Smart Cities October eNewsletter - Special Issue on Smart Transportation

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Written by Sara Paiva

Transportation is considered one of the verticals of Smart Cities and currently has enormous importance due to the global challenges that are posed in terms of cities’ sustainability. It has been given a huge highlight by organizations such as the United Nations.

Written by Christos Zaroliagis

Limited information about parking space availability in urban environments is an everyday burden with a severe social and environmental impact, due to time loss and unnecessary pollution while looking for free parking spaces. Crowdsourcing has been used as a source of parking availability information, since it provides flexibility and a system based on it can be deployed at a large scale due to the low infrastructure cost. Mobile phone users, participating in such a crowdsourcing-based parking system, can provide the sought parking availability information and receive in return some reward. The major challenges in this context concern the utilization and the quality of the crowdsourced data.

Written by Dr. Hrishikesh Venkataraman

Road transport is one of the major modes of transport across the world. It covers every corner of almost each country/continent, connecting the most remote places. It also contributes significantly to the economic development of countries. In the era of smart vehicles and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), roads are no longer merely a physical entity or solid ground. They have to be ‘empowered’ with information, communication, intelligence and sensing capability that were never possible decades ago. Having said that, if one leaves out the highways/freeways, the conditions of the remaining roads are not always best suitable to cruise-in. In fact, if one looks at emerging economies such as Asia, South America and Africa, which form the bulk of next generation growth in the smart transportation, the roads are not being well-maintained, primarily owing to the high cost of operation. Most of the times, the existing roads are not at all conducive to operate a smooth and efficient road transport system. In fact, there are several challenges that still needs to be identified and addressed in order to make roads and driving conditions better in multi-vehicle-type driving, diverse road conditions.

Written by Azin Moradbeikie1,2, Ahmad Keshavarz1, Habib Rostami1, Sara Paiva2, and Sergio Ivan Lopes2,3

According to the United Nations, nowadays, 55% of the world's population lives in cities, with that percentage predicted to rise to 68% by 2050 [1]. This increase will lead to fundamental social, economic, and environmental challenges that will shape the way we experience cities. Moreover, due to its complexity, a city can be seen as a system composed of different sub-systems like transportation, logistics, power grids, factories, harbors, etc., that interact and function as a whole. The 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development points out industrialization, i.e. Industry 4.0, as a fundamental driver to increase productivity, value, and job creation. Moreover, to achieve these industrial development goals, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies emerge as key enablers that pave the way to inclusive and sustainable industrial development sustained by improving processes in continuous innovation cycles. As a result, each sub-system of the city should become smarter, not only by collecting more data, but also, by giving meaning to data, in both spatio-temporal dimensions. The spatial context of data is therefore relevant and transversal in some city sub-systems, such as transportation and logistics, where, for example, harbors play a vital role, due to their vital relevance on the industrial and manufacturing supply chains.

Written by D.Jeya Mala and A.Pradeep Reynold

In Smart City applications, there is a tremendous focus on smart transportation. Several industries are working on self-driving cars to solve transportation issues associated with traditional traffic control systems. To its progression, the communication between self-driving cars has become a reality which helps them to form a platoon on a highway to provide an automated driving technology. The vehicles on the road are formed as a platoon in which each vehicle communicates with the other vehicle through V2V technology. In the platoon, the vehicle in the lead drives the speed. The other vehicles line up behind the first vehicle and automatically drive in formation to stay close together on the highway without any traffic congestion. An innovative idea suggested in this article is, the leader and the other vehicles in the platoon to be equipped with intelligent agents to track and communicate the speed of the vehicle to be followed by the other vehicles. In this way, several problems associated with Vehicle Platooning can be reduced.


IEEE Smart Cities Publications Journals and Magazines Special Issues

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