Modelling Smart Cities Through Socio-Technical Systems

The COVID-19 outbreak has proven to be a challenge for most communities, requiring them to adapt to a newfound reality. Cities need now to accommodate the circulation of their populations in a safe manner, dealing with economic repercussions, and avoiding to oversaturate the countries’ healthcare facilities. So far, the latter has happened with dramatic consequences in terms of loss of human lives. In this context, we propose a social simulation meta-model suitable to represent the complex socio-technical system of a campaign hospital, created to support existing healthcare facilities as a response to the demands created by the coronavirus pandemic. With this model we intend to support the analysis of social coordination policies towards the improvement of a given set of characteristics of the system. By considering both technical and social dimensions, we expect to gain insights into how certain aspects such as the collaborativeness of patients or the nature of staff might affect the healing speed of patients and, similarly, the efficiency of the campaign hospital. Ultimately, all emergent behaviour should provide useful insights allowing for the identification of key social practices influencing its performance.