Large-Scale Modeling of Smart Cities Considering the Mutual Impact of Transportation and Communication Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) are key components of the transportation systems within future smart cities, in which information and communication technologies interact to enhance the transportation system. By collecting and analyzing real-time data, and applying advanced data analytics techniques, ITS can make better-informed decisions, that are sent back to the network actuators (cars, drivers, traffic signals, travelers,... etc.) to solve or at least mitigate the ongoing transportation problems. In such feedback systems, the communication network is a major component that interacts with the transportation applications. Consequently, it is imperative to study the mutual interactions and effects between the communication and the transportation networks.

The key enabler for such studies is the large-scale modeling of communication and transportation systems. However, developing such models is challenging, not only because of the intricate interdependency between the communication and transportation systems but also because of the scale of such systems that usually covers a city-level network with hundreds of thousands of travelers concurrently moving and communicating in the network.

Consequently, in our research, we are interested in studying the mutual impact of the communication and transportation systems in large-scale networks while focusing on eco-routing navigation applications that attempt to minimize the transportation network carbon footprint. Our objectives are: 1) enabling the large-scale modeling of transportation systems in smart cities including both transportation and communication systems and 2) studying the mutual interactions between the communication and the transportation systems in real-world networks.

Under this umbrella, we introduced two simulation frameworks to realistically model the communication in vehicular systems. Subsequently, we use them to study the mutual influence of the communication and transportation system. Moreover, we designed, developed, and tested a multi-modal agent-based simulation platform which can simulate large-scale transportation systems.

The results show that, in congested road networks, the communication performance has a significant impact on the transportation system performance. Moreover, the results show that there is a negative mutual impact loop that may lead to a degrading performance of both systems. Thus, it is important to consider this impact when deploying new ITS technologies that utilize vehicular wireless communication.