Emerging research topics in control for smart infrastructures

As we move deeper into the 21st century, critical infrastructures related to energy and transportation are becoming smart-monitor themselves, communicate, and most importantly self-govern. Various drivers have enabled this transition, including sustainability concerns, scarcity in resources, economic considerations, and rapid growth in enabling technologies of sensor networks, and computational and communication systems. Two notable examples of such infrastructures are smart grids and smart cities. The idea behind a Smart grid is the creation of a dynamic, cyber-physical infrastructure that meets the challenges of intermittency and distributed availability of renewables, and realizes reduced operational costs and emissions, via a flexible, intelligent, and networked grid that plans, controls, and balances supply and demand over an entire region. The concept of a Smart City is gaining popular attention driven by goals of sustainability and efficiency, the needs of enhancing quality of life and affordability, growing urbanization of the world's population, and the explosion of technological advances in communication and computation. While systems and control problems abound in any complex dynamic system, two characteristics that are specific to critical infrastructures are the need to deliver reliable service and the ability to accomplish this goal amidst constrained resources. These in turn lead to new research topics in systems and control including empowered consumers, transactive control, and resilience. The focus of this paper is on these emerging topics. Their role in smart infrastructures, the opportunities they provide, and the research challenges that they bring in are all discussed. Specific illustrations of recent successes are presented that are based on coordinated adjustment of generation and consumption using concepts of multi-agents and multi-timescales in smart grids and socio-technical models of empowered drivers in smart cities.