AI Maturity 4 Sustainable Cities

Partners:

• Sociotechnical Systems Research Center – Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• INESC TEC– Faculty of Engineering
• University of Porto (FEUP)

Sustainable cities face persistent social-environmental externalities that cannot be resolved by urban strategies alone. The forestry sector offers strong potential to mitigate these impacts and generate benefits for urban sustainability.

This project focuses on using AI to enhance the efficiency and resilience of forestry supply chains. While AI offers environmental and economic advantages, sociotechnical factors like adoption, trust, and systemic resilience are often overlooked. Building on our sociotechnical AI maturity model, we aim to refine it using evidence-based factors to support responsible AI integration.

The rapid uptake of AI across supply chains creates opportunities for innovation and sustainability, yet adoption remains uneven. Existing AI maturity models rarely consider sociotechnical systems thinking or responsible AI.
By applying our model to Portugal’s forestry sector, a critical player in achieving Sustainable Smart Cities (SSCs) goals, we will assess current AI maturity and propose sociotechnical interventions, including digital twin concepts for SSCs ecosystems.

MIT PI:

• Donna Rhodes, SSRC, MIT

Portugal PI:

• André M. Carvalho, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, NOVA School of Science and Technology | NOVA FCT, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
• António Lucas Soares, Researcher at INESC TEC and Associate Professor at Department of Informatics Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.

Visit the project page here.