Modeling Citizen-Centric Services in Smart Cities

Much research about large cities has focused on policy-level action for concerns such as infrastructure, basic amenities and education, treating the citizens as a collective of millions. We suggest an alternative, drawing on recent moves towards ‘digital era governance.’ We argue for and develop a foundation for the design and modeling of services that focus on individuals. Drawing on and extending prior work in service modeling and public-sector governance, we develop a formalism for modeling citizen-centric services, illustrate its application, and extract principles that underlie this effort. The paper concludes with pointers to other aspects of the larger iCity project, aimed at building smart cities in the world’s rapidly growing regions.