Wangda Zuo

Alexander C. DeRieux, Walid Saad, Wangda Zuo et al.

Rapid global urbanization is a double-edged sword, heralding promises of economical prosperity and public health while also posing unique environmental and humanitarian challenges. Smart and connected communities (S&CCs) apply data-centric solutions to these problems by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). This coupling of intelligent technologies also poses interesting system design challenges regarding heterogeneous data fusion and task diversity. Transformers are of particular interest to address these problems, given their success across diverse fields of natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, time-series regression, and multi-modal data fusion. This begs the question whether Transformers can be further diversified to leverage fusions of IoT data sources for heterogeneous multi-task learning in S&CC trade spaces. In this paper, a Transformer-based AI system for emerging smart cities is proposed. Designed using a pure encoder backbone, and further customized through interchangeable input embedding and output task heads, the system supports virtually any input data and output task types present S&CCs. This generalizability is demonstrated through learning diverse task sets representative of S&CC environments, including multivariate time-series regression, visual plant disease classification, and image-time-series fusion tasks using a combination of Beijing PM2.5 and Plant Village datasets. Simulation results show that the proposed Transformer-based system can handle various input data types via custom sequence embedding techniques, and are naturally suited to learning a diverse set of tasks. The results also show that multi-task learners increase both memory and computational efficiency while maintaining comparable performance to both single-task variants, and non-Transformer baselines.

Xing Lu, Kathryn Hinkelman, Yangyang Fu et al.

Infrastructure in future smart and connected communities is envisioned as an aggregate of public services, including the energy, transportation and communication systems, all intertwined with each other. The intrinsic interdependency among these systems may exert underlying influence on both design and operation of the heterogeneous infrastructures. However, few prior studies have tapped into the interdependency among the three systems in order to quantify their potential impacts during standard operation. In response to this, this paper proposes an open source, flexible, integrated modeling framework suitable for designing coupled energy, transportation, and communication systems and for assessing the impact of their interdependencies. First, a novel multi-level, multi-layer, multi-agent approach is proposed to enable flexible modeling of the interconnected energy, transportation, and communication systems. Then, for the framework's proof-of-concept, preliminary component and system-level models for different systems are designed and implemented using Modelica, an equation-based object-oriented modeling language. Finally, three case studies of gradually increasing complexity are presented (energy, energy + transportation, energy + transportation + communication) to evaluate the interdependencies among the three systems. Quantitative analyses show that the deviation of the average velocity on the road can be 10.5\% and the deviation of the power draw from the grid can be 7\% with or without considering the transportation and communication system at the peak commute time, indicating the presence of notable interdependencies. The proposed modeling framework also has the potential to be further extended for various modeling purposes and use cases, such as dynamic modeling and optimization, resilience analysis, and integrated decision making in future connected communities.