A Standardized Broker Model in Smart Cities

As urban residents are expected to represent more than 60 per cent of the world’s population by
2050, the current developments and interests in the “Smart City” concept are essential to enable
the successful transition to this new era. This paradigm relies on the integration of emerging
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud
Computing, Big Data to manage assets and resources efficiently while facilitating the planning,
construction, management and smart services within cities. While smart cities aim to enhance
the quality, performance and interactivity of urban services at reduced cost, their realization is
faced by many regulatory and technical challenges. Among these challenges, is the integration
of renewable energy resources to the utility system of smart cities motivated by the increasingclimate change concerns. Adding further to its complexity, is the challenge of incorporating
multiple renewable energy retailers in the same region each with their own pricing strategies due
to the lack of a standardized metering indicator and billing system. These challenges create a
need for an intelligent and standardized cloud-based energy broker to satisfying the end-user
requests, and minimize expenses by efficiently selecting the most suitable energy retailer.
In our work, a particular focus is raised towards the optimization of such energy brokering
service which is motivated by the orchestration of a brokering role aiming to improve user
experience and interaction with smart city services. Hence our main contribution is proposing a
standardized intelligent broker model with smart trading strategies to cope with the dynamics
and complexity of the energy retail market, while allocating energy resources based on endusers’
demands. This is achieved through the following steps: 1) studying a complete model of
the broker service and involved parties within the exposed framework. 2) proposing a multiobjective
heuristic to provide a dynamic optimization of the grid operations and resources, with
full cyber-security, within the boundaries of the city. 3) analyzing the gaps among industry
practices, market requirements and current technical standardization efforts at ISO/IEC JTC 1/
SC 38 (Cloud Computing and distributed platform) in order to pave the way to establishing
standards in metering indicators and billing principles for cloud services this while keeping in
mind privacy and data protection risks and regulations enforced by ISO JT1/SC 27 and EU
General Data Protection Regulation effective May 2018. This research was conducted in
collaboration with ILNAS - the Institut Luxem- bourgeois de la Normalisation, de l’Accréditation,
de la Sécurité et qualité des produits et services (ILNAS) under the authority of the Minister of
Economy, Luxembourg.