Smart Facility Management for Smart Cities: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective

Smart facility management (SFM) is an important dimension and solution for smart city operation and management. However, there is still a lack of definition and analysis of SFM from the perspective of systems theory. This paper applies the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS) to analyze the constitution, characteristics, and mechanisms of the SFM for smart cities. The results indicate that the SFM-CAS for smart cities is a multi-agent system composed of management agents, service agents, facility agents, and technology agents. The SFM system satisfies the four major characteristics of aggregation, nonlinearity, diversity, and flows, as well as incorporates three mechanisms, i.e., building block mechanism, tagging mechanism, and internal model mechanism. In the process of SFM for smart cities, the external environmental parameters and internal operational status of urban facility agents are comprehensively perceived by emerging information technology agents, which also foster extensive interconnection with management agents to facilitate effective intelligent decision-making, thus enabling superior execution by service agents.