Assessing Impact, Performance and Sustainability Potential of Smart City Projects: Towards a Case Agnostic Evaluation Framework

Konstantinos Kourtzanidis, Komninos Angelakoglou, Vasilis Apostolopoulos, Paraskevi Giourka and Nikolaos Nikolopoulos
Additional contact information
Konstantinos Kourtzanidis: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), Thermi, GR-57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Komninos Angelakoglou: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), Thermi, GR-57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Vasilis Apostolopoulos: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), Thermi, GR-57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Paraskevi Giourka: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), Thermi, GR-57001 Thessaloniki, Greece
Nikolaos Nikolopoulos: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Chemical Process and Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), Thermi, GR-57001 Thessaloniki, Greece

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-38

Abstract: We report on a novel evaluation framework to globally assess the footprint of smart cities and communities (SCC) projects, being also expandable to the case of smart grid related projects. The uniform smart city evaluation (USE) framework is constructed upon three complementary evaluation axes: the first one aims to weigh up the success of a SCC project based on performance metrics against pre-defined project-specific target values. The second axis focuses on the project’s impact towards the sustainability of a city and it is bench-marked against national and international key objectives arising from strategic plans. This bench-marking feeds the third axis which provides a more inclusive evaluation against four pre-defined and widely acclaimed sectors of interest. The steps to be followed for the uniform evaluation of each axis and corresponding index are presented in detail, including necessary key performance indicator (KPI) normalization, weighting, and aggregation methods. The resulting indices’ scores for each axis (namely project performance index, sustainability impact index, and sustainability performance index) can be post-processed with adequate data processing and visualization tools to extract important information on the extent to which the range of success of a SCC project contributes to the city sustainability progress. Illustrative examples from an on-going SCC project are provided to highlight the strengths of the approach. The proposed framework can be used to compare multiple projects within a city and sustainability and project performance in different cities, evaluate the interventions chosen per project against city needs, benchmark and design future projects (with, e.g., reverse engineering, projections), as well as evaluate various spatial and temporal scales.

Keywords: smart cities; evaluation; frameworks; impact; KPI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7395/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7395/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:13:p:7395-:d:586997

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().