Muvuna, Jules Photo

Jules Muvuna

PhD Student

Project title: Systems Engineering Approach to Design and Modelling of Smart Cities

Cities are currently being challenged by issues which impose stresses on urban quality of life. Among the challenges, population growth, traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and quality of public services. To ensure sustainable development, cities are embracing smart cities concept. However, the literature shows that the concept is not being approached efficiently (Moss Kanter and Litow, 2009). A smart city is a system of systems and should be approached as a whole as opposed to infusing technology into subsystems one by one. To achieve this, there is a requirement of a standard platform to integrate all the subsystems of a smart city system.

In this work an integrated model is proposed based on systems engineering approach and Systems Modelling Language will be used as a potential modelling language. This approach allows visual semantic representation of different modelling stages. The model visualises a smart city as a system and brings all the subsystems of a smart city system on one single platform. The main objective is to make all the subsystems of a smart city system to share information in a secure and integrated manner. The model will benefits a city by harnessing the power of the data. Each subsystem will work as autonomous system controlling its own data but also as a subsystem of a city system by making the information obtained available to all the other subsystems and benefiting of information from other subsystems. A case study on smart mobility will be carried on to allow validation of the model.