CRISP Type 2: Collaborative Research Towards Resilient Smart Cities

Ismail Guvenc

Project runs from 08/15/2016 to 08/14/2019
$124,907

Realizing the vision of truly smart cities is one of the most pressing technical challenges of the coming decade. The success of this vision requires a synergistic integration of cyber-physical critical infrastructures (CIs) such as smart grids, smart transportation, and wireless communication systems into a unified smart city. Such CIs have significant resource interdependencies as they share energy, computation, wireless spectrum, personnel (users, operators), and economic investments. Such resource sharing increases the proneness of such CIs to cascading failures. For example, the failure of a generator will cause a power outage for residential customers as well as an outage on portions of the wireless CI. This, in turn, can impact the platoons of vehicles connected to this communication CI. Protecting such CIs from failures requires instilling resiliency into the processes which manage their common resources. Resiliency is defined as the CIs’ ability to recover from failure by optimally allocating their resources over their nodes and connections. While there has been notable activity recently in improving the resiliency of CIs, these have been primarily motivated by singular and often catastrophic events related to weather, terrorism and other natural disasters. Also, most such efforts have been restricted to a single CI with only one interdependency between a communication and a physical component and do not explicitly account for the presence of humans that interact seamlessly with the CIs. In reality, smart cities require protecting multiple, interdependent CIs each of which is used by millions of users. The goal of this interdisciplinary research is to address this challenge by developing a holistic approach for optimizing the resiliency of a city’s interdependent CIs.

This research will lay the foundations of resilient smart cities by introducing a foundational framework for leveraging the CIs’ interdependencies to yield resilient resource management schemes cognizant of both technological and human factors. By bringing together researchers in cyber-physical systems, computer and network science, transportation engineering, security, behavioral economics, power systems, wireless networks, and psychology, this framework will yield theoretical and practical advances: 1) Rigorous mathematical techniques for delineating the interdependencies between CIs via a symbiotic mix of novel tools from graph theory, machine learning, and random spatial models; 2) Novel resilient resource management mechanisms that advance notions from powerful frameworks such as cognitive hierarchy theory, dynamic learning, and the Colonel Blotto game to enable optimized management of shared CI resources in face of failures stemming from agents of varying intelligence levels ranging from random events (wear-and-tear, natural disasters) to highly strategic attacks; 3) New behavioral models for characterizing the trust relationships between a smart city’s residents and the CIs; 4) Behavioral studies that provides guidelines on: a) how to influence the CIs’ users using communication messages conveyed over platforms to be developed and b) how such influence impacts the resiliency of the coupled CIs; and 5) Large-scale smart city simulator that exploits realistic CI data coupled with real-world experiments over four major smart grid, communication, and transportation testbeds, that will bridge the gap between theory and practice.