Sustainable Smart Cities Through the Lens of Complex Interdependent Infrastructures: Panorama and State-of-the-art

Abstract

Smart cities are developed to enable modern functionalities (e.g., sustainable energy systems, smart power grids, and electrified transportation networks) and focus on the information and communication technologies (ICTs) in order to improve the operation and efficiency of the future cities. Further, the concept of smart cities is developed to integrate smart technologies and solutions with the foremost goal of improving the quality of life. The advanced metering, control, information, and communication technologies are the backbones of smart cities that are utilized to gather and analyze the data in order to provide energy-efficient, cost-efficient, reliable, and secure services. Smart cities focus on the coordination between different sectors including energy and transportation systems, water supply networks, and healthcare in order to enable more efficient applications. This chapter aims to provide a review on the smart cities and the needs of sustainability for the future cities, as well as the ongoing challenges for smart city implementation. Furthermore, an overview is provided to explain the interdependent power and transportation networks, as one of the key elements of future smart cities. Regarding the applications of smart cities, increasing amount of information should be gathered from the cities and community via distributed sensors, as well as the control devices. Privacy and security issues will rise due to the concerns regarding the protection of the collected data and transmitted control signals against the malicious behaviors. Such issues are also covered in this chapter. Thus, although smart cities can benefit citizens in a variety of aspects, there are some privacy and security concerns regarding the possible data leakage and malicious attacks. To enhance the acceptability of the high penetration of smart cities and their real implementation potential, all the presented aspects are addressed.