Application of Decision-Making Methods in Smart City Projects: A Systematic Literature Review

In the current era, Smart City projects have to deal with big social, ecological, and technological challenges such as digitalization, pollution, democratic aspirations, more security, etc. The higher involvement of multi-stakeholders in the different phases of the projects is one strategy, enabling a variety of perspectives to be considered and thus to develop a shared vision of the city. Paradoxically, the dynamic and multiple natures of stakeholders appear to be a source of complication and uncertainty in the decision-making process. This study aims to provide a better understanding of this paradox and uses a systematic literature review methodology, as an original big data analysis, in order to investigate decision-making methods, enabling communication between multi-stakeholders, especially the involvement of citizens, into various phases of Smart City projects. Beginning with 606 papers, a bibliometric process led to the selection of 76 of these articles. Detailed analysis of these documents generated a general map for applying different decision-making methods at various levels of decision and implementation phases.