Proposed Smart University Model as a Sustainable Living Lab for University Digital Transformation

Recently, there is an emerging and rapidly growing research on smart universities due to the impact of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT technologies and big data to enhance performance of teaching activities and university management systems. The motivation of this paper is to study university digital transformation and analyze smart university framework. The study begins with a description of trends in initiating various concepts, challenges as well as opportunities on development of smart universities. The second contribution focuses on expressing a systematic approach of designing the smart university concept, that separates its application domains and covers its technological system. A smart university model is then proposed which includes five domains: IoT ecosystem, smart infrastructure, smart applications and services, smart teaching and learning, data-driven smart analysis. Lastly a proposal of establishing a smart university as a living laboratory will be discussed. Several pilot projects which have been implemented in the UD-DUT testbed lab will be further analyzed, such as employee attendance management system, smart office energy management, campus public LoRA network. In addition, possible challenges and future works regarding this novel smart university framework will be explored.