Publication – An actionable maturity planning model for smart, circular cities

The InnoSec team participating in the Cyber-pi research project (T2EDK-01469) published on 06/06/2023, in the scientific journal Cities, the article entitled “An actionable maturity planning model for smart, circular cities“. In this paper, we propose a macroeconomics approach to assist decision-makers and stakeholders when considering the transition of a city towards the circular economy paradigm. We reflect on approaches that leverage smart city maturity models to capture the evolution and trajectory of a city in its quest for smartness. By adopting the cross-methodology borrowed from the macroeconomics domain, we illustrate how a maturity model can be actionable in the sense that it can reveal the equilibria of supply and demand of a given smart city dimension or parameter. To evaluate this methodology, we study a well-known use case in cybersecurity, specifically incident response, against crowdsourcing, a key enabler of a data-driven circular economy. Our findings confirm that when crowdsourcing is injected into smart city infrastructure, the city’s maturity is expected to increase as the additional capabilities can  contribute to addressing cybersecurity incidents.

In this paper, we propose a macroeconomics approach to assist decision-makers and stakeholders when considering the transition of a city towards the circular economy paradigm. We reflect on approaches that leverage smart city maturity models to capture the evolution and trajectory of a city in its quest for smartness. By adopting the cross-methodology borrowed from the macroeconomics domain, we illustrate how a maturity model can be actionable in the sense that it can reveal the equilibria of supply and demand of a given smart city dimension or parameter. To evaluate this methodology, we study a well-known use case in cybersecurity, specifically incident response, against crowdsourcing, a key enabler of a data-driven circular economy.

Our findings confirm that when crowdsourcing is injected into smart city infrastructure, the city’s maturity is expected to increase as the additional capabilities can contribute to addressing cybersecurity incidents.

Acknowledgment: This research has been co‐financed by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union and Greek national funds through the Operational Program Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the call RESEARCH – CREATE – INNOVATE (project code: T1EDK-01469).