Smart Infrastructures: Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Lifecycle Automation

The deployment and maintenance of large smart infrastructures used for powering data-driven decision making, regardless of retrofitted or newly deployed infrastructures, still lack automation and mostly rely on extensive manual effort. In this article, we focus on the two main challenges in the lifecycle of smart infrastructures: deployment and operation, each of which is rather generic and applies to all infrastructures. We discuss the existing technologies designed to help improve and automate deployment and operation for smart infrastructures in general and use the smart grid as a guiding example to ground some examples across the article. Next, we identify and discuss opportunities where the broad field of artificial intelligence (AI) can help further improve and automate the lifecycle of smart infrastructures to eventually improve their reliability and drive down their deployment and operation costs. Finally, based on the usage of AI for web and social networks as well as our previous experience in AI for networks and cyber-physical systems, we provide decision guidelines for the adoption of AI.