CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: A Cyber-Physical Infrastructure for the "Smart City"

Co-PI:

Abstract

The project aims at making cities "smarter" by engineering processes such as traffic control, efficient parking services, and new urban activities such as recharging electric vehicles. To that end, the research will study the components needed to establish a Cyber-Physical Infrastructure for urban environments and address fundamental problems that involve data collection, resource allocation, real-time decision making, safety, and security. Accordingly, the research is organized along two main directions: (i) Sensing and data acquisition using a new mobile sensor network paradigm designed for urban environments; and (ii) Decision Support for the "Smart City" relying on formal verification and certification methods coupled with innovative dynamic optimization techniques used for decision making and resource allocation. The work will bring together and build upon methodological advances in optimization under uncertainty, computer simulation, discrete event and hybrid systems, control and games, system security, and formal verification and safety. Target applications include: a "Smart Parking" system where parking spaces are optimally assigned and reserved, and vehicular traffic regulation. The research has the potential of revolutionizing the way cities are viewed: from a passive living and working environment to a highly dynamic one with new ways to deal with transportation, energy, and safety. Teaming up with stakeholders in the Boston Back Bay neighborhood, the City of Boston, and private industry, the research team expects to establish new collaborative models between universities and urban groups for cutting-edge research embedded in the deployment of an exciting technological, economic, and sociological development.

Christos Cassandras

Christos G. Cassandras is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. He is also co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received degrees from Yale University (B.S., 1977), Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1978), and Harvard University (S.M., 1979; Ph.D., 1982). In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published over 300 refereed papers in these areas, and five books. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. He has recently collaborated with The MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents.

Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009 and has also served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He is the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and has served as Vice President for Publications and on the Board of Governors of the CSS. He has chaired the CSS Technical Committee on Control Theory, and served as Chair of several conferences. He has been a plenary speaker at many international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001 and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002, and an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer.

He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, a 2011 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC.

Performance Period: 10/01/2012 - 09/30/2015

Institution: Trustees of Boston University

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

Award Number: 1239021

Project URL

http://ionia.bu.edu/Research/NSF-Smart-Cities-12.html