Computer Aided Strategic Planning for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Amjad Umar

The role of digital innovations to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been widely recognized in major recent publications such as the Cisco-ITU report on IoTs and the Ericsson-Columbia study of ICT4SDGs. These and other studies have identified short range and long range challenges that must be addressed. This paper introduces a computer aided planning, engineering and management environment that has been developed to address these challenges for rapid progress in health, education, public safety, public welfare, and other vital areas. This environment, currently operational for a UN Partnership, consists of a set of intelligent advisors that collaborate with each other in a fashion similar to a team of consultants who guide the user through an extensive array of choices throughout the learn-plan-do-check cycle. The intelligent advisors quickly produce highly customized plans for SDG services for different countries by integrating diverse techniques such as semantic web, Big Data, deep learning, enterprise ontologies, business patterns, and gamification. This paper emphasizes the practical and innovative applications of computer aided strategic planning for SDGs and other global efforts in smart cities and next generation enterprises. Experiences and insights gained in development, deployment, maintenance and methodologies for actual use of computer aided planning systems are highlighted.