Towards A Novel Approach for Designing Smart Classrooms

Several universities in the world have taken the path to become smart universities. The main purpose of such move is to increase the education quality and to provide students/teachers a safe and comfortable environment. A smart university consists of several smart components: smart classroom, smart parking, smart maintenance, smart traffic flow management, etc. In this paper we propose to design and implement smart classrooms. The other smart components will be the subject of future research projects. Nowadays, smart classrooms are based on Internet of Things (IoT). However, IoT based systems tend to become more and more complex over the time. This complexity is related to the increasing number of IoT platforms, technologies and components (hardware and software), as well as the increasing number of vendors in this evolving ecosystem. This situation makes selecting the appropriate IoT system for smart classrooms a time-consuming challenge, especially since several actors (Teachers, Students, Managers, IT specialists, Financial officials, etc.) may participate in such process of selecting the most suitable IoT systems for a smart classroom; with each of them viewing and acting on the choice of IoT systems from one single perspective at a time. This paper proposes a multi-perspective decision-making approach in order to assist managers in the process of selecting the most suitable IoT systems for smart classrooms. This approach is promising because of its ability to: (1) represent graphically all the perspectives of an IoT system and (2) measure the compliance of an IoT system with the smart classrooms' requirements.