Development of Urban-Level Infrastructure Information Delivery Manuals Using Knowledge Modularization for Enhanced Smart City Data Exchanges

Smart cities provide intelligent services to enhance infrastructure systems’ performance and community well-being. The heterogeneity of the 3D model data formats in their infrastructure systems, however, frequently hinders seamless data exchange, sharing, and integration. Model View Definitions (MVD) and Information Delivery Manuals (IDM) have been broadly used to develop interoperable data schemas that can address this heterogeneity. For developing IDM/MVD of a smart city, generalized standards and streamlined approaches that can avoid inconsistencies and redundancies of complicated infrastructure systems and features remain elusive. Particularly, existing domain-specific standards primarily focus on data exchanges within individual infrastructure, overlooking underlying interactions and interrelated functional operations between multiple systems. Thus, a unified system that contains necessary relationships of each infrastructure system covering sub-domain standards is required to represent the interactions and exchanges between urban-level infrastructure of a smart city. In this regard, this study provides a framework that integrates various infrastructure domains based on modularized knowledge of infrastructure systems and their smart functionalities. The expected outcome also includes a unified ontological data structure for functional elements and properties. The framework connects functions, elements, and properties for each specific use case that enables the development of an interoperable environment at an urban level, and allows for defining new types of connections between different infrastructure systems.