Smart city evaluation from the perspective of information theory

Smart city evaluation is an effective way to measure the level of smart city development and help promote the construction process. Cities are complex dissipative systems that will spontaneously become more chaotic if there is no intervention. Therefore, material, energy, and information should be introduced into the urban system to keep cities stable and ordered, which is consistent with the core idea of information theory. However, the existing smart city evaluation methods do not consider urban entropy. In this paper, we propose a smart city evaluation method from the perspective of information entropy by defining smart city construction as a kind of "negative entropy" that flows into the urban system and reduces city clutter. We conduct experiments on the real-world dataset collected from China's practical smart city evaluation in 2016 and 2018. Experimental results show that our method can effectively evaluate the level of smart city development as smart city entropy strongly correlates with the benchmark results.