Engineering Smart Cities

Catalog description

This course prepares students to tackle the technical challenges to designing and operating smart and dynamic infrastructure systems. In particular, students will learn to combine data and models to control overall system performance in the face of uncertainty. The class will focus on smart city infrastructure systems that are self-aware, with continual surveillance of the built and natural environment and an autonomous capacity to control resource allocation. This course will build upon fundamental engineering principles (for systems such as transportation, energy, and water resources) and teach students to employ emerging sensor technologies, accompanying data analytics, resource demand forecasting, and model predictive control theory. Students will learn to couple engineering models of infrastructure with data-driven probabilistic models of resource demand and the approaches to control these integrated hybrid systems for optimal and equitable resource allocation with improved resilience to exogenous disturbances. Finally, the class will explore cases studies in urban flooding, energy supply, transportation and air quality, and water supply.