Manir U. Isham

A smart city is a trending concept describing a new generation of cities operated intelligently with minimal human intervention. It promotes energy sustainability, minimal environmental impact, and better governance. In transportation, the remote highway infrastructure monitoring will enhance the driver’s safety, continuously report road conditions, and identify potential hazardous incidents such as accidents, floods, or snow storms. In addition, it facilitates the integration of future cuttingedge technologies such as self-driving vehicles. This paper presents a general introduction to a smart monitoring system for automated real-time road condition inspection. The proposed solution includes hardware devices/nodes and software applications for data processing, road condition inspection using hybrid algorithms based on digital signal processing, and artificial intelligence technologies. The proposed system has an interactive web interface for real-time data sharing, infrastructure monitoring, visualization, and management of inspection reports which can improve the maintenance process.

In recent years, the foment for sustainable and reliable micro energy grid (MEG) systems has increased significantly, aiming mainly to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels, provide low-cost clean energy, lighten the burden, and increase the stability and reliability of the regional electrical grid by having interconnected and centralized clean energy sources, and ensure energy resilience for the population. A resilient energy system typically consists of a system able to control the energy flow effectively by backing up the intermittent output of renewable sources, reducing the effects of the peak demand on the grid side, considering the impact on dispatch and reliability, and providing resilient features to ensure minimum operation interruptions. This paper aims to demonstrate a real-time simulation of a microgrid capable of predicting and ensuring energy lines run correctly to prevent or shorten outages on the grid when it is subject to different disturbances by using energy management with a fail-safe operation and redundant control. In addition, it presents optimized energy solutions to enhance the situational awareness of energy grid operators based on a graphical and interactive user interface. To expand the MEG’s capability, the setup integrates real implemented hardware components with the emulated components based on real-time simulation using OPAL-RT OP4510. Most hardware components are implemented in the lab to be modular, expandable, and flexible for various test scenarios, including fault imitation. They include but are not limited to the power converter, inverter, battery charger controller, relay drivers, programmable AC and DC loads, PLC, and microcontroller-based controller. In addition, the real-time simulation offers a great variety of power sources and energy storage such as wind turbine emulators and flywheels in addition to the physical sources such as solar panels, supercapacitors, and battery packs.