An Ontology-based Service Model for Smart Infrastructure Design

As a fundamental building block of smart cities, smart infrastructure has been increasingly drawing attention in both academia and industry across the globe. Many research efforts have been directed toward models for smart city infrastructure and city service. The existing models focus on either general description for features and criteria of smart infrastructure, or domain-specific investigation in an ad-hoc way, which, for example, applies optimization to smart transportation and smart buildings. However, a general model optimally augmenting smart features into traditional infrastructure is not reported in the literature so far. We propose such a service model for smart infrastructure designers to fill this gap in two steps. A static ontology of the service model is firstly setup to identify a general framework of the underlying infrastructure expressed by a multi-agent system (MAS) and a dynamic ontology is then designed to manage informed decision-making between global and local scales inside the system. With this approach we can accomplish the design of specific smart infrastructures based on expected goals, availability of information, and the feasibility of implementation. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach we design and present two smart transportation systems as examples of this procedure. We also propose some future improvements of the service model.