An Influence-Based Model for Smart City’s Interdependent Infrastructures: Application in Pricing Design for EV Charging Infrastructures

While smart critical infrastructures are principle components of smart cities, isolated and individually optimized infrastructures will not necessarily realize the vision of smart city in providing efficient solutions and services to citizens. This is mainly due to the interdependencies among critical infrastructures, which suggest the need for collaborative solutions and synergistic modeling and analysis of these systems. In this paper, an integrated framework based on influence model, a networked Markov chain framework, is proposed for modeling interdependent infrastructures and capturing their interactions based on the rules and policies governing their internal and interaction dynamics. To demonstrate the benefits of synergistic approaches, in this paper, the interdependencies between transportation networks and power infrastructures, through electric-vehicle (EV) charging infrastructures, are considered. Particularly, the proposed integrated framework is used to design an algorithm for assigning dynamic charging prices for the EV charging infrastructure with the goal of increasing the likelihood of having balanced charging and electric infrastructures. The proposed scheme for charging prices is traffic and power aware as the states and interactions of transportation and power infrastructures are captured in the integrated framework. Finally, the cyber infrastructure plays a critical role in enabling such collaborative solutions and their role is also discussed.