Grant: Discovery Development Grant

The quality of the municipal infrastructure is taken for granted until it fails in some way. As around 80% of Canadians live in urban areas, the management of the civil infrastructure becomes key to our societal and economical metabolism. In 2013-2030, global investments in civil infrastructure are estimated at $57 trillion. Instrumenting this civil infrastructure with Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) results in building smarter cities and is expected to increase infrastructure efficiency by 40%. The long-term objective of this research is to build a cyber-physical platform to support the management and design of ICT-pervaded smarter cities. The proposed research will contribute to the structured integration of ICT  (commercializable impact) in the management of urban infrastructure to improve the serviceability and performance (environmental impact) of municipal infrastructure of Canadian cities. The multidisciplinary nature of our R&D provides trainees with opportunities to explore and create new content in urban informatics and cloud computing. The platform includes novel computational models, protocols, and tools required for delivering value-added municipal applications to city residents. Examples of municipal applications include Advanced Traveller Information System (ATIS), which provides real-time planning and monitoring of multi-modal travellers' itineraries in a smart city. An ATIS includes route guidance devised based on users' context of quickest, shortest, or most environment-friendly mode of travel while avoiding possible traffic jams/ accidents and attempting to minimize collective Co2 emissions and fuel consumption. Within the proposed platform, municipal applications are adaptively composed based on urban dynamics that capture real-time contexts of city residents, urban infrastructure and surrounding environment. The characterization of urban dynamics directly affects the functional and non-functional requirements of municipal applications. The proposed platform enables changing the functional composition of municipal application based on real-time contexts and also includes algorithms to efficiently optimize the allocation of required cyber and cloud computing infrastructure resources required for large-scale processing of big infrastructure data. Specifically, this research proposal aims at answering the following research questions: ""How to intelligently compose municipal applications in response to real-time changes in urban dynamics (with a focus transportation networks as an example)?"" and ""How to adaptively manage resources of the cloud infrastructure to enable urban dynamics awareness?""