Detection of Runtime Conflicts among Services in Smart Cities

The populations of large cities around the world are growing rapidly. Cities are beginning to address this problem by implementing significant sensing and actuation infrastructure and building services on this infrastructure. However, as the density of sensing and actuation increases and as the complexities of services grow there is an increasing potential for conflicts across Smart City services. These conflicts can cause unsafe situations and disrupt the benefits that the services were originally intended to provide. Although some of the conflicts can be detected and avoided during designing the services, many can still occur unpredictably during runtime. This paper carefully defines and enumerates the main issues regarding the detection and resolution of runtime conflicts in smart cities. In particular, it focuses on conflicts that arise across services. This issue is becoming more and more important as Smart City designs attempt to integrate services from different domains (transportation, energy, public safety, emergency, medical, and many others). Research challenges are identified and then addressed that deal with uncertainty, dynamism, real-time, mobility and spatio-temporal availability, duration and scale of effect, efficiency, and ownership. A watchdog architecture is also described that oversees the services operating in a Smart City. This watchdog solution detects and resolves conflicts, it learns and adapts, and it provides additional inputs to decision making aspects of services. Using data from a Smart City dataset, an emulated set of services and activities using those services are created to perform a conflict analysis. A second analysis hypothesizes 41 future services across 5 domains. Both of these evaluations demonstrate the high probability of conflicts in smart cities of the future.