Evaluation of Smart City Models: A Conceptual and Structural View

Leonard Walletzk

, Odonchimeg Bayarsaikhan

, Mouzhi Ge

and Zuzana Schwarzov

Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Deggendorf Institute of Technology, Deggendorf, Germany

Keywords:

Smart City Model, Smart Ecosystem, Interoperability, Multi-contextual View, Adaptability.

Abstract:

With the rapid development of smart cities, there has been a variety of smart city models that are proposed

to facilitate the smart city design and service architecture. Meanwhile those smart city models also create

complexity to follow the models and it is difﬁcult to observe how the models can work collaboratively as well

as how to possibly improve the models. Therefore, this paper ﬁrstly classiﬁes the smart city models with a

conceptual and structural view, where the conceptual models focus on the interactions of components and the

structural models are featured by layers with processes. Based on the model classiﬁcation, the paper further

evaluates the models with service structure, interoperability, multi-context and adaptability. The evaluation

results can be used to compare, select and improve the smart city models and service design.

1 INTRODUCTION

Smart city has a very wide range of stakeholders

ranging from citizens, organizations to municipali-

ties. This leads to the result that smart city initi-

ates a variety of concepts with diverse deﬁnitions

(Step

anek et al., 2017; Dragoicea et al., 2020). From

the organizational perspective, today’s organizations

intend to be ﬂexible in organizing their operations,

services, technological solutions, to respond quickly

to any changes and challenges, and improve the orga-

nizational resources allocation continuously(Buhnova

et al., 2022; Mbarek et al., 2021).

Throughout the last decade, different works have

viewed the smart city from various perspectives, and

derived different deﬁnitions for smart city (Piro et al.,

2013; Desouza and Flanery, 2013; Lee et al., 2014).

Most of the works are stressing the importance in a lo-

cal context (Neirotti et al., 2014; Wey and Hsu, 2014)

or analyzing existing conceptual views on smart city

(Chourabi et al., 2012). For example, from the view

of municipality, it is critical for municipalities and

city planning experts to understand versatile aspects

of the smart city management, including the structure

and composition of smart cities, their interrelation-

ships, and how they interact (Ge et al., 2019; Trang

et al., 2019). However, gathering this information in

a comprehensive and orderly manner is a signiﬁcant

challenge for them, and due to the incompleteness of

the information, it often affects the quality of their de-

cisions and makes it difﬁcult to implement smart city-

appropriate management (Anthopoulos et al., 2019).

To understand smart city, various stakeholders

may name or interpret one thing differently, espe-

cially with terminology. The way to construct Smart

City under one dominant domain like Smart Govern-

ment (Anthopoulos et al., 2021) or urban develop-

ment (Liu et al., 2020) means losing the information

and links to other domains that might be critical for

Smart City development (Bastidas et al., 2021; Ban-

gui et al., 2018). Therefore understanding this diverse

terminologies will provide an comprehensive view for

the diversity of smart cities and how they interact with

each other (Yang et al., 2019). Smart cities need to

reﬂect in their smart city management and operations

the ability to respond and adapt to changes at all lev-

els of cities with the rapid development of technol-

ogy (Walletzk

y et al., 2020; Walletzk

y et al., 2019).

The development of a smart city model in line with

this situation is important for the development of a

smart city. Thus, it is important to implement a smart

city model that is compatible, resilient, and adaptable

(Lom and P

ribyl, 2020).

This paper is therefore to determine whether exist-

ing smart city models meet the requirements of smart

cities and provide an evaluation study to help develop

a model that meets those requirements. In this study,

we will select nine smart city models and compare

them based on ”structure”, ’interoperability”, ”multi-

contextual view” and ”adaptability” to see if they

Walletzký, L., Bayarsaikhan, O., Ge, M. and Schwarzová, Z.

Evaluation of Smart City Models: A Conceptual and Structural View.

DOI: 10.5220/0011074900003203

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS 2022), pages 56-65

ISBN: 978-989-758-572-2; ISSN: 2184-4968

meet today’s smart city requirements. The results of

this study will determine whether the existing mod-

els meet the needs and will serve as a basis for the

development of a suitable model.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sec-

tion 2 selects nine smart city models that are further

divided into conceptual models and structural models.

Section 3 evaluates the models based on four criteria,

which are structure, interoperability, multi-contextual

view and adaptability. Section 4 concludes the paper

and highlights the future research.

2 SMART CITY MODELS

To ﬁnd the papers that are focused on a structural

and conceptual model of smart city, we have used

Google Scholar and searched the literature by us-

ing the following keywords: smart city, concep-

tual model, structural model, and architecture. We

considered that Google Scholar is more up-to-date

with including new papers and combining the paper

sources from various libraries such as IEEE, ACM

and Springer. Based on the research results we have

manually selected the 9 most relevant papers and di-

vided them into two groups: conceptual and struc-

tural. The conceptual models focus on the smart

city framework and the interactions between differ-

ent conceptual terminologies. On the other hand, the

structural models are mostly layer-based and focused

on different stages of smart cities.

2.1 Conceptual Smart City Models

(Nam and Pardo, 2011) aims to suggest a framework

connecting conceptual variants of the smart city la-

bel, key elements for being a smart city, and strategic

principles for making a city smart. For deﬁning smart

city, a variety of the labels can be categorized into

three dimensions: technology, people, and commu-

nity. The conceptual variants are mutually connected

with substantial confusion in deﬁnitions and compli-

cated usages rather than independent on each other.

From the discussion of conceptual variants of

smart city that set of fundamental factors which

make a city smart, the author identiﬁes and clari-

ﬁes key conceptual components of smart city, and re-

categorises and simpliﬁes them into three categories

of core factors: technology (infrastructures of hard-

ware and software), people (creativity, diversity, and

education), and institution (governance and policy).

Given the connection between the factors, a city is

smart when investments in human/social capital and

IT infrastructure fuel sustainable growth and enhance

the quality of life, through participatory governance.

The author offers strategic principles for making

a city smart in order to realize the various visions

speciﬁed for diverse policy domains, aligning to the

three categories of core components. First, integration

of Technology Factors: integrates technologies, sys-

tems, infrastructures, services, and capabilities into an

organic network that is sufﬁciently complex for unex-

pected emergent properties to develop. Second, learn-

ing for Human Factors such as social learning and ed-

ucation. And third, governance of Institutional Fac-

tors such as collaboration, cooperation, partnership,

citizen engagement, and participation.

Figure 1: Fundamental Components of smart city (Nam and

Pardo, 2011).

The research objective of (H

ainen and

Tyrv

ainen, 2018) is to present a smart city conceptual

model (SCCM) that assists cities and their stakehold-

ers to carry out robust smart city initiatives and en-

hance sustainable smart city ecosystem design and de-

velopment. Foundation for SCCM is derived from the

systematic literature review of the smart city ecosys-

tems and value networks. SCCM originates from

a perception that design and management of com-

plex smart city is not a trivial task and many smart

city initiatives have failed it due to weak smart city

governance, ecosystem orchestration and insufﬁcient

digital technology knowledge and capabilities. Thus,

SCCM aims to clarify complex smart city gover-

nance, ownership, orchestration and decision-making

procedures and advance technological compatibility

and correct skills and resource allocation in cities.

Furthermore, SCCM aims to provide tools to ac-

celerate competitiveness, transparency and economic

Evaluation of Smart City Models: A Conceptual and Structural View

growth in cities.

The author proposed a smart city conceptual

model that aims to assist smart city practitioners to

form long-term smart city vision and strategy, facili-

tate the governance of the heterogeneous stakeholder

relations and digital technologies, and assist to eval-

uate risks and funding needs. Smart city conceptual

model considers four primary dimensions: strategy,

technology, governance and stakeholders. Each pri-

mary dimension is complemented with sub-elements,

which all together form meaningful interrelations and

provide a comprehensive and systematic approach for

the smart city design, development and implementa-

tion.

Figure 2: A conceptual model for the smart city design

ainen and Tyrv

ainen, 2018).

The aim of (Fernandez-Anez et al., 2018) is to fa-

cilitate the analysis of the complex and comprehen-

sive smart city strategies designed by municipalities

from an integrative perspective. This is used to de-

velop a conceptual model capable of displaying an

overview of the stakeholders taking part in the ini-

tiative in relation to the projects developed and the

challenges they face. This model is also used to syn-

thesise the opinion of different stakeholders involved

in smart city initiatives and to compare their attitudes

on the key projects implemented in a corresponding

strategy.

The implementation of smart cities is still related

to sector-speciﬁc and partial understanding, in part

because of the limitations of governance and ﬁnanc-

ing tools. It is necessary to bridge the gap between the

theoretical comprehensive perspective and the sector-

wide implementation of the smart city concept.

Stakeholders’ involvement and engagement in

decision-making is essential for Smart governance

and it’s the key element to becoming a smart city.

However, stakeholders reveal different visions of the

smart city in their discourses. There are also differ-

ences between the image of the smart city and its

implementation and between the vision of the stake-

holders in smart city development and the initiatives

carried out. It can therefore be assumed that nar-

rowing the gap between the stakeholders’ vision of

smart city initiatives and the implementation of cer-

tain projects may make a decisive difference to the

success of smart city strategies.

The author further proposed a new model based

on analysis of the usage of conceptual models in the

scientiﬁc literature on smart cities. This research un-

derstands the smart city as an integrated and multi-

dimensional system that aims to address urban chal-

lenges based on a multi-stakeholder partnership. The

proposed conceptual model follows a comprehensive

and integrative approach to smart cities that links the

three main issues identiﬁed: (a) the key role of gover-

nance and stakeholders’ involvement; (b) the impor-

tance of displaying a comprehensive vision of smart

city projects and dimensions; and (c) the understand-

ing of smart city as a tool to tackle the urban chal-

lenges. Finally, the three parts of the conceptual

model are shown interrelated. The model is described

from the centre to its outer limits, but not necessarily

in a linear sequence, in order to aid its understanding.

Figure 3: Smart city implementation and discourses: An

integrated conceptual model (Fernandez-Anez et al., 2018).

(Arafah et al., 2018) aims to produce a new ap-

proach and concept, which is the “smart and resilient

city”. The authors explored ﬁve smart city models,

and proposed a new model which contains especially

resilience concepts in the context of natural disasters.

The smart and resilient city model has 25 characters

that are integrated and embedded within the scope of

smart and resilient city concept: (1) the six character-

istics (smart governance, smart economy, smart envi-

ronment, smart living, smart mobile and smart peo-

ple) can lead to a multi-dimensional strategy to syn-

ergize and support each other; (2) the four dimen-

sions - the smart and resilient city concept; and (3) the

components of the city are divided into physical and

non-physical components: resources, processes, and

technologies included into the physical group; people,

institutions, and activities entered into non-physical

groups. This model is developed to serve as a guide

SMARTGREENS 2022 - 11th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

on building smarter and more resilient cities for plan-

ners and decision-makers, and to increase capacity

responses from complex urban systems in facing cli-

mate change.

Figure 4: Smart and resilient city model (Arafah et al.,

2018).

2.2 Discussions for Conceptual Models

Smart city conceptual models are multi-dimensional

and are deﬁned by the key components and factors

that contribute to a smart city, and are designed to un-

derstand and manage those components and factors.

The ﬁrst two models are similar, The ﬁrst model

shows the components that construct a smarter city,

while the second model aims to improve the design

and development of a smart city ecosystem and is

represented by 4 dimensions with its sub-elements.

These two models serve more as general outlines and

are suitable for providing an overview for the compo-

nents in a smart city.

The next two models are designed to help smart

city planners and decision-makers build smarter and

more ﬂexible cities and support smart cities to accom-

plish the challenges they face. The third model is de-

signed to show smart city stakeholders, their involve-

ment in smart city initiatives, as well as smart city

challenges. The fourth model is designed for serving

as a guide for smart city planners and decision-makers

on how to build smarter and more resilient cities, and

to increase capacity responses from complex urban

systems in facing the climate change.

For interoperability, some of these conceptual

models of a smart city deﬁne the interoperability be-

tween the components that make up a smart city, but

they are not clear. The interoperability in these papers

is not detailed on how to help manage smart city com-

ponents. For multi-contextual view. These concep-

tual models of smart cities are developed in general

or in a speciﬁc context. In other words, they cannot

be transformed into multi-contextual and cannot be

changed. For adaptability, most of these models are

not designed to be responsive to change. The fourth

model may be able to respond to changes, but only

partially.

Although these smart city conceptual models pro-

vide a comprehensive understanding of the compo-

nents in a smart city, they stays in an abstract level. As

such, it is important to propose a more detailed model

to provide an understanding of the smart city ser-

vices structure and implementation in order to man-

age smart city services in a multi-contextual environ-

ment.

2.3 Structural Smart City Models

(Chan and Paramel, 2018) proposes the model of

smart city Ecosystem Frameworks. This model pro-

vides a comprehensive understanding of the smart

city ecosystem framework as shown in Figure 5. The

author develops this model for planning smart cities

and considers that a vibrant and sustainable city is

an ecosystem comprised of people, organizations and

businesses, policies, laws and processes integrated to-

gether to create the desired outcomes such as govern-

ment efﬁciency, sustainability, health and wellness,

mobility, economic development, public safety and

quality of life. This city is adaptive, responsive and

always relevant to all those who live, work in and

visit the city. A smart city integrates technology to

accelerate, facilitate, and transform this ecosystem.

The author deﬁnes four types of value creators in the

smart city ecosystem: city, businesses and organiza-

tions, communities, and residents; and capability lay-

ers.

(Anthopoulos, 2015) aims to deﬁne a general

smart city architecture, which serves governance pur-

poses for innovation and sustainability, while it uti-

lizes experiences from practical cases and corre-

sponding theoretical context. The authors focused on

answering the question ”What is the structure of a

smart city architecture that could deﬁne a correspond-

ing standard?” and proposed a generic multi-tier ICT

architecture based on the analysis of smart city di-

mensions, categories, development stages, compo-

nents, and existing smart city architecture approaches.

The generic multi-tier ICT architecture for smart

cities is proposed as follows:

• Layer 1 - Nature Environment: it concerns all

the environmental features where the city is lo-

cated such as landscape, rivers, lakes, sea, and

forests.

• Layer 2 - Hard Infrastructure (Non-ICT-

Evaluation of Smart City Models: A Conceptual and Structural View

Figure 5: The smart city ecosystem framework (Chan and Paramel, 2018).

based): it contains all the urban features which

have been installed by human activities and which

are necessary for city operation (buildings, roads,

bridges, energy-water-waste utilities etc.).

• Layer 3 - Hard Infrastructure (ICT-based): it

concerns smart hardware that the SSC services

are offered with (datacenters, supercomputers and

servers, networks, IoT, sensors etc.).

• Layer 4 - Services: all the smart city services are

grouped in the smart city sic dimensions and or-

ganized according to the international urban key-

performance indicators.

• Layer 5 - Soft Infrastructure: individuals and

groups of people living in the city, as well as

applications, databases, software and data, with

which the SSC services are realized.

(Deren et al., 2021) deﬁnes the concepts of dig-

ital twins and digital twin cities, discusses the rela-

tionship between digital twins and smart cities, ana-

lyzes the characteristics of smart cities based on dig-

ital twins, and focuses on the ﬁve main applications

of smart cities based on digital twins. One of ﬁndings

is the smart city operation brain (SCOB). The authors

described the SCOB and its infrastructure that serves

as the Public Information Cloud Service Platform.

Once the public information cloud service plat-

form is established, the ofﬁce of SCOB is able to start

to operate, and the ofﬁcials could use the applications

on the platform to conduct management activities in

the smart city. Figure 7 shows the structure of the

Figure 6: A generic multi-tier ICT architecture for smart

city (Anthopoulos, 2015).

public information cloud service platform. The plat-

form is composed of an infrastructure layer, software

development and operation platform layer, and an ap-

plication layer. The platform uses infrastructure such

as servers, networks, and sensor equipment to acquire

data, and uses cloud infrastructure, data, platforms

and software as services, and ﬁnally achieves the ap-

plications of cloud service platforms in various ﬁelds

such as smart urban management, smart public secu-

rity, and smart tourism. The platform can create an

ecological chain for data collecting, processing, stor-

ing, cleaning, mining, applying, and feedback.

(Li et al., 2013) describes the key supporting tech-

nologies of smart cities (i.e. digital cities, Internet

of Things, and cloud computing). From the geo-

SMARTGREENS 2022 - 11th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

Figure 7: Schematic diagram of the structure of a smart city

public information cloud service platform based on digital

twins (Deren et al., 2021).

matics perspective, the fundamental and operational

issues for smart city are addressed, including geo-

referencing and 3D spatial-temporal modeling, inte-

gration of global position system (GPS), remote sens-

ing and GIS in mobile platforms, devices and struc-

tures for ubiquitous sensing and communication, and

service capabilities in cloud environments. The au-

thor deﬁnes the main framework of a smart city based

on the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things

shown in Figure 8 has a hierarchical structure of four

layers: distributed sensor layer, ubiquitous network

layer, service-oriented middle-ware layer and intelli-

gent application layer.

Figure 8: A framework of the smart city based on the Inter-

net of Things (Li et al., 2013).

(Walletzk

y et al., 2018) identiﬁes the beneﬁts of

an integrated view that not only interconnects the ser-

vices, but also identiﬁes joint layers that they rely on,

which helps us to understand the impact of the under-

lying IT services and the infrastructure they rely on.

At the same time, we extend our view to the Smart

Citizen, who plays an essential role in the value cre-

ation process within the smart city.

Figure 9: The structure of smart city layers (Walletzk

y et al.,

2018).

2.4 Discussions for Structural Models

As for the structural model, most of the models have

provided a comprehensive understanding of the smart

city and its structure, which are built based on the in-

formation and communication technology infrastruc-

ture.

A majority of the models in this group provides

a deep understanding of the structure of the smart

city. Each model is usually built with 4-5 layers. The

ﬁrst two models show a smart urban environment and

non-technological infrastructure than other models in

this second group. For example, (Chan and Paramel,

2018) proposed a smart city ecosystem framework

compared to other models, and provides important in-

sights regarding how to build a smart city ecosystem

through this model. It identiﬁes the layers of smart

city services in terms of service coverage, value and

innovation, management and policy systems, data and

privacy, security, and technology infrastructure, all of

which together constitute a smart city ecosystem. The

model is valuable in identifying the key components

of a smart city ecosystem integrated with technology.

However, we still need to identify the services that

construct a smart city and how those services inter-

connect to create a smart city.

The smart city model in (Anthopoulos, 2015), un-

like other models, is designed to create innovation and

sustainability, with a smart city architecture that in-

cludes the natural environment and non-technological

Evaluation of Smart City Models: A Conceptual and Structural View

infrastructure. The model has layers called natural en-

vironment, services and soft infrastructure and we can

obtain an understanding of the possible types that are

covered by each layer.

The rest of the smart city models are based on in-

formation and communication technology infrastruc-

ture, and some of these models are more focused on

speciﬁc technology features, such as IoT and Digital

Twin. The common advantage of these models is that

each model to some extent reﬂects the types of ser-

vices provided by the smart city, and we are able to

gain an understanding of the main types of services.

For interoperability – most of the models in this

group provide insights of the types of smart city ser-

vices, but most models do not fully show how those

services are interconnected or connected to other lay-

ers. The last two models appear to be connected to

the modules of the other layers. In particular, the lat-

est model shows how it is connected to other layer

services. However, this model does not show how the

services in the same layer are interconnected.

From the multi-contextual view – these models

are deﬁned generally or from a speciﬁc perspective.

In other words, the models are focused on multi-

contextual views. However, the smart city consists of

various stakeholders and components, which play dif-

ferent roles and responses depending on the context.

Therefore, it is necessary to understand this diversity

of smart cities and to reﬂect the multi-contextuality in

smart city model.

For adaptability – a smart city is constructed by

multiple components and services that are intercon-

nected or interacted. When one device in a smart city

changes, this change will affect the devices and sys-

tems associated with it, and these interconnected de-

vices or systems that need to react to this change and

adapt to it. There is limited description of how these

changes will affect other parts of the model. Although

(Li et al., 2013) describes the characteristics required

to become a smart resilient city, it does not specify

how smart city services will be deﬁned and responded

to changes.

3 EVALUATION RESULTS

In the previous section, we divided smart city mod-

els into conceptual and structural groups, based on

their characteristics. We also discussed the charac-

ter of each group. From these studies, we have cre-

ated the following table (Table 1), which shows how

each model meets the characteristics we have deﬁned.

We have considered 4 evaluation criteria, which are

service structure, interoperability, multi-context and

adaptability.

• Service Structure (S) - Is the paper suggesting

the view of services’ structure? Is there any in-

sight on how to design or analyze the structure of

services?

• Interoperability (I) - Does the paper illustrate in-

teroperability of the services or does it present the

service as isolated with none or a very low level

of interactions?

• Multi-context (MC) - Does the paper follow the

idea of smart city as a multi-contextual environ-

ment? Are the authors familiar with the multi-

contextual perspective, and do they reﬂect and

consider the relations among the different con-

texts?

• Adaptability (A) - Does the paper count with the

process of adaptation of the presented model? Are

the authors discussing the changes of the model,

depending on outer or inner impulses?

Smart city covers a wide range of stakeholders,

advanced technologies and devices. We need to pay

attention to this diversity of smart cities in order to

achieve sustainable development of smart cities, and

we have identiﬁed a few key features needed to ensure

this diversity, and we aim to evaluate if those key fea-

tures are met by the existing smart city models. Based

on the results of the above smart city models review,

the evaluation based on each feature will be discussed

in the next sections.

3.1 Service Structure

As indicated in (Step

anek and Ge, 2018), the key fea-

tures that are used to determine the structure of ser-

vices are the interconnections of intelligent systems

and smart service designs. We have divided all the

selected models into two main groups: Conceptual

and Structural, which depends on the characteristics

of the models. In terms of the ”structure” key feature,

the structural group model provided more smart city

services at the structural level, which was convenient

with this key feature. Most of the models in the struc-

tural group showed smart services in general, while

models 7 and 9 showed the structure of services more

clearly. Although models 7 and 9 show the structure

of smart city services, the relationship between them

has not been clearly deﬁned.

3.2 Interoperability

This key feature is one of the important factors to

help understand the structure of smart city services,

SMARTGREENS 2022 - 11th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

Table 1: Evaluation Results of Smart City Models.

Group

Literature name / model

S I MC A

1 Conceptual Conceptualizing smart city with Dimensions of Technology, People,

and Institutions (Nam and Pardo, 2011)

N N N N

2 Conceptual Improving Smart City Design: A Conceptual Model for Governing

Complex smart city Ecosystems (H

ainen and Tyrv

ainen, 2018)

N N N N

3 Conceptual Smart City Implementation and Discourses: An Integrated Concep-

tual Model. The case of Vienna (Fernandez-Anez et al., 2018)

N P N N

4 Conceptual Towards Smart and Resilient City: A Conceptual Model (Arafah

et al., 2018)

N N N N

5 Structural The Smart City Ecosystem Framework – A Model for Planning

smart cities (Chan and Paramel, 2018)

F N N N

6 Structural Deﬁning Smart City Architecture for sustainability (Anthopoulos,

2015)

F N N N

7 Structural Smart City based on Digital Twins (Deren et al., 2021) F N N N

8 Structural Geomatics for smart cities - Concept, Key Techniques, and Appli-

cations (Li et al., 2013)

F P N N

9 Structural smart city Layered Model (Walletzk

y et al., 2018) F P N N

Legend: “F” - Fulﬁlled; “P” - Partially; “N” - Not Fulﬁlled

such as the interactions between smart city services,

how they work together, and what impact they have.

From the above smart city models, models 8 and 9

show interoperability and can see how the design of

smart city model’s layers and their services are con-

nected to each other. Although these models show

interoperability between layers, they do not show in-

teroperability of services on a single layer. By deﬁn-

ing the services at that layer, it is possible to under-

stand the structure of smart city services, how services

are interconnected as well as their interrelationships.

We found that understanding their interoperability can

signiﬁcantly impact the organization of smart city ser-

vices and optimize the structure of smart city services.

3.3 Multi-contextuality

Smart city includes different stakeholders such as or-

ganizations, governments, individuals, and industry

professionals, and their perspectives vary depending

on their work experience, skills, and work environ-

ment. Smart city services also play different roles,

which depend on the speciﬁcs of each sector, envi-

ronmental impact factors, stakeholders, and contexts.

Smart city governments and experts need to take

into account the diversity of smart cities when cre-

ating a smart city. Therefore, the smart city ser-

vice model also needs to be developed by taking into

account the versatility and multi-contextuality. The

models are based on general and speciﬁc perspectives

(IoT, data twin, ICT, etc.). Thus, it can be seen that it

is necessary to develop a multi-contextual model.

3.4 Adaptability

It is critical that smart city models are organized in

a way that is adaptable and responsive for service

changes. Smart city services are interconnected and

affecting each other mutually. If the changes in one

part of a service can affect another part, it is impor-

tant to consider this effect when designing a smart city

service. The models we have chosen rarely take this

point into account. Thus, it is valuable to develop a

ﬂexible model that can adapt to service change.

4 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have searched literature on smart

cities models. The research results have been reﬁned

to nine smart city models. In order to organize the

models, we have classiﬁed the models into concep-

tual and structural groups. The conceptual models

have focused on the smart city framework and interac-

tions among various conceptual components, whereas

the structural models are mostly layer-based and fo-

cused on different processes for smart cites. Based

on the classiﬁcation, we have further discussed the

features of each model group. In order to further

understand the models, we have evaluated the mod-

els based on their service structure, interoperability,

multi-contextuality and adaptability. The evaluation

results have shown how the smart cities models can

be improved and work collaboratively. Also, the re-

sults also indicate how to build smart city models in

the future.

Evaluation of Smart City Models: A Conceptual and Structural View

As future work, we ﬁrst plan to further develop

the evaluation criteria into quantitative form, so that

the models can be automatically evaluated. Also, we

plan to include more smart city models and architec-

tures into the evaluation to observe the similarity and

differences among the models. This can be done by

creating an alignment of the smart city models with

a reference model.

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Evaluation of Smart City Models: A Conceptual and Structural View