Synergies Between Transportation Systems, Energy Hub and the Grid in Smart Cities

The concept of smart cities has emerged as an ongoing research in recent years. In this case, there is a proven association between the smart cities and the smart devices, which have caused the power systems to become more flexible, controllable and detectable. Along with these promising results, many disputes have been generated over the cyber-attacks as unpredictable destructive threats, if not properly repelled, which could seriously endanger the power system. With this in mind, this paper explores a novel stochastic virtual assignment (SVA) method based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) approach, where the essential data of the system sections are broadcasted decentralized through the data blocks, as a worthwhile step to deal with the cyber attacks’ risk. To do so, an additional security layer is added to the data blocks aiming to enhance the security of the data against the long lasting data sampling by virtually assigning the hash addresses (HAs) to the data blocks, which are randomly changed based on a stochastic process. The basic network architecture is based on a Provchain structure as a new framework to constantly monitor data operation. Two pivotal strategies also represented to deal with the energy and time needed for the HAs generation process, which have improved the proposed method. In this paper, the proposed security framework is implemented in a smart city environment to provide a secure energy transaction platform. Results show the authenticity of this model and demonstrate the effectiveness of the SVA method in decreasing the successful probability of cyber threat, increasing the time needed for the cyber attacker to decrypt and manipulate the data block.