Multi-criteria assessment of smart city transformation based on SWOT analysis

The population growth, urbanization and environmental challenges especially in urban cites are pushing urban infrastructures to sustain the resources and balance the supply demand. These challenges have triggered the alarm of urgency to set smarter ways. Developing an intelligent and sustainable city is the way forward. The concept of making city `smart' is evolving as a strategy to manage urban infrastructure and ease the urbanization challenges. Smart city development is a strategic process, which requires novelty in approach, planning, operations, networking and management of urban enterprises. To strategize the smart city transformation scenario, Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) analysis has been used as a strategic tool to identify the gap between existing resources and prerequisites of smart city transformation. In this paper, we have distributed the smart city transformation process into three strategic phases; 1) smart city vision and status assessment, 2) smart city transformational initiatives and 3) smart city development and implementation. The execution of every phase towards smart city transformation is somehow linked with each other and is impacted by multi-criteria's and different parametric factors which need to be identified. This paper attempts to identify those factors for every phase of smart city transformation based on SWOT analysis. Based on SWOT analysis, an integrative framework is also proposed to explain the relationships and impacts of those factors. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first kind of contribution to systematically analyse the smart city transformation based on SWOT analysis.