Our Objective:

Objective: Quickly Plan & Develop smart Hubs around the globe that are highly specialized for location specific needs and limitations.

Quick Tour



Major Challenges:
  • Where exactly to locate the hubs.

  • What services to provide for the area.

  • What type of energy and ICT infrastructure will be needed especially in the remote areas.

  • What are the National, Regional and Local Security and Policy issues.

  • What are the project management, IT management and Governance issues.

  • What are the people, processes and technology tradeoffs (e.g., can well trained people and efficient processes/policies compensate for the lack of technologies).

  • What are the small versus large projects considerations (e.g., can a smart “bus” between dumb components make it smart).


Implementation of the vision of a large number of collaborating smart hubs is a non-trivial task due to the technical, management and logistical challenges. These are serious barriers that must be crossed systematically. Unfortunately, many ICT projects are not carefully addressing these challenges and are re-inventing the wheel leading to a failure rate of 60-85% due to expensive retries, especially in developing countries. Smart Hub projects are no exception.

Computer Aided Methodology

We have developed and are actively using a systematic computer aided planning methodology, displayed in Figure 1, to address these challenges. This methodology relies heavily on the SDG Advisor and a powerful computer aided planning and decision support environment, called SPACE (Strategic Planning, Architecture, Controls and Education). The SPACE environment (www.space4ict.com) produces a highly customized portal to support different smart hub configurations within hours. Most importantly, SPACE supports individual services that can be combined into complex “service bundles” to represent offices, community centers, corporations and even cities. This allows us to plan and architect very simple to very large and complex scenarios for smart hubs. The methodology consists of the following phases for a detailed tour of the methodology):


Figure 1: Computer Aided Planning, Engineering and Management Methodology


Important Knowledge gained in deploying the hub is added to the Planning Tool for future use.



Click here for a detailed tour of the methodology.