IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 16, NO. 2, APRIL 2015

Scanning the Issue and Beyond: Transportation and

Mobility Transformation for Smart Cities

The OVERALL performance and current status of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS (T-ITS) have been reported and discussed in the first Executive Committee (ExCom) meeting of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) this year, held in beautiful Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. I am glad to inform you that the state of our journal is like the sunny blue sky, white clouds, and lovely beach of the Virgin Islands: bright and pleasant. The ExCom has decided to establish a new platform for ITSS social media presence; thus, our future abstracts will be distributed through the new social media platform.

This issue starts with three survey papers on technology and security for intelligent vehicles. I will go beyond smart cars and share my thinking and view on issues of transportation and mobility transformation for smart living in smart communities and cities.

TRANSPORTATION AND MOBILITY TRANSFORMATION FOR SMART CITIES

In February, Prof. Nanning Zheng and I went to Changshu, a midsize city near Shanghai, China, for the final discussion on various issues regarding the establishment of China’s first Intelligent Vehicle Proving Center (IVPC). The goal is to make IVPC a world center for the demonstration and advancement of technology and services for transportation and mobility transformation in future smart living in smart cities.

Before the meeting, I spent some time reading materials related to transportation and mobility transformation research and implementation. In addition to the extensive recent coverage by media on the University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center, I found an interesting final report on the Transportation Transformation Project by MZ Strategies, LLC. Yes, technology innovation is the key to transformation so far. As witnessed by Google’s self-driving cars, Uber, DiDi Dache, etc., technology-driving mobility and transportation innovation is growing exponentially. Right after last year’s IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference in Qingdao, China, a group of my own students started a venture that uses social networking media and Uber-like methods for social logistics. However, overall and around the world, governmental and public agencies are slow to respond and adapt. To speed up the mobility and transportation transformation for smart living in smart communities or smart cities, we need more than just technology, we need to consider and include dynamics of social organizations and cultures, and we need a comprehensive systems engineering approach that accommodates and embraces diversified disciplines, fields, thinking, behaviors, and cultures.

For me, current ITS projects are still too much field or discipline centric, traffic, vehicular, infrastructural, computers, control, communication, web, services, and so on, issues and problems are addressed mostly independently, sometimes integrated only at the small-scale or local levels. To many, and in many senses, total integration in physical space is something of an impossible mission: a hopeful journal to nowhere due to various forbidding economic, legal, ethical, or scientific barricades on the road. This is true to a large degree, but now, Cyberspace offers us a new mechanism of overcoming these barricades and an augmented reality infrastructure of integrating technology, systems, and societies for transformation in transportation and mobility. Total integration in cyberspace still faces many hurdles, but much less daunting, and should be feasible for implementation with models for artificial or software-defined transportation systems, methods for computational experiments, and tools for parallel execution of actual and virtual operations and organizations. I believe that this will be the future for ITS and for future transportation and mobility research, development, and applications. 

The emergence of and enthusiasm for smart cities and smart living provide a unique opportunity for realization of transportation and mobility transformation. The ITS professional community as a whole needs to think and plan for total integration in a full and ultralarge scale: from social logistics, economic development, and community service to personal mobility and seamless connection between smart homes to smart societies via intelligent transportation systems. New directions that we have promoted in the IEEE T-ITS over the last few years, from total traffic control, parallel driving, social transportation, computational transportation, transportation 5.0, and transportation knowledge automation to many others, will be critical for the development of next-generation transportation and mobility systems for smart living in smart cities. Virtual reality transportation and augmented reality mobility can used to greatly accelerate the process, reduce the cost, and improve the quality of conceiving, designing, testing, evaluating, implementing, and operating smart systems for future transportation and mobility, whereas cyber-physical-social systems would be the ideal venue to link and integrate these systems with our future life.

A quarter century ago, many regions/countries and professional organizations had proposed reference architectures or models for ITS; now, we need to develop national or international reference architectures for transportation and mobility transformation for smart living in smart communities and cities.

FEI-YUE WANG, Editor-in-Chief

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Scanning the Issue and Beyond： Transportation and Mobility Transformation for S.pdf