A methodology for the alignment of engineered assets within a smart city context
Introduction
the concept of using data from a city environment to support the economic decisions, governmental and social policy is not a new paradigm. During the Cholera outbreak of 1854 in London a Dr John Snow theorised that the disease was being spread through contaminated water and collected data on the location of pumping stations and nearby cholera deaths. John quickly realised that there where geospatial clusters of death around specific pumping stations and despite the scepticism from the location authority, the pumping handing was removed and the deaths quickly subsided.
One of the first attempts to documents and map life and labour of citizens within a city was from Charles booth, who mapped every street of London between 1889 – 1903 and documented the average “social class” of families on that street. Even know the maps and associated data capture techniques were considered revolutionary at the time, there is little evidence to suggest they helped informed policy and decisions regarding the city development.
During the 1940’s the Las Angeles department for planning had mocked up a computer stamp card system that they hoped could track and analyse all of the properties within the city, this included such information as ownership, number of bedrooms and location. After World War 2 there was a growing awareness that the poorly maintained housing (slums) threatened the prosperity of health and morals of the wider city, the planning department database alone could not address this problem. During the 1950/60’s the city started to investigate the merging of other data sources such as US census, police department, county assessor, aerial photos and other private and public sources. this exercise was extremely successful in gaining federal funding to support the redevelopment of Las Angeles during the 1950/60/70’s.
The need for smarter cities is essential for the world as a collective is to respond to the critical economic, social and environmental challenges. As of 2008, over 50% of the world population lives in cities and this expected to rise to 70% by 2050, already in the UK 8 out of 10 people already live in classified urban city areas. Furthermore by 2050 over 60% of the world's energy will be consumed in cities contributing to over 70% of the world waste and gas emissions produced by cities.
While it is understood that citizens of the city are a vital focus for a smart cities development, there is a clear gap within existing frameworks in how a smart city will improve the quality of life of its citizens. There is a real risk that citizens will embrace the smart city agenda and see little in return regarding economic and social benefits. The proposed Smart Cities frameworks are lacking on two accounts. Firstly, they fail to identify the requirements of the citizens within the city. Secondly, they do not consider the functional output of the cities engineered assets and the impact of this on the citizen requirements. The figure here illustrates the traditional model where a citizen interacts with individual service providers within a city, as shown in PAS 181.
Proposal
It is proposed to extend the existing high-level Smart Cities framework as defined within the British Standards Institute PAS 181 to include citizen requirements and the cities engineering assets.
To create the alignment between the services and the citizen requirements it is proposed that within a smart city framework the services have to be linked to the engineered assets that support the services. This is achieved by viewing the engineered assets within a city as a system, that when combined provide a functional output that aids to support the operational requirements of the city services. By viewing the engineered assets as the function they provide, it enables performance measurement of the assets and confirms they are meeting the citizen requirements. By a city classifying its engineered assets by the functional output they provide, the providers of the city services can have direct line-of-sight from the individual asset products and systems to the performance of the city services.
Creating the alignment between asset functions and city services has added benefits. Firstly, it allows the city services owner to have a holistic understanding of the assets that support that service and the multiple stakeholders that develop, operate and maintain them, this is especially important when cities assets have public and private owners. Secondly, it provides direct line-of-sight from the citizen's requirements and the performance of the engineered assets that support that service, this can aid in developing outcome-based operational and maintenance decisions. Finally, it provides a scalable platform for data analysis and modelling tools that can focus on individual engineered assets performance impact on the cities services and ultimately the citizen's satisfaction.
To ensure that the smart cities development framework is citizen-centric and not the traditional city operational model where citizens have siloed interaction with individual city services, it is required to understand the citizen requirements within a city and the services that support that requirement. Many of the cities citizens requirements will be supported by multiple city services, which in turn are supported by multiple engineered assets. For example, the requirement for a citizen to learn will be supported by several city services such as education, waste management and energy supply. The United Nationals Statistics Division have developed a high-level Classification of the Function of Government (COFOG), where appropriate these functions have been adopted into citizen requirements, Table 3 summarises the high-level COFOG and associated citizen requirements where applicable.
By classifying citizen requirements in alignment to government functions, it supports the integration of city services, as they no longer support individual services but aid to support the holistic requirements for the citizens. /Below illustrates the integration of citizen requirements via a smart cities integration layer that provides one point of access to the city services for the citizen requirement.
Conclusion
The proposed extension to the existing PAS 181 smart cities framework aids to create a direct line-of-sight from citizen requirements to the engineered assets within a city. This alignment allows for the city service provides to validate that its engineering assets are meeting the required performance values and in turn meeting the citizen requirements. furthermore, this will also aid in greater informed citizen-centric decisions on capital investment plan, operational requirements and risk management.
Future research should focus on exploring the scalability of the proposed framework to incorporate the alignment to the broader regulation and government objectives and strategies, this will support line-of-sight from government policy to citizens requirements and the performance of engineering assets. Furthermore, due to the diverse nature of cities, the dynamic and changing aspect of citizen requirements should be investigated and inform changes in government functions. Finally, investigating the commercial business requirements might differ from individual citizen requirements and provide new insight into the relationship between business, city services and the engineered assets
