Last week I had the opportunity to attend to “International Conference on City Sciences: New architectures, infrastructures and services for future cities”, which took place during June 4th and 5th in College of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji University in Shanghai. The conference was organized by a joint collaboration between Tongji university and Polytechnic University of Madrid, aiming to foster multi-disciplinary research on city sciences. In this context city sciences refer to a broad number of disciplines like urban planning, architecture, transport or ICT, aiming to improve live and increase sustainability in the cities of the future.
The common context of the conference presenters was the increasing urbanization happening all over the globe, with critical implications for some developing countries like China or India where urbanization is happening extremely fast producing megacities like Shanghai. In this sense, the challenges of fast urbanization are about improving quality of life within the cities, as it is already too late to create a holistic plan for the city. Profesor Wu Jiang, from Tongji University, explained how the growth of the city has overtake the urban planning for chinese cities during the last 30 years, making impossible to coordinate planning with existing urban evolution. In the same line profesor Iñaki Ábalos introduced the concept of ecologic urbanism, highlighting the importance of 0 emission in future cities.
The conference was divided in a number of tracks, including transportation, energy, urban planning, ecologic urbanism and smart cities. Within the Smart cities track I had the opportunity to present two co-authored papers: Quality of Experience (QoE)-basedservice differentiation in the smartcities context: Business Analysis and Horizontalization of Internet of Things services for Smart Cities – Use cases study.
The paper Quality of Experience (QoE)-based service differentiation in the smart cities context: Business Analysis intends to provide an initial research on how QoE service provision will impact the development of smart city services. In order to do that, authors aim to identify which Smart City services may be impact and in which way for QoE service provision. Aligned with the same objective, business analysis for QoE service provision is introduced with the intention of identify recurring patterns that could be used in the different Smart City services considered.
In the paper Horizontalization of Internet of Things services for Smart Cities – Use cases study, we introduce a number of use cases from selected industries; Transportation, Automotive, Energy and Healthcare. In the second part of the paper value network and value proposition for the use cases introduced previously are analyzed, with the ultimate goal of obtaining insights on the potential horizontalization and integration of Smart City services through ICT. The analysis is focused on the relations between actors, offering and value propisition and value network.
