Parallel Transportation Systems: Toward IoT-Enabled Smart Urban Traffic Control and Management

IoT-driven intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have great potential and capacity to make transportation systems efficient, safe, smart, reliable, and sustainable. The IoT provides the access and driving forces of seamlessly integrating transportation systems from the physical world to the virtual counterparts in the cyber world. In this paper, we present visions and works on integrating the artificial intelligent transportation systems and the real intelligent transportation systems to create and enhance “intelligence” of IoT-enabled ITS. With the increasing ubiquitous and deep sensing capacity of IoT-enabled ITS, we can quickly create artificial transportation systems equivalent to physical transportation systems in computers, and thus have parallel intelligent transportation systems, i.e. the real intelligent transportation systems and artificial intelligent transportation systems. The evolution process of transportation system is studied in the view of the parallel world. We can use a large number of long-term iterative simulation to predict and analyze the expected results of operations. Thus, truly effective and smart ITS can be planned, designed, built, operated and used. The foundation of the parallel intelligent transportation systems is based on the ACP theory, which is composed of artificial societies, computational experiments, and parallel execution. We also present some case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of parallel transportation systems.