Recently, at the "2016 China Smart City Development Forum" co-organized by the Information Technology Research Center of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Research Center of China Goldmine Smart City, 2016 China Smart City Development Assessment Report was officially released, which shows that Yichang ranks 37 in the 201 participant cities and is among the Top 50 in the Sixth (2016) China Smart City Construction.
The assessment was conducted mainly on the basis of the PSF model, namely, three key elements of the smart city construction and operation----resource flow, application system and the core goals, which includes 6 major categories of first class indicators and 17 categories of second class indicators as well as the items of addition and subtraction. The first class indicators refer to the smartness in a city’s infrastructure, governance, people's livelihood, economy, population and security system, while those items of addition and subtraction include awards, policy making and security issues, etc..
In August 2013, Yichang was identified as one of China’s pilot smart cities. The municipal government accordingly made a three-year (2016-2018) plan to speed up the construction of smart Yichang. So far, it is the first to have built a city-class cloud computing center among the cities of the same size, and to have built a smart government system covering its subordinate cities, counties, towns and villages, a social governance system fully covered by smart grid and a smart people's livelihood system.
It is learned that Wuhan, another city from Hubei Province, is also listed in the Top 50 of China Smart City Construction, which ranks thirteenth.