The Chair of Information Systems and Strategic IT Management (SITM) at the University of Duisburg-Essen is offering a new set of bachelor’s and master’s thesis topics in the field of Smart Cities.

Smart City initiatives are increasingly shaping how cities address challenges such as mobility transformation, climate adaptation, digital public services, and urban governance. At the same time, cities face growing pressure to measure progress, compare approaches, and design effective governance and organizational structures. Against this background, the offered thesis topics focus on the conceptual, methodological, and organizational foundations of Smart City development beyond purely technological solutions.

Bachelor’s Thesis Topics

The bachelor’s theses address practice-oriented and analytically focused questions, including:

• The development and analysis of indicator systems and KPIs for specific Smart City domains (e.g. mobility, climate adaptation);
• The acceptance, effort, and challenges of municipal data collection in Smart City studies;
• Governance and organizational structures of Smart City initiatives, based on comparative case studies of medium-sized German cities.

Master's Thesis Topics

The master’s theses focus on methodologically and conceptually advanced research questions, such as:

• The development of context-sensitive benchmarking frameworks for Smart Cities;
• The design of a reference model architecture for analyzing Smart City initiatives across technological, organizational, and societal dimensions;
• The analysis and validation of scoring and weighting logics in Smart City rankings, including fairness, transparency, and robustness.

All thesis topics are supervised by members of the chair and can be further specified in coordination with the respective supervisor. Detailed descriptions of the individual topics, including contact persons, are available on the chair’s website.

Interested students are encouraged to get in touch and discuss potential thesis projects with us (tim.bree@uni.due.de).