Today half of the world’s population is living in urban areas, and cities are growing their infrastructures and services to keep up. Traditionally city governments have different departments to oversee the metropolitan services for citizens; however, departments are not fully communicating their plans and actions, utilizing their services as independent entities. As a city grows, duplicated efforts and waste of resources emerge. In developing a smart city infrastructure, it is necessary to think of cities as complex systems with departments as subsystems sharing all resources and assets.
For example, a typical department of transportation models traffic patterns in order to plan new roads or arrange streets for efficient mobility. In a systemic approach streets in the city are a shared resource – the education department adds traffic at peak times according to school schedules; the sanitation department influences traffic with low speed vehicles collecting garbage; and the environmental department estimates degrees of pollution via the density of traffic identified by the transportation department. Also, the health department could use such information, as well as weather conditions, to increase its pharmaceutical stock in relation to pollution numbers or anticipated storms or natural disasters.
In this scope, it’s fundamental for cities in a smartification process to consolidate their infrastructure according to the basic principles of services design such as modularity, exportability, interoperability, extensibility, and scalability.
