Assessment of European cities from a smartness perspective: An integrated grey MCDM approach

Benchmarking cities has an essential place to have an idea about their current situation globally. In recent years, the concept of a "smart city" has attracted attention, and therefore the competition between cities has increased even more. Although various indices published regularly have been developed, no approach makes use of a systematic methodology. The gap in the literature constitutes the main motivation of this study. From this point of view, the study aims to measure the smartness level of cities by performing integrated grey-based methods. In this manner, a grey extension of an integrated Level Based Weight Assessment (LBWA) & Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) method has been proposed. Six criteria are weighted with the LBWA-G method, and the performances of 17 European cities are measured by the EDAS-G method. The criteria and cities' related data are derived from the Global Power City Index (GPCI). Furthermore, sensitivity and comparative analysis are conducted to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed methodology. The findings of our study offer many managerial implications. We think that this study will guide administrative and local administrators to carry out corrective action for moving forward and developing their cities.