scholarly journals Vehicular Crowdsourcing for Congestion Support in Smart Cities

Smart Cities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 662-685
Author(s):  
Stephan Olariu
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Traffic Signal Control ◽  
Signal Timing ◽  
Adaptive Traffic Signal Control ◽  
Traffic Conditions ◽  
Direct Benefits ◽  
Traffic Signal Control Systems ◽  
Computational Resources

Under present-day practices, the vehicles on our roadways and city streets are mere spectators that witness traffic-related events without being able to participate in the mitigation of their effect. This paper lays the theoretical foundations of a framework for harnessing the on-board computational resources in vehicles stuck in urban congestion in order to assist transportation agencies with preventing or dissipating congestion through large-scale signal re-timing. Our framework is called VACCS: Vehicular Crowdsourcing for Congestion Support in Smart Cities. What makes this framework unique is that we suggest that in such situations the vehicles have the potential to cooperate with various transportation authorities to solve problems that otherwise would either take an inordinate amount of time to solve or cannot be solved for lack for adequate municipal resources. VACCS offers direct benefits to both the driving public and the Smart City. By developing timing plans that respond to current traffic conditions, overall traffic flow will improve, carbon emissions will be reduced, and economic impacts of congestion on citizens and businesses will be lessened. It is expected that drivers will be willing to donate under-utilized on-board computing resources in their vehicles to develop improved signal timing plans in return for the direct benefits of time savings and reduced fuel consumption costs. VACCS allows the Smart City to dynamically respond to traffic conditions while simultaneously reducing investments in the computational resources that would be required for traditional adaptive traffic signal control systems.

scholarly journals Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 843-870 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Houston ◽  
Jennifer Gabrys ◽  
Helen Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Community Initiatives ◽  
Theoretical Inquiry ◽  
Citizen Sensing ◽  
Urban Sensing

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives.

scholarly journals CitySpeed: A Crowdsensing-Based Integrated Platform for General-Purpose Monitoring of Vehicular Speeds in Smart Cities

Smart Cities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Costa ◽  
Adson Damasceno ◽  
Ivanovitch Silva
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Software Application ◽  
Management Actions ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Search Filters

The development of crowdsensing-based technologies has allowed for the use of smartphones in large-scale data collection for different scopes of applications, mostly in a transparent and ubiquitous way. When concerning urban areas and smart city initiatives, the collection and further analysis of information about the highest number of vehicles is of paramount importance, potentially supporting more efficient mobility planning and management actions in modern cities. In this context, this article proposes a public general-purpose platform for acquisition and visualization of vehicular speeds, which can then be exploited by any additional application. For that, a crowdsensing-based mobile software application was developed to collect instantaneous speeds provided by smartphone GPS, formatting and distributing this information to a database system. Such historical data can then be exported or visualized through a web-based comprehensive interface, which provides valuable data when planning traffic mobility in cities; for example, indicating areas with heavier traffic over a certain time period. Therefore, allowing the use of many different search filters and supporting data delivery in the JSON format, the CitySpeed platform can provide services not supported by popular applications, such as Waze and Google Maps, and potentially assist smart city initiatives in this area.

scholarly journals Smart City as a Model for Sustainable Development of Territories

2021 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 05003
Author(s):  
Konstantin Semyachkov
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
City Model ◽  
The Impact

The article examines the impact of digital technologies on the sustainable development of ecological and economic systems. The main aspects that make the development of digital technologies especially relevant for environmental modernization and sustainable development are analyzed. It is shown that the large-scale use of digital technologies contributes to the development of new tools, models and methods of urban management. One of the promising areas for the development of the urban environment in these conditions is the concept of a smart city. Based on the analysis of research on the topic of smart cities, the effects of the use of the smart city model for the formation of the foundations of sustainable development of territories are noted.

scholarly journals Environmental benefits through Storage, Exchange of thermal energy in smart city

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-142
Author(s):  
Ali Badai
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Small Neighborhood ◽  
Environmental Benefits ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Developmental Phase ◽  
The People ◽  
Direct Benefits ◽  
Gas Consumption ◽  
Novel Design

The aim of this study is to look at  the potential of a  local sustainable energy network in  a pre-existing context to develop a novel design beneficial to the environment. Nowadays, the concept of smart cities is still in the developmental phase/stage   andwe are currently residing in a transitional period, therefore it is very important to discover new solutions that show direct benefits the people may get from  transforming their city from a traditional to a smart city. Using experience and knowledge of successful projects in various European and non-European smart cities, this study attempts to demonstrate the practical potential of gradually moving existing cities to the level of smart cities by developing the available environmental resources. Data displays that using residual heat in a small neighborhood results in a lower annual gas consumption of at least 732. 200.00 m³, this incidentally leads to a reduction of CO₂  emission by 1,303,316 kg.

ACS-Lite Algorithmic Architecture: Applying Adaptive Control System Technology to Closed-Loop Traffic Signal Control Systems

2003 ◽  
Vol 1856 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felipe Luyanda ◽  
Douglas Gettman ◽  
Larry Head ◽  
Steven Shelby ◽  
Darcy Bullock ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Control ◽  
Control System ◽  
Control Systems ◽  
Closed Loop ◽  
Signal Control ◽  
Traffic Signal Control ◽  
Adaptive Control System ◽  
Traffic Conditions ◽  
Run Time ◽  
Traffic Signal Control Systems

ACS-Lite is being developed by FHWA to be a cost-effective solution for applying adaptive control system (ACS) technology to current, state-of-the-practice closed-loop traffic signal control systems. This effort is intended to make ACS technology accessible to many jurisdictions without the upgrade and maintenance costs required to implement ACS systems that provide optimized signal timings on a second-by-second basis. The ACS-Lite system includes three major algorithmic components: a time-of-day (TOD) tuner, a run-time refiner, and a transition manager. The TOD tuner maintains plan parameters (cycle, splits, and offsets) as the long-term traffic conditions change. The run-time refiner modifies the cycle, splits, and offsets of the plan that is currently running based on observation of traffic conditions that are outside the normal bounds of conditions this plan is designed to handle. The run-time refiner also determines the best time to transition from the current plan to the next plan in the schedule, or, like a traffic-responsive system, it might transition to a plan that is not scheduled next in the sequence. The transition manager selects from the transition methods built in to the local controllers to balance the time spent out of coordination with the delay and congestion that is potentially caused by getting back into step as quickly as possible. These components of the ACS-Lite algorithm architecture are described and the similarities and differences of ACS-Lite with state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice adaptive control algorithms are discussed. Closed-loop control system characteristics are summarized to give the context in which ACS-Lite is intended to operate.

KNOWLEDGE BASED TRAFFIC SIGNAL CONTROL MODEL FOR SIGNALIZED INTERSECTION

Transport ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrikas Pranevičius ◽  
Tadas Kraujalis
Keyword(s):  
Intelligent Transportation Systems ◽  
Control Method ◽  
Intelligent Transportation ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Traffic Signal ◽  
Signalized Intersection ◽  
Signal Control ◽  
Traffic Signal Control ◽  
Signal Timing ◽  
Traffic Conditions

Intelligent transportation systems have received increasing attention in academy and industry. Being able to handle uncertainties and complexity, expert systems are applied in vast areas of real life including intelligent transportation systems. This paper presents a traffic signal control method based on expert knowledge for an isolated signalized intersection. The proposed method has the adaptive signal timing ability to adjust its signal timing in response to changing traffic conditions. Based on the traffic conditions, the system determines to extend or terminate the current green signal group. Using the information from its traffic detectors of isolated intersection, the proposed controller gives optimal signals to adapt the phase lengths to the traffic conditions. A comparative analysis between proposed control algorithm, fuzzy logic (FLC) and fixed-timed (pre-timed) controllers has been made in traffic flows control, with varying traffic volume levels, by using simulation software ‘Arena’. Simulation results show that the proposed traffic signal control method (EKC) has better performance over fuzzy logic and conventional pre-time controllers under light and heavy traffic conditions.

scholarly journals Smart Cities of the Future as Cyber Physical Systems: Challenges and Enabling Technologies

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (10) ◽  
pp. 3349
Author(s):  
Antonio Puliafito ◽  
Giuseppe Tricomi ◽  
Anastasios Zafeiropoulos ◽  
Symeon Papavassiliou
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Smart City ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Sustainable Growth ◽  
Information And Communications Technology ◽  
Urban Issues

A smart city represents an improvement of today’s cities, both functionally and structurally, that strategically utilizes several smart factors, capitalizing on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to increase the city’s sustainable growth and strengthen the city’s functions, while ensuring the citizens’ enhanced quality of life and health. Cities can be viewed as a microcosm of interconnected “objects” with which citizens interact daily, which represents an extremely interesting example of a cyber physical system (CPS), where the continuous monitoring of a city’s status occurs through sensors and processors applied within the real-world infrastructure. Each object in a city can be both the collector and distributor of information regarding mobility, energy consumption, air pollution as well as potentially offering cultural and tourist information. As a consequence, the cyber and real worlds are strongly linked and interdependent in a smart city. New services can be deployed when needed, and evaluation mechanisms can be set up to assess the health and success of a smart city. In particular, the objectives of creating ICT-enabled smart city environments target (but are not limited to) improved city services; optimized decision-making; the creation of smart urban infrastructures; the orchestration of cyber and physical resources; addressing challenging urban issues, such as environmental pollution, transportation management, energy usage and public health; the optimization of the use and benefits of next generation (5G and beyond) communication; the capitalization of social networks and their analysis; support for tactile internet applications; and the inspiration of urban citizens to improve their quality of life. However, the large scale deployment of cyber-physical-social systems faces a series of challenges and issues (e.g., energy efficiency requirements, architecture, protocol stack design, implementation, and security), which requires more smart sensing and computing methods as well as advanced networking and communications technologies to provide more pervasive cyber-physical-social services. In this paper, we discuss the challenges, the state-of-the-art, and the solutions to a set of currently unresolved key questions related to CPSs and smart cities.

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