New guides from BSI focus on smart city projects and data sharing

A new guide to developing smart city project proposals has been published by BSI, the business standards company.

PAS 184 Smart Cities — Developing project proposals for delivering smart city solutions outlines how a city-wide, strategic-level approach to the development of a smart city programme should be applied at the level of an individual smart city project.

According to BSI, the guide uses case studies to illustrate good practice in smart city procurement and creating viable, financially robust business cases for smart city projects.

Dan Palmer, head of manufacturing at BSI, explained: “PAS 184 was created to make the process for delivering smart city solutions as easy as possible. One of the biggest barriers to setting up new smart city projects is the difficulty of showing how an innovative approach can provide better value for money than the business-as-usual approach. This PAS provides common-sense guidance to help city leaders to develop project proposals in order to make smart city solutions a reality.”

The new guide is timely, as recent research suggests there is a lack of strategy in developing cities that are ‘smart’.

The RICS Research Trust report by University of Reading academics found that less than a quarter of UK cities had an smart city action plan. Of those that did, the main focus was on open data and there was little or no evidence of the built environment and construction sectors engaging directly with the smart city agenda.

“A key priority for cities is the need to develop clear smart city and data strategies to demonstrate the benefits for citizens and help improve incentives for companies to share their data,” said Professor Tim Dixon, chair of Sustainable Futures in the Built Environment at the University of Reading.

Last month, BSI published a guide on establishing a framework for sharing data and information services in smart cities.

PAS 183:2017 Smart Cities — Guide to establishing a decision-making framework for sharing data and information services “provides clarity around what types of data can be published as open data, what can be shared and what should be kept private,” BSI’s Dan Palmer said.

It covers types of data in smart cities; establishing a data sharing culture; a data value chain, and its roles and responsibilities; purposes for data use; assessing data states; defining access rights for data; and data formats of transportation.

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