Ranking of Indian Smart Cities using TOPSIS Method

Abstract

Performance measurement is an important integrated part of any smart policy framework. Smart city concept has been widely accepted across the globe as a model for urban development and nations have adopted this as a policy measure. Ranking of cities and continuous monitoring, enhances competition amongst cities to perform better and meets the objective of the policy. This paper concentrates on the question of what should be the approach of ranking the smart cities. Introducing this topic, the first section provides a gist of literature surveyed on smart city and their ranking approaches. Four samples of Smart cities of Gujarat are assessed based on 31 factors across six characteristics of Smartness. Entropy method is applied to assess weights ad and TOPSIS method is used to rank the cities based on the closeness coefficients. The results presented gives an understanding on performance of the cities in various aspects and provides guidance to authorities to take corrective measures for improvement. This paper also discusses on the appropriate approach while city rankings are done.