The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States has recently released a measurement framework to help assess smart cities.
According to NIST, key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to evaluate smart cities but often fail to measure benefits linked to community impact and return on investment. For this reason, NIST has developed Holistic Key Performance Indicators (H-KPI) Framework that builds on conventional KPI methods while also assessing data across three interacting levels of analysis: technologies, infrastructure services, and community benefits.
Adopting a systems approach
As demonstrated by the NIST framework, understanding the complexity of cities requires a holistic approach. For this reason, the IEC has adopted a systems approach to smart city standardization in recognition that cities are made up of individual albeit interconnected systems - such as water, energy, transport, etc- that must be addressed holistically.
Smart cities make use of data and technology to offer improvements to city life, city services and resilience. By collecting data easily and using algorithms to analyze the data in real time, it is possible to formulate an overall picture of what is going on in a given area - and how it can be improved or strengthened.
Using standards to evaluate smart cities
The IEC has published several standards that can be used to help evaluate and understand the concept of smart cities.
The concept of a smart city will depend based on the perspective of a user. The requirements of an engineer, for example, will be very different than those of a policy maker, a tourist or an environmentalist. As a result, the IEC has published IEC SRD 63235 which offers a holistic system of systems approach in order to help users define the views, methodology framework, principles, processes, rules, and evaluation criteria for smart city system concepts building. This methodology can be used to enable collaboration between organizations built upon a common understanding of the concepts necessary for a smart city system.
The IEC works with ISO in its Joint Technical Committee 1 Working Group 11 (JTC 1/WG 11) to develop smart city standards related to ICT. In October 2019, JTC 1/WG 11 published ISO/IEC 30146 which provides assessment indicators and evaluation methods to measure the functionality of different ICT systems within a city. The indicators can be used to measure a smart city holistically or tailored to measure individual parts of the city.
In addition, three standards have been published that each address a different viewpoint within a city to be used by city information officers when planning and implementing a smart city. The frameworks include business process (ISO/IEC 30145-1), knowledge management (ISO/IEC 30145-2) and engineering (ISO/IEC 30145-3).
(Source: IEC)
