Deployment of cybersecurity for managing traffic efficiency and safety in smart cities

Boosting the concept of smart cities for implementing an intelligent management of traffic congestion while reducing cybersecurity concerns will not only be more efficient for reducing traffic congestion but also more resilient to cyber incidents. In this paper we proposed a framework that can act as a generalized firewall and work interactively with several critical infrastructures in a smart city to protect the respective operations from a variety of cyber threats. The objective is to develop several steps for a comprehensive traffic management framework in smart cities that facilitates the cooperation among drivers and between drivers and the traffic management authority. The transformative nature of the proposed study supports its applications to a variety of networked critical infrastructures, including electricity, gas, water, rails, and telecommunications, as they intend to respond effectively to a wide range of weather- or human-related disruptions. The contributions of this paper include: Improving the traffic management performance in urban transportation systems, assessing and mitigating the cybersecurity risk in urban traffic management, and facilitating efficient and cyber-secure traffic management in metropolitan areas; Developing and testing an interactive simulation platform for evaluating the traffic management performance under various traffic conditions; Validating and demonstrating the applications in a practical urban transportation system; Disseminating the proposed study results to a wide range of concerned audiences via user-group meetings, detailed education forums, and a close collaboration with the local traffic management authority.