Chapter 17: Smart City and Cybersecurity
Smart cities are expected to be one of the defining experiences of the next decades. A smart city collects a lot of data using sensors located in various parts of the city, such as on the roads, utility infrastructures, and water resources. The data are then used to make data-driven and automated decisions, such as how to allocate the city resources, manage the traffic real-time, identify and mitigate infrastructure problems etc. This prospect comes with two challenges: How to program the automation and how to protect the highly-connected city assets from cyberattacks. Fortunately, reinforcement learning can help with both.
In this chapter, we cover three problems related to smart cities and cybersecurity and describe how to model them as RL problems. Along the way, we introduce you to the Flow library, a framework that connects traffic simulation software with RL libraries, and solve an example traffic light control problem.
In particular...