Evaluation of Smart Sustainable East Asian Cities Integrating Fuzzy Logic, MCDM and Information Theory

Chen Jiaxu

Abstract

With the vigorous development of emerging economies in East Asia, the size and population of East Asian cities is growing rapidly in recent years. At the same time, with the development of technology and increasing pressure on the global environment, the construction of Smart Sustainable Cities is crucial to the long-term sustainable development of East Asian urban society. During the investigation, we found that the development of Smart Sustainable Cities in developed economies and supporting urban assessment tools are more mature, taking Europe and the United States as an example. East Asia has been actively developing Smart Sustainable Cities in recent years. But it lacks a city evaluation tool that applicable to the region to assist in evaluating the real status of urban development. Therefore, the paper proposes a new Smart Sustainable City evaluation system designed for first-tier to second-tier cities in East Asian countries, aiming to help them have a comprehensive understanding of their current urban development level, advantages, and disadvantages. Considering the three main aspects of Sustainability, namely Environment, Economy and Society, as well as the Technological-based characteristics of smart cities, we identified four main evaluation criteria for the proposed system. Meanwhile, to ensure that the evaluation results are scientific and reliable, we integrated MCDM with Information Theory to determine the weight distribution of the evaluation indicators. And the Fuzzy Logic is used to construct the scoring system. The pilot Smart Sustainable City evaluation of two case study cities, Singapore and Shenzhen, China, has verified the feasibility of the proposed evaluation system.