Integration of Blockchain with Connected and Autonomous Vehicles: Vision and Challenge

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are introduced to improve individuals’ quality of life by offering a wide range of services. They collect a huge amount of data and exchange them with each other and the infrastructure. The collected data usually includes sensitive information about the users and the surrounding environment. Therefore, data security and privacy are among the main challenges in this industry. Blockchain, an emerging distributed ledger, has been considered by the research community as a potential solution for enhancing data security, integrity, and transparency in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). However, despite the emphasis of governments on the transparency of personal data protection practices, CAV stakeholders have not been successful in communicating appropriate information with the end users regarding the procedure of collecting, storing, and processing their personal data, as well as the data ownership. This article provides a vision of the opportunities and challenges of adopting blockchain in ITS from the “data transparency” and “privacy” perspective. The main aim is to answer the following questions: (1) Considering the amount of personal data collected by the CAVs, such as location, how would the integration of blockchain technology affect transparency , fairness , and lawfulness of personal data processing concerning the data subjects (as this is one of the main principles in the existing data protection regulations)? (2) How can the trade-off between transparency and privacy be addressed in blockchain-based ITS use cases?

Make More Connections: Urban Traffic Flow Forecasting with Spatiotemporal Adaptive Gated Graph Convolution Network

Urban traffic flow forecasting is a critical issue in intelligent transportation systems. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of urban road conditions, how to capture the dynamic spatiotemporal correlation and make accurate predictions is very challenging. In most of existing works, urban road network is often modeled as a fixed graph based on local proximity. However, such modeling is not sufficient to describe the dynamics of the road network and capture the global contextual information. In this paper, we consider constructing the road network as a dynamic weighted graph through attention mechanism. Furthermore, we propose to seek both spatial neighbors and semantic neighbors to make more connections between road nodes. We propose a novel Spatiotemporal Adaptive Gated Graph Convolution Network ( STAG-GCN ) to predict traffic conditions for several time steps ahead. STAG-GCN mainly consists of two major components: (1) multivariate self-attention Temporal Convolution Network ( TCN ) is utilized to capture local and long-range temporal dependencies across recent, daily-periodic and weekly-periodic observations; (2) mix-hop AG-GCN extracts selective spatial and semantic dependencies within multi-layer stacking through adaptive graph gating mechanism and mix-hop propagation mechanism. The output of different components are weighted fused to generate the final prediction results. Extensive experiments on two real-world large scale urban traffic dataset have verified the effectiveness, and the multi-step forecasting performance of our proposed models outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

Importance of the Static Infrastructure for Dissemination of Information within Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are a today´s hot topic, especially in the context of the development of information technologies, which can be employed in transportation. Although the scope and the technical solution of these systems may vary, they are frequently based on VANET (Vehicular ad hoc network), i.e. a communication network, which is primarily generated among the moving subjects, which form ITS. Given the highly dynamic VANET, the questions are raised as to the data transmission. This paper is aimed to make a detail analysis of the communications within VANET using the simulation model, which includes the static infrastructure of ITS and to experimentally verify the impact of this infrastructure on the dynamics of information spreading in ITS. The authors present the results obtained from a few different scenarios, which have been tested.

Fitting Empirical Fundamental Diagrams of Road Traffic: A Comprehensive Review and Comparison of Models Using an Extensive Data Set

<div>Understanding the inter-relationships between traffic flow, density, and speed through the study of the fundamental diagram of road traffic is critical for traffic modelling and management. Consequently, over the last 85 years, a wealth of models have been developed for its functional form. However, there has been no clear answer as to which model is the most appropriate for observed (i.e. empirical) fundamental diagrams and under which conditions. A lack of data has been partly to blame. Motivated by shortcomings in previous reviews, we first present a comprehensive literature review on modelling the functional form of empirical fundamental diagrams. We then perform fits of 50 previously proposed models to a high quality sample of 10,150 empirical fundamental diagrams pertaining to 25 cities. Comparing the fits using information criteria, we find that the non-parametric Sun model greatly outperforms all of the other models. The Sun model maintains its winning position regardless of road type and congestion level. Our study, the first of its kind when considering the number of models tested and the amount of data used, finally provides a definitive answer to the question ``Which model for the functional form of an empirical fundamental diagram is currently the best?''. The word ``currently'' in this question is key, because previously proposed models adopt an inappropriate Gaussian noise model with constant variance. We advocate that future research should shift focus to exploring more sophisticated noise models. This will lead to an improved understanding of empirical fundamental diagrams and their underlying functional forms.</div><div><br></div><div>Accepted by IEEE Transactions On Intelligent Transportation Systems on 14th Dec 2021<br></div><br>

Percolation in networks with local homeostatic plasticity

Percolation is a process that impairs network connectedness by deactivating links or nodes. This process features a phase transition that resembles paradigmatic critical transitions in epidemic spreading, biological networks, traffic and transportation systems. Some biological systems, such as networks of neural cells, actively respond to percolation-like damage, which enables these structures to maintain their function after degradation and aging. Here we study percolation in networks that actively respond to link damage by adopting a mechanism resembling synaptic scaling in neurons. We explain critical transitions in such active networks and show that these structures are more resilient to damage as they are able to maintain a stronger connectedness and ability to spread information. Moreover, we uncover the role of local rescaling strategies in biological networks and indicate a possibility of designing smart infrastructures with improved robustness to perturbations.

Sustainable Energy Management in Intelligent Transportation

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are a collection of technologies that can enhance transport networks and public transit and individual decision-making about various elements of travel. ITS technologies comprise cutting-edge wireless, electronic and automated technology intending to improve safety, efficiency and convenience in surface transit. In certain cases, reducing energy usage has proven to be an ITS advantage. In this report, the primary energy advantages of a range of ITS systems established through models, pilot projects/field tests and extensive use are examined and summarized. In worldwide driving, the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions play a vital role. A new age of communication leading to ITS will be the communication between cars via IoT. IoT is a mixture of data and data analysis data storage and processing to manage the traffic system efficiently.Energy management, which is seen as an efficient, innovative approach to highly efficient energy generation plants. It simultaneously takes care of optimizing traditional sources of the IoT based intelligent transport system, helps to automate railways, roads, airways and shipways, which improve customer experience in the process. Following an evaluation of the situation, a proposal named energy management in intelligent transportation (EMIT) improves energy efficiency and economic efficiency in transportation. It improves energy management to reduce economic and ecological waste by decreasing global transport energy consumption. The sustainable development ratio is 85.7%, accidents detection ratio is 85.3%, electric vehicle infrastructure ratio is 83.6%, intelligent vehicle parking system acceptance ratio is 82.15%, and reduction ratio of energy consumption is 91.4%.

Activity of vehicles in the bus rapid transit system Metrobús in Mexico City

In this paper, we analyze a massive dataset with registers of the movement of vehicles in the bus rapid transit system Metrobús in Mexico City from February 2020 to April 2021. With these records and a division of the system into 214 geographical regions (segments), we characterize the vehicles’ activity through the statistical analysis of speeds in each zone. We use the Kullback–Leibler distance to compare the movement of vehicles in each segment and its evolution. The results for the dynamics in different zones are represented as a network where nodes define segments of the system Metrobús and edges describe similarity in the activity of vehicles. Community detection algorithms in this network allow the identification of patterns considering different levels of similarity in the distribution of speeds providing a framework for unsupervised classification of the movement of vehicles. The methods developed in this research are general and can be implemented to describe the activity of different transportation systems with detailed records of the movement of users or vehicles.

Comparing Machine Learning Models for the Predictions of Speed in Smart Transportation Systems

In today's world of advanced technologies in IoT and ITS in smart cities scenarios, there are many different projections such as improved data propagation in smart roads and cooperative transportation networks, autonomous and continuously connected vehicles, and low latency applications in high capacity environments and heterogeneous connectivity and speed. This chapter presents the performance of the speed of vehicles on roadways employing machine learning methods. Input variable for each learning algorithm is the density that is measured as vehicle per mile and volume that is measured as vehicle per hour. And the result shows that the output variable is the speed that is measured as miles per hour represent the performance of each algorithm. The performance of machine learning algorithms is calculated by comparing the result of predictions made by different machine learning algorithms with true speed using the histogram. A result recommends that speed is varying according to the histogram.