Page 19 - Digital solutions for integrated city management and use cases: A U4SSC deliverable on city platforms

• Compare the existing situation (baseline) with the expected impact.
• Compare projects with each other while tracking the performance one’s own projects.

• Track the progress concerning the overall policy goals of a city and provide a benchmark for
comparing cities with each other.

2 Common smart city technology challenges

While smart city technologies have tremendous potential to assist cities in ‘leapfrogging’ outmoded
economic and social activities, these technologies are not a panacea. Their success in ensuring
sustainable development calls for strategic solutions, government support, inclusive innovation
engaging all stakeholders, global access to new technological capabilities, and applications of
these technologies at the scale necessary to achieve sustainable impact.

Aside from any ongoing security, privacy and accessibility challenges or concerns, common
challenges related to smart city technologies from a deployment viewpoint include the following :
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1 Scalability: With smart devices in cities increasing rapidly and sensor networks becoming
concurrently diverse, scalability is a technical challenge to enabling ubiquitous access. In
essence, smart city applications encounter major scalability problems due to the large amount
of data they must process. A city platform can be considered scalable when it demonstrates
the ability to adapt to IoT or Industry 4.0 models, standards and requirements.

2 Legacy technology: As the demand for new services keeps increasing in smart cities, retaining
old technologies becomes infeasible and developers and service providers must create afresh
instead of reusing and customizing older technologies. When retained, older technologies still
need to meet scalability and efficiency requirements at different levels, including naming and
addressing, communication and networking, data management, and service provisioning.

3 Governance: Smart sustainable cities, by definition, engage and involve several different types
of stakeholders within both the technology products and services realm. In the absence of
flexible horizontal solutions for sharing skills, network infrastructures, and devices between the
various technology provision and management stakeholders, governance can be a challenge.

4 Lack of testbeds: Cities need to ensure reliability when it comes to city-wide technology
deployment. Typical testbeds only offer experimentation and testing limited to specific
environments or application-specific deployments and allow for neither conclusive
experimentation nor test for all constraints to do with non-technical stakeholders. When it
comes to IoT deployment especially, largescale testbeds are necessary.
5 Interoperability: Different providers use various smart city applications created by different
developers to offer services to citizens. In fact, it is quite common in smart cities to use technologies
based on proprietary solutions, which inhibit the communication and interoperation that is
needed to function seamlessly to achieve efficient large-scale smart city solutions.

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