Smart City Operations

“Smart City Operations – SCOs” constitute an important development that is expected to have a profound impact on the socioeconomic future of Europe. ICT is a strong enabler for cities to turn “smarter” and thus offer their citizens the opportunity of a better quality of life. This can be achieved through better decision making about a variety of domains within a city. Particular areas where SCOs find fertile ground for development include light and traffic optimization, energy consumption, public and private transport, health care, environmental protection and citizen empowerment.

The Smarties group supports world-class research and related postgraduate training in the field of SCOs, recognizing that great advances may be made through the interconnectivity of systems, that to date have been considered as stand-alone SCO pillars, to facilitate the discovery, analysis and use of the potentially useful associations between heterogeneous data. The group aims to advance knowledge and provide trained scientists to meet the needs a variety of stakeholders concerned with the effectiveness of public services, policies, and the quality of life in cities.

A major innovation of the work in the group is that considers the collaboration between the different SCO pillars, specifically those of health, mobility, energy and governance. These pillars are researched from a multi-perspective stand, in a systemic manner, taking into consideration technological, economical, and social factors. Novel approaches are continuously sketched and researched, so as to combine the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of large amounts of heterogeneous data from various sources, towards providing compliant SCOs across space, time and technological platforms, in an economically feasible manner and to a wide range of stakeholders.