The Role of Open Data and Simulation in Building Smart Cities

In today’s world, technology plays important role in all spheres of life. Smart initiatives and smart city projects facilitate modern urban life and bring solutions to everyday problems that arise due to changes in people’s lifestyles. The basis of the application of smart technologies is data that should be publicly and widely available. The key factor is open data. We define open data as a set of digital data that is available, with technical and legal characteristics necessary for free use, reuse and redistribution by anyone, anytime and anywhere, and as such fully fits into the foundations of the application of smart technologies. Sets of such data should be harmonized on a technical and semantic level in order to be useful and usable. Smart technologies and open data sets as a whole enable the application of various methods and techniques of modeling real systems with the aim of increasing the quality of modern life. A special emphasis in this paper is placed on the simulation modeling method as an experimental method that enables the construction of behavioral scenarios in ordinary everyday as well as extraordinary situations. By using this method, smart solutions gain adaptability during planned or unplanned changes in the systems in which they are applied, and the decision-making process about changes is facilitated by the application of designed and pre-verified scenarios. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of smart solutions based on the use of open data and modeling and simulation methods, which will make life easier for current and especially future generations, i.e. solutions of the future as well as possible ways of their implementation on a real example of one of the cities in the Republic of Croatia.