A Holistic, Interdisciplinary Decision Support System for Sustainable Smart City Design

Abstract

With the advent of the smart city paradigm, modern cities have become complex systems of systems with a host of increasingly entangled dependencies and interactions among systems as well as stakeholders from multiple different domains. Efficient design, engineering, and operation of such systems is challenging due to the large number of involved stakeholders and their requirements, which might be conflicting and will change over time. In this paper, we present results from our ongoing efforts towards engineering next-generation smart city applications to provide stakeholders with a holistic and tailored view on their problem domain to support them in managing relevant aspects of the city, and furthermore provide effective assistance for important decision processes. We introduce the URBEM Smart City Application (USCA), an interdisciplinary decision support system, and present different views on its use by involved experts from four central smart city domains in the context of a smart city research initiative in the city of Vienna.