Smart City: A Mobility Technology Adoption Framework Incorporating Surface-Level Technical Analysis

Abstract

Rising urban population, aging infrastructure, and increasing capital maintenance costs call for more efficient use of limited available resources. To address these concerns, the use of technology for urban infrastructure management and operational efficiency comes naturally with emerging technological advancements. Although there have been analyses on how to conceptually design a smart city from the ground up, they are often less applicable in transforming existing cities into smart ones. Retrofitting existing infrastructures requires integration and synergies with existing systems. Given the broad scope of smart cities, this paper equips planners with surface-level considerations in adopting smart mobility solutions. This provides an avenue to assess project feasibility, risk management, and investment requirement. The process is presented via a replicable framework with a use case with simplistic approaches that do not require complex constraints or modeling. The framework streamlines how to deduce a feasible set of user-centric smart solutions, which are then ranked according to their impacts for implementation priority. Middle East Technical University campus located in Ankara (Turkey) is considered for the use case. The main outcomes for the use case are deducing high-impact smart solutions based on the proposed framework. Preliminary system design analyses are showcased for three high-ranked solutions: electric vehicle charging station installation and investment optimization, autonomous electric shuttle system design, and bus network electrification strategies.