A maturity-aware decision support system for smart circular cities: integrating ISO 37122 and ISO 59020 for policy-oriented assessment

Municipal scorecards frequently compress heterogeneous smart city and circular economy evidence into composite values that remain difficult to audit, compare, or translate into actionable policy. This article introduces MA-SCC-DSS, a reproducible, maturity-aware decision-support method grounded in Design Science Research artifact logic and informed by ISO 37122 for smart city assessment and ISO 59020 for circularity evaluation. Its methodological contribution is not a new standard or maturity scale, but the executable coupling of standards-informed mapping, evidence-confidence tagging, component-level rule gates, and tiered circularity activation within a traceable score-to-action pathway. The method transforms annual component scores and associated metadata into validated input tables, standards-informed indicator mappings, confidence tags, maturity bands, diagnostic alerts, and a policy-facing roadmap. MA-SCC-DSS was deliberately designed for settings where circularity data are uneven or incomplete, enabling practitioners to begin with aggregated scorecards and progressively incorporate sectoral indicators as richer data become available. The present validation establishes implementation correctness and internal consistency for one three-year illustrative dataset; it does not establish cross-municipality validity.