BIGDATA: Collaborative Research: IA: Big Data Analytics for Optimized Planning of Smart, Sustainable, and Connected Communities

将村庄、城镇和城市转变为智能、互联和可持续的社区是未来十年最关键的技术挑战之一。实现这一愿景取决于使现有的社区基础设施(如交通、通信和能源系统)能够无缝集成可再生能源、智能传感器和电动汽车等可持续组件。这样的整合将确保未来的社区真正可持续，并通过表现出理想的品质来连接，这些品质包括：a)零能源，因为它们在能源生产方面是自给自足的；b)零中断，因为整个社区的通信链路超可靠，并且经历显著低的中断；以及c)零拥堵，因为整个社区的交通拥堵被降到最低。在这一总体愿景下，该项目的目标是为智能、互联和可持续的社区开发一个新的规划框架，通过以最佳方式决定如何、何时以及在哪里部署或升级社区的基础设施，从而实现这些零能源、零停电和零拥堵的目标。这些决策将由海量的社区数据推动，这些数据来自多种来源，包括移动性、能源、交通、通信需求和其他社会技术信息，以便就如何逐步和有机地将社区转变为完全可持续和真正互联的环境做出明智的决定。此问题的规模和异构性要求我们需要创新用于处理、分析和可视化异类数据的工具，以及用于监控此社区基础设施性能的数据感知指标。这项研究的一个关键要素是创建一个虚拟试验台，该试验台可以利用弗吉尼亚理工大学和佛罗里达州一个零能源社区以及其他来源(如能源部)的真实大数据集，准确地重建、模拟和评估理论框架。试验台的目的是开放获取，并将能够支持东道国机构的研究以及需要非专有多域开放数据集的其他用户。因此，这项研究的整体性预计将促进可持续和相互联系的社区的全球部署。拟议的研究将得到智能社区大数据挑战活动的补充，该活动将使社区能够广泛参与。该教育计划包括以大数据为中心的新课程，以及研究生和本科生大规模参与大数据和智能社区研究。通过开放源码软件以及定期讲习班和教程确保广泛传播。将组织K-12外联活动，以吸引未被充分代表的学生群体参与大数据研究。这项变革性的研究将通过开发首个大数据驱动的整体方法，为通信、能源和交通网络等至关重要的系统联合规划、优化和部署社区基础设施，从而为智能、互联和可持续社区奠定理论和实践基础。通过汇集来自数据科学、电气工程以及土木和建筑工程的跨学科领域的专家，这项研究将产生几项创新：1)新颖的大数据技术，用于忠实地为智能社区创建时空模型，集成来自不同来源的数据，并阐明给定智能社区的组成和运营；2)新颖的、数据驱动的性能度量标准，其改进了来自随机几何的强大的数学工具，通过易处理的零能源、零停电和零拥堵的概念来明确量化智能社区的健康状况；3)先进的分析工具，从优化理论中提出新的想法，以设计部署、升级和运营各种社区基础设施节点的最有效的策略，给定数据和社区的规模、动态和结构，以及4)虚拟智能社区试验台，可以利用开放的、非专有的现实世界大数据集准确地重建、模拟和评估理论框架。

Transforming villages, towns, and cities into smart, connected, and sustainable communities is one of the most critical technological challenges of the coming decade. Realizing this vision is contingent upon enabling existing community infrastructure such as transportation, communications, and energy systems, to seamlessly integrate sustainable components such as renewable sources, smart sensors, and electric vehicles. Such an integration will ensure that tomorrow's communities are truly sustainable and connected by exhibiting desirable qualities that include: a) zero energy, in that they are self-sufficient in their energy production, b) zero outage, in that communication links across the community are ultra-reliable and experience significantly low interruption, and c) zero congestion, in that the traffic congestion is minimized across the community. With this overarching vision, the goal of this project is to develop a new planning framework for smart, connected and sustainable communities that allows meeting such zero-energy, zero-outage, and zero-congestions goals by optimally deciding on how, when, and where to deploy or upgrade a community's infrastructure. These decisions will be driven by massive volumes of community data, stemming from multiple sources that can include mobility, energy, traffic, communication demands, and other socio-technological information, to make informed decisions on how to gradually and organically transform a community into a fully sustainable and truly connected environment. The scale and heterogeneity of this problem necessitates the need for innovation in the tools used to process, analyze, and visualize heterogeneous data, as well as the data-aware metrics used to monitor the performance of this community infrastructure. One key element of this research is creation of a virtual testbed that can accurately reconstruct, simulate, and evaluate the theoretical framework by leveraging real-world big data sets from Virginia Tech and a zero-energy community in Florida as well as other sources, such as the DOE. The testbed is intended to be open access and will be able to support both research at host institution as well as other users requiring non-proprietary multi-domain open-data sets. The holistic nature of this research is thus expected to catalyze the global deployment of sustainable and connected communities. The proposed research will be complemented by a smart community big data challenge event that will enable broad community participation. The educational plan includes new big data-centric courses, as well as a large-scale involvement of graduate and undergraduate students in big data and smart communities research. Broad dissemination is ensured via open-source software and periodic workshops and tutorials. K-12 outreach events will be organized to attract under-represented student groups to big data research.This transformative research will lay the theoretical and practical foundations of smart, connected, and sustainable communities by developing the first big data-driven holistic approach to joint planning, optimization, and deployment of community infrastructure for systems of critical importance, such as communication, energy, and transportation networks. By bringing together interdisciplinary domain experts from data science, electrical engineering, and civil and architectural engineering, this research will yield several innovations: 1) Novel big data techniques for faithfully creating spatio-temporal models for smart communities that integrate data from heterogeneous sources and shed light on the composition and operation of a given smart community, 2) Novel, data-driven performance metrics that advance powerful mathematical tools from stochastic geometry to explicitly quantify the health of smart communities via tractable notions of zero energy, zero outage, and zero congestion, 3) Advanced analytical tools that bring forward novel ideas from optimization theory to devise the most effective strategies for deploying, upgrading, and operating various community infrastructure nodes, given the scale, dynamics, and structure of both the data and the community, and 4) A virtual smart community testbed that can accurately reconstruct, simulate, and evaluate the theoretical framework by leveraging open non-proprietary real-world big data sets.