Smart Cities as Cyber-Social-Physical Systems

Abstract

Smart Cities are an example of Cyber-Physical Systems whose goals include improvements in transportation, energy distribution, emergency response, and infrastructure maintenance, to name a few. One of the key elements of a Smart City is the ability to monitor and dynamically allocate its resources. The availability of large amounts of data, ubiquitous wireless connectivity, and the critical need for scalability open the door for new control and optimization methods which are both data-driven and event-driven. The talk will present such an optimization framework and its properties. It will then describe several applications that arise in Smart Cities, some of which have been tested in the City of Boston: a “Smart Parking” system which dynamically assigns and reserves an optimal parking space for a user (driver); the “Street Bump” system which uses standard smartphone capabilities to collect roadway obstacle data and identify and classify them for efficient maintenance and repair; adaptive traffic light control; optimal control of connected autonomous vehicles. Lastly, to address the “social’’ dimension, the talk will describe how a large traffic data set from the Massachusetts road network was analyzed to estimate the Price of Anarchy in comparing “selfish” user-centric behavior to “social” system-centric optimal traffic routing solutions.