cities at the same time. The bidirectional method is designed by the authors of this paper, and it is a novelty in the international literature about research methodology for business and management studies.

Ethical Reflections on the Application of Artificial Intelligence in the Construction of Smart Cities

With the increasing reliance and demand for artificial intelligence in the construction of smart cities, AI has been embedded in various applications and infrastructures. However, uncertainties, concerns, and even fears about AI are constantly emerging. This study based on actor‐network theory (ANT) showcases the application practices of artificial intelligence in smart city, including smart transportation, smart water management, smart healthcare, smart grids, and smart city evaluation standards, and analyzes the process of constructing an actor‐network involving governments, technology development companies, and urban residents. It demonstrates the interactive network processes such as problem statement, interest alignment, recruitment, and mobilization. It explores the relationships among humans, humans and technology, and the self‐challenges faced by technology, such as digital ethics, machine ethics, and relational alienation. In the future, it is necessary to establish explainable, transparent, safe, and responsible AI in the development of smart cities, grant certain rights, and respect to nonhuman actors such as data, AI, and machines, and formulate a series of laws and ethical guidelines to ensure the sustainable development of smart city.

A Study of the Construction of Smart Healthy Elderly Care City: An Aspect of Foshan City, Guangdong Province

The smart healthy elderly care city takes the integration of healthy elderly care resources with information technology as its basic feature, and innovates the healthy elderly care service model to accurately serve the elderly. In recent years, all parts of the country have gradually promoted the construction of smart, healthy and elderly care cities, which have achieved good results, but also face many problems. In order to evaluate the current situation of the construction of smart healthy elderly care cities, the author has built a smart healthy elderly care city evaluation index system based on the research results and standards of smart city and healthy elderly care city evaluation index system. The evaluation index system of smart health care city involves five fields, including smart health care infrastructure, smart health care environment, smart health care economy and smart health care services, which can comprehensively and systematically reflect the construction of smart health care city. Taking Foshan City, Guangdong Province as an example, this paper empirically analyzes the current situation and problems of the construction of a smart healthy elderly care city using the data from 2020-2021, and then puts forward high-quality development strategies for the construction of a smart healthy elderly care city in Foshan.

Percepatan Reformasi Birokrasi Melalui Penerapan e-Government oleh Pemerintah Kota Padang

In the last 20 years, various reform efforts have been carried out with different names, ranging from the concept of new public management to one of them, the concept of e-Government. The city of Padang applies the concept of e-Government through a smart city. However, based on the results of the 2022 smart city evaluation, Padang City is ranked lowest in West Sumatra, even though as a provincial capital it has great potential to develop e-Government. The purpose of writing this article is to analyze the extent of the e-Government reforms implemented by the Municipal Government of Padang. The research method uses descriptive qualitative. To analyze it, the researcher used the concepts put forward by Dwiyanto including Productivity, Service Quality, Responsiveness, Responsibility and Accountability. From the discussion it can be concluded that the implementation of e-Government has had a significant impact on accelerating bureaucratic reform. However, there are still deficiencies in the form of capacity and quality of human resources in each OPD which are still lacking and e-Government applications have not been integrated in one system.

Using Multi-Criteria Decision-Making for Smart City Evaluation and Ranking

As urban areas continue to grow and evolve, the development of smart cities has become a critical topic in urban planning and sustainability. Cities have been forced to become as smart as possible to deal with huge amounts of civic functions and boost economic growth, while constantly increasing citizens’ quality of life. They frequently invest in data-driven smart technologies for managing the vast amount of data and improving performance and efficiency. However, a city earns its smartness status when it satisfies criteria from various dimensions. Therefore, governments and local authorities need to direct their limited resources to the right domains. One way to determine it is to position the city among its rivals. The paper proposes a methodology for evaluating and ranking the smartness of 48 cities worldwide using two techniques: TOPSIS and the entropy weight method. The proposed framework examines the smartness of the cities considering seven dimensions. The results reveal a comprehensive ranking that not only accounts for the cities' overall performance in smart city development but also highlights specific strengths and weak areas for improvement. The proposed approach can be utilized as a decision support tool for city planners, policymakers, and stakeholders to identify best practices for the development of sustainable smart cities, evaluate progress, and direct investments to the right areas.

Sustainability in mobility for autonomous vehicles over smart city evaluation; using interval-valued fermatean fuzzy rough set-based decision-making model

The simulation tools geared towards promoting sustainability in Mobility as a Service (MaaS) evaluation is inherently a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) challenge due to three primary concerns: the criteria significance, data variability, and the expert opinions' uncertainty. Despite efforts in recent years, no current developed MaaS has fully addressed all evaluation criteria. Moreover, no research has evaluated the sustainability of MaaS in the context of determining its optimality. As such, this research's pivotal contribution is to present an evaluation of simulation tools for sustainable MaaS in autonomous vehicles operating in smart cities. This evaluation leans on the advanced extension of a newly proposed an interval-valued Fermatean fuzzy rough set (IVFFRS) incorporated within integrated MCDM methodologies. The IVFFRS is designed to capture intricate and uncertain evaluative data. The initial phase of the evaluation methodology involves formulating the evaluation criteria using an interval-valued Fermatean fuzzy rough set, fuzzily weighted for zero inconsistency. The subsequent phase adopts the interval-valued Fermatean fuzzy rough decision via the opinion score method to prioritize alternatives in light of data variations. This study evaluates ten distinct simulation tools for MaaS in autonomous vehicles based on seven criteria. The methodology's robustness is further ascertained through sensitivity and comparative analyses.

Optimising smart city evaluation: A people‐oriented analysis method

AbstractSmart cities integrate information technology with urban transformation, making it crucial to systematically evaluate their development level and effectiveness. Recent years have seen increased attention towards smart city evaluations worldwide, but there is still research space for theoretical models, technical methods, and practical applications. To address this gap, this study proposes an efficiency evaluation model for smart cities and a smart city user demand analysis model. It answers two research questions: how to configure investments in different aspects of smart city for a better user experience, and how to judge the extent and specific points of public demand in various sectors of a smart city. By analysing evaluation data, this study accurately identifies the development direction and construction focus of smart cities, supports targeted optimisation and improvement strategies, enhances user experience, and provides rationalised suggestions for a dynamic revision of smart city evaluation indicators.

Evaluation of the Smart City and Analysis of Its Spatial–Temporal Characteristics in China: A Case Study of 26 Cities in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration

The smart city is recognized as a potent instrument for creating efficient urban environments and improving the quality of life of urban residents. However, there is an absence of research establishing a comprehensive evaluation model for the smart cities (SCs) and focusing on their spatiotemporal analysis. Thus, a comprehensive evaluation framework was developed and applied to 26 cities in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration (YRDUA) in China from 2017 to 2020 to assess the smart city level (SCL) in China and analyze these cities’ spatial–temporal characteristics. The results indicated the following: (1) The overall SCL in the YRDUA has exhibited sustainable improvement, and the gap between cities is gradually narrowing. (2) The SCL of the YRDUA exhibits a higher SCL in the east and a lower SCL in the west of the YRDUA. The global spatial correlation of the SCL was random. Nantong, Hefei, Jiaxing, Zhoushan, Chizhou, Tongling, and Wuhu showed significant local spatial correlation. (3) The comprehensive evaluation framework is applicable for analyzing the SCs in China, and this framework can also be extended to other countries. Pertinent recommendations are put forth to enhance the SCL through the formulation of policies and fostering intercity collaboration. This research not only enriches the theoretical research on smart city evaluation but also clarifies the spatial–temporal characteristics of the SCs in China, thereby providing valuable insights that can foster sustainable smart city development.

Global Models of Smart Cities and Potential IoT Applications: A Review

As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, the development of smart cities and the deployment of IoT applications will play an essential role in addressing urban challenges and shaping sustainable and resilient urban environments. However, there are also challenges to overcome, including privacy and security concerns, and interoperability issues. Addressing these challenges requires collaboration between governments, industry stakeholders, and citizens to ensure the responsible and equitable implementation of IoT technologies in smart cities. The IoT offers a vast array of possibilities for smart city applications, enabling the integration of various devices, sensors, and networks to collect and analyze data in real time. These applications span across different sectors, including transportation, energy management, waste management, public safety, healthcare, and more. By leveraging IoT technologies, cities can optimize their infrastructure, enhance resource allocation, and improve the quality of life for their citizens. In this paper, eight smart city global models have been proposed to guide the development and implementation of IoT applications in smart cities. These models provide frameworks and standards for city planners and stakeholders to design and deploy IoT solutions effectively. We provide a detailed evaluation of these models based on nine smart city evaluation metrics. The challenges to implement smart cities have been mentioned, and recommendations have been stated to overcome these challenges.

Design of an Evaluation System for Disruptive Technologies to Benefit Smart Cities

Technological empowerment has facilitated the development of cities, which have progressed from pre-industrial to industrial to information-based and are currently transitioning towards the advanced stage of smart cities. The evolution and transformation of cities are fuelled by technology, which serves as a key driver. Disruptive technologies are radically scientific innovations that dramatically change the way consumers, businesses, and industries operate by destroying the value of existing technical competencies, thereby providing organisations with the capability or technical foundation to alter their business environments. To ensure that a city has a clear understanding of its smart city development direction, it is crucial to establish a scientifically valid and reliable evaluation index and method to analyse and recognise the disruptive technologies closely related to industrial development, transformation, and competitiveness in smart cities. However, there is a paucity of study on this topic. This paper addresses this research gap by developing a framework for disruptive technology identification and evaluation for smart cities using an entropy weight method and analytic hierarchy process. The evaluation index system contains 5 primary indicators and 11 secondary indicators according to the connotation of disruptive technologies in smart cities. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework are verified in the field of information science. This study provides technical knowledge and theoretical support for the evaluation and construction of smart cities.

Reassessing smart city components: An overview of the dynamic nature of smart city concept

Cities all over the world are in search for a sustainable solution to address the problems associated with urbanization. Holistic smart cities have a multidimensional point of view for future cities. This paper pools components of smart cities and deconstructs the complicated holistic smart cities. The pooled data comes from 29 studies, consisting of 23 performance evaluation schemes and 6 indicator sets that cover 15 countries plus 6 broad geographic regions. On the basis of recurrent themes amongst smart city components, we categorize the components into 9 sub categories and 3 main categories. The results verify that the 6 predetermined components namely, Economy, People, Environment, Mobility, Living and Governance are inalienable from the holistic approach. Novel and unique components that emerge from the study, such as Technology, Infrastructure, Energy, Pandemic Resiliency, Legal, Demography and Propagation substantiate the dynamic nature of the holistic perspective. We recommend that for accurate and better holistic evaluation of smart cities, evaluation schemes need to assimilate varied smart city components from the 3 main categories in a balanced manner. This adds value to the holistic approach and allows diversity and context specificity to thrive in smart city components making them holistic in the true sense. The study is beneficial for policymakers and researchers for holistic measurement of smart city performance.

Evaluating Social Impact of Smart City Technologies and Services: Methods, Challenges, Future Directions

This study examines motivations, definitions, methods and challenges of evaluating the social impacts of smart city technologies and services. It outlines concepts of social impact assessment and discusses how social impact has been included in smart city evaluation frameworks. Thematic analysis is used to investigate how social impact is addressed in eight smart city projects that prioritise human-centred design across a variety of contexts and development phases, from design research and prototyping to completed and speculative projects. These projects are notable for their emphasis on human, organisational and natural stakeholders; inclusion, participation and empowerment; new methods of citizen engagement; and relationships between sustainability and social impact. At the same time, there are gaps in the evaluation of social impact in both the smart city indexes and the eight projects. Based on our analysis, we contend that more coherent, consistent and analytical approaches are needed to build narratives of change and to comprehend impacts before, during and after smart city projects. We propose criteria for social impact evaluation in smart cities and identify new directions for research. This is of interest for smart city developers, researchers, funders and policymakers establishing protocols and frameworks for evaluation, particularly as smart city concepts and complex technologies evolve in the context of equitable and sustainable development.

Stakeholder-inclusive multi-criteria development of smart cities

The evaluation of smart cities involves multiple stakeholder groups and has multiple objectives. Therefore, a multi-criteria approach is required to facilitate inclusive decisions. In view of covering classic fuzzy sets, the q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (q-ROFS) with parameters q can provide a wider range to represent uncertain information. Considering the flexibility and robustness of the Frank aggregation method, this study investigates a new framework for smart city evaluation by integrating the Frank operator with q-ROFS. First, it defines the Frank operational rule of q-ROFS, and based on this rule, it presents q-rung orthopair fuzzy Frank weighted averaging/geometric operators. In addition, it analyzes some properties of the proposed operators and discusses their exceptional cases. Subsequently, by combining an improved TOPSIS model and the proposed operators, it presents a novel multi-attribute evaluation approach within q-ROF situations. Finally, it proves the feasibility of this method through its application in a smart city evaluation.

RETRACTED: Challenges and vulnerability evaluation of smart cities in IoT device based on cybersecurity mechanism

AbstractIn recent times, Cyber thieves discover new software vulnerabilities and attack vectors to take advantage of them. Cyber Security (CS) specialists are having a constant battle to stay on top of the latest threats. Knowledge sharing, sometimes called intelligence sharing, can enhance collective resilience and responsiveness in the face of dangers if peers are willing to share information proactively. Internet of Things (IoT) is the buzz word which integrates almost all the technology concerning computation and communication. Before the IoT goal can be fully realized, some barriers must be addressed, with security and privacy being two of the most essential. When IoT devices connect to an IoT gateway or other edge device, the sensor data they gather is either transmitted to the cloud for analysis or processed locally. Based on the received information, they act and it can expose a device as well as its data. Insufficient or no device authentication and authorization are common problems, as is poor or no encryption. Due to restricted energy supplies and low processing power, IoT security and privacy are complex, especially for resource‐constrained devices. In this article, IoT‐CS security problems and associated threats are discussed. The overarching goals were identifying assets and exploring possible threats, assaults, and vulnerabilities encountered by the IoT in the sectors like healthcare, transportation, utilities, safety, and environmental health that might be significantly improved with IoT‐CS deployment in smart cities. The predominant challenges in the deployment of the IoT related technologies had been studied in the aspects of cyber security and mitigation strategies had been discussed.

Analysis on the Development of Smart City of Big Cities in China and Its Effect to Economic Structure Based on Entropy Method

This work aims to analyze the construction of smart cities in China’s large cities and its impact on the economic structure. Some developed countries, such as the United States and Europe, have established mature smart city evaluation systems. Therefore, this work draws on the evaluation system of smart cities in developed countries to study the development status of smart cities in large cities in China. An extend linear system evaluation model is established. Besides, five first-level indicators and 24 second-level indicators are established from the five aspects: urban infrastructure, technological innovation, smart economy, human services, and intelligent environment to evaluate the development status of the city. In addition, a susceptible infected system model has been established to study the impact of smart city construction on the industrial structure. The research results demonstrate that the development level of smart cities and smart industries in eastern China is relatively high, and the comprehensive scores of smart city construction in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chongqing all exceed 0.082. However, the development level of smart cities and smart industries in the central and western regions is relatively low. The comprehensive evaluation scores of smart cities such as Tianjin, Hangzhou, and Wuhan are between 0.35 and 0.8, and technological innovation still needs to be further developed. In conclusion, the development gap between eastern, central, and western China has further widened with time. This work provides possible research experience for China’s smart city construction and industrial construction.

Smart city indexes, criteria, indicators and rankings: An in‐depth investigation and analysis

AbstractThere are many indexes and ranking bodies on Smart Cities. However, most of these rankings have their own specific evaluation criteria and ranking methodologies. Currently, there are no uniformly and universally accepted methods for comprehensive and fair evaluation of smart cities. This is a problem as no ranking is widely accepted and universally agreed upon. This not only creates chaos but also confusion as to what indexes to follow. In this paper, 6 current smart city indexes (IMD‐SUTD Smart City Index, AT Kearney Global Cities Index, IESE Cities in Motion Index, EasyPark Cities of the Future Index, Mori‐Foundation Global Power City Index and Smart EcoCity Index) produced by major organisations are examined, discussed, and compared. Commonalities and differences are highlighted, revealing insights into the accuracy, comprehensiveness, shortcomings, acceptance and usage of these indexes and rankings. Finally, new evaluation factors are suggested and the rationale behind them are provided, in addition to the essential 8 criteria of economy, governance, technology, health, transport, environment, living and sustainability.

How to Promote a Smart City Effectively? An Evaluation Model and Efficiency Analysis of Smart Cities in China

With the rapid development of smart cities, smart city evaluation is receiving an increasing amount of attention. However, the link between the evaluation results of smart cities and the decision making of urban construction roadmap is still relatively lacking. Therefore, it is necessary to quantitatively analyze the evaluation results, to support cities to formulate specific measures for effectively improving their smartness construction. The era of big data gives us the opportunity to evaluate and improve the development of smart cities with urban data. This paper proposes a Capability–Performance–Experience (CPE) evaluation model. An empirical study was conducted with 275 Chinese cities as samples. Principal component analysis and k-means clustering were adopted to classify cities according to their infrastructure readiness level. For each category, multi-linear regression and sensitivity analysis were adopted to analyze the impact of each input factors on each output factors. The results contribute to reasonably design or adjust strategies for smart cities based on their own development stages. Some policy implications are proposed to better prioritize investment in smart cities and to maximize the return on citizens’ experience.