Modeling of Smart Cities Based on ITS Architecture

Nowadays the term Smart City is widely used and almost every city aims to become "Smart". Unfortunately, the definitions of what Smart means differ and there is not a single accepted one. Often a technocratic view is adopted and the actual goal—make city more liveable—is not kept in mind. In this paper, a new approach to initiate and develop Smart City model is provided. A unified model is one way to describe the processes within such complex and heterogeneous system as Smart City. It is based on the similarity to the well-established framework called ITS (Intelligent Transport System) architecture. First, an overview of the Smart City initiatives and key principles that often require change of the way how we think of projects is provided. Further, the objectives and approach to national ITS architectures are described and discussed, mainly aiming on its limitations for the practical use especially in the context of Smart Cities. Finally, this paper provides a guidance on how a Smart City Architecture shall be established to overcome the system complexity and to reduce its dimension in terms of volume of required data flow. The new approach is based on decentralized intelligence, where a number of processes are carried out at the level of so-called building blocks. Multi-agent systems are proposed as a design tool for the particular building blocks.