A smart city is a concept of cities that apply the information communication technologies (Smart ICT), such as the Internet-of-Things, cloud computing, big data, to improve and manage the planning, construction and smart services of cities.There are many challenges and opportunities of emerging and future smart cities, which can be addressed by means of cloud computing.
Cloud computing is driven by offering on-demand resources from the pool of virtualized resources to solve elasticity and scalability for large-scale computational objectives, such as dynamic energy pricing that is shifting peak demand to a different point in time when the energy price is lower, real-time massive data streaming, etc.A cloud-based platform will be instrumental in minimizing network complexity and providing cost-effective solutions as well as increasing the utilization of energy. Smart grid and smart city services cloud be deployed in different ways,such like in a hybrid cloud, community cloud, private cloud. As a step into this direction, we study dynamic pricing strategies in smart cities, try to formulate and model for a simple modelisation of maximizing the profit of an intermediate company which acting as an electricity broker for the end-user while orchestrating the management of smart-meters data which is stored and analytics computed across multiple cloud provider. In the model, the objective is to build a prototype reflecting the price contributions of the intermediate company (include electricity ype, cloud storage, compute) and see how to make it evolve over time to adapt to the demand.The users’ energy demand changes with the price to maximize their individual utility, and users might choose different retailers based on the provided prices. The intermediate company will choose the lowest cost of energy resources based on clients’ energy usage demand in real time. Dynamic pricing aims at reducing the overall energy consumption, the capacity of end use customers to change their electricity usage from their normal or current consumption patterns in response to market signals is mainly about shifting consumption to a different point in time.
Furthermore, in our model, the intermediate company need to pay the bills of cloud service which is a part of total cost. If the metering indicators and billing modes can be known for different type of cloud service, customers will have the tools for choosing, using and evaluating cloud services, and give guidance to understand why such bills need to be paid. The metering indicators and billing modes also help cloud service providers to get foundations for cloud service metering & pricing, settlement between different cloud service providers. During the studying, we have come to know that standardization in the area of metering and billing lags behind research, there isn’t any published standardization involve in metering indicators and billing principles for cloud service.
Therefore, in our study we focus on researching the market requirements for the metering indicators and billing principles of cloud service to highlight and determine gaps between industry practices, market requirements and current technical standardisation efforts at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 38 committee 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.Key words: Smart Cities, Cloud Computing, Dynamic Pricing, Technical Standardisation, Billing Principles
