Nowadays with the accelerating globalization the smart city development and the application of smart technologies is getting even more emphasis in several parts of the world, and in almost every continents. The cause for it is that the cities have to react on the rapidly changing conditions with the accelerating of globalization (e.g.: challenges of increasing population, city services, problems of the economies of scale), and to this they need new and recent solutions. In that approach the concept of smart cities can give innovative solutions for the future of cities.
In this recent research we examine the possible concepts and measurement solutions of smart cities, representing the best practices applied in the literature. In the analysis we have created a complex index based on the synthesis of the measurement methods, which can measure the performance of the smart cities by six components. In the research we have analysed the smart performance of some cities in the Visegrad countries and we have created the ranking of the 10 settlements. Th e results underlie that with except of Bratislava, the capital cities show outstanding smart performance based on the complex index. In 2015, the best performing city was Prague among the analysed ones, which was followed by Budapest and Warsaw. It is important to mention, that in case of the given components there is a huge standard deviation among the best and worst performing cities.
Keywords: smart city, measurement, Visegrad countries, complex index
