Around half the world's population live in cities, a figure that has doubled since 1950 and growth is expected to continue for some time yet. Cities need to anticipate and manage the needs of their residents in order to be sustainable.

Highly complex, smart cities leverage new technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle the challenges posed by increasing populations and urbanization, covering everything from transport and housing to healthcare and air quality. Being able to model and simulate smart city functions and processes effectively enables city managers to make sense of the enormous amounts of data they collect and thus make better decisions.

The newly published standard ISO/IEC TS 5147 provides guidance on the representation and visualization of smart cities, to help city planners evaluate possible outcomes.

Project leader of the standard Peter Ryan said with cities being so complex, there are many ways of representing the data and many standards that can help.

"Smart cities are systems of systems, requiring the interoperability and integration of a multitude of functions," he said.

"They also acquire vast amounts of data. Using this to create simulations and models can help them understand behaviours and trends, which is necessary for managing functions and planning future developments. This document is aimed at providing guidance on internationally agreed best practice on how to do that."

ISO/IEC TS 5147 offers guidance on the many representation and visualization standards that are helpful to this process as well as methods for smart city data categories. These include the natural and built environment, networks, weather, physical and semantic properties, sound, social media and more.

(Source: IEC)