Technology plays a vital role in helping cities understand and respond to the needs of their residents. This can be achieved by analyzing the data collected by these technologies. However, to fully leverage the benefits of these technologies, standards are needed.

Given that cities are made up of inpidual though interconnected systems that must be addressed holistically, the IEC set up its Systems Committee (SyC) for Smart Cities. Together with the IEC technical committees, it ensures that IEC Standards fully address user needs. It also collaborates with other standards development organizations (SDOs) to provide solutions that can leverage the know-how of each organization and avoid overlaps.

To better understand the work of the SyC Smart Cities Advisory Group (AG) 10 on Cooperation, IEC e-tech spoke with its Convenor Wei Sun who also serves as the Vice Chair for SyC Smart Cities.

What are the objectives of the SyC Smart Cities AG 10 on Collaboration?

AG 10 on Collaboration was established in July 2021 with the objective of proposing policies, methods and procedures to support collaboration using the IEC systems approach within IEC technical committees and system committees as well as with other SDOs that have common interests in the field of smart cities standardization.

Since its establishment in mid-2021, what has AG 10 achieved so far?

Because a smart city is a complex system of systems, SyC Smart Cities needs to establish and maintain liaison with other IEC technical committees, subcommittees, system committees and advisory groups as well as with ISO and other SDOs. To date, IEC SyC Smart Cities has established 15 liaisons with IEC committees (TCs/SCs/SyCs), 12 liaisons with ISO committees as well as several liaisons with the ITU.

What are the benefits of cooperating with IEC SyC Smart Cities?

IEC SyC Smart Cities focuses on the demand side to capture the requirements of all stakeholders that can benefit from electrotechnical standards. The work of AG10 is to collaborate with the relevant IEC TCs/SCs/SyCs to develop, maintain and implement an overall work plan to provide the standards needed to support smart cities. We also work closely with other SDOs to ensure that IEC Standards fit within the packages of standards needed to meet the requirements of smart cities.

Most of the standards that result from our work will be developed through cooperation with other IEC TCs/SCs/SyCs and SDOs. AG 10 seeks to build a communications channel that can collect and explore the interests and concerns of SDOs related to smart cities.

(Source: IEC)