A State-of-the-art Integrated Transportation Simulation Platform

Nowadays, universities and companies have a huge need for simulation and modelling methodologies. In the particular case of traffic and transportation, making physical modifications to the real traffic networks could be highly expensive, dependent on political decisions and could be highly disruptive to the environment. However, while studying a specific domain or problem, analysing a problem through simulation may not be trivial and may need several simulation tools, hence raising interoperability issues. To overcome these problems, we propose an agent-directed transportation simulation platform, through the cloud, by means of services. We intend to use the IEEE standard HLA (High Level Architecture) for simulators interoperability and agents for controlling and coordination. Our motivations are to allow multiresolution analysis of complex domains, to allow experts to collaborate on the analysis of a common problem and to allow co-simulation and synergy of different application domains. This paper will start by presenting some preliminary background concepts to help better understand the scope of this work. After that, the results of a literature review is shown. Finally, the general architecture of a transportation simulation platform is proposed

Towards a cooperative traffic network editor

In this paper we explore the potential benefits of concepts such as visual interactive modelling and simulation to devise and implement a cooperative network editor embedded in a collaborative environment for transport analysis. Traditional approaches lack adequate means to foster integrated analyses of transport systems either because they are strict in terms of purpose or because they do not allow multiple users to dynamically interact on the same description of a model. The use of a common geographical data model of the application domain promotes the means for different experts to interact seamlessly in a collaborative environment

Towards a microscopic traffic simulation framework to assess vehicle-to-vehicle networks

This paper presents the specification of a framework based on the concept of service-oriented architectures (SOA) to support the assessment of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET). A preliminary study of concepts related to SOA was carried out, as well as of those technologies that allow real-time data acquisition and dissemination within urban environments, and simulation tools to aid the simulation of the VANET. The requirements for our simulation framework were identified and a two-layered architecture was specified, which rely on the abstraction levels of services for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. A prototypical application was implemented, which was used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach presented through experimental results

Simulating communication in a service-oriented architecture for V2V networks

A framework based on the concept of service-oriented architectures (SOA) to Support the assessment of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) is herein presented. Concepts related to SOA, as well as technologies that allow real-time data acquisition and dissemination within urban environments, and simulation tools to aid the simulation of VANET were preliminarily Studied. A two-layered architecture wits specified oil the basis of the requirements for our simulation framework resulting in the specification of a multi-agent system formed of vehicle entities that are able to communicate and interact with each other and with their surrounding environment as well. A prototypical application was implemented, which Was used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach presented through experimental results

An approach to simulation of autonomous vehicles

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores (Major de Telecomunicações). Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Social Media Text Processing and Semantic Analysis for Smart Cities

With the rise of Social Media, people obtain and share information almost instantly on a 24/7 basis. Many research areas have tried to gain valuable insights from these large volumes of freely available user generated content. With the goal of extracting knowledge from social media streams that might be useful in the context of intelligent transportation systems and smart cities, we designed and developed a framework that provides functionalities for parallel collection of geo-located tweets from multiple pre-defined bounding boxes (cities or regions), including filtering of non-complying tweets, text pre-processing for Portuguese and English language, topic modeling, and transportation-specific text classifiers, as well as, aggregation and data visualization. We performed an exploratory data analysis of geo-located tweets in 5 different cities: Rio de Janeiro, S\~ao Paulo, New York City, London and Melbourne, comprising a total of more than 43 million tweets in a period of 3 months. Furthermore, we performed a large scale topic modelling comparison between Rio de Janeiro and S\~ao Paulo. Interestingly, most of the topics are shared between both cities which despite being in the same country are considered very different regarding population, economy and lifestyle. We take advantage of recent developments in word embeddings and train such representations from the collections of geo-located tweets. We then use a combination of bag-of-embeddings and traditional bag-of-words to train travel-related classifiers in both Portuguese and English to filter travel-related content from non-related. We created specific gold-standard data to perform empirical evaluation of the resulting classifiers. Results are in line with research work in other application areas by showing the robustness of using word embeddings to learn word similarities that bag-of-words is not able to capture

Validação de simuladores de condução low-cost baseados em jogos sérios usando Heads-Up Display: estudo de caso com simulação de dispositivos in-glass

A existência de simuladores de condução cada vez mais evoluídos e acessíveis em termos de custo é uma realidade, permitindo a realização de uma grande variedade de estudos, muitos dos quais de extrema importância para a melhoria da segurança na estrada, uma vez que há imensos cenários que não podem ser testados no mundo real devido ao perigo que podem apresentar para a segurança, quer do condutor e passageiros, quer das pessoas na estrada. Com a incorporação de realidade aumentada no para-brisas de automóveis, usando um Heads-Up Display (HUD) para a integração de sistemas de informação embutidos no veículo (IVIS), os condutores conseguem visualizar e percecionar a informação mostrada sem necessidade de desviarem o olhar da estrada, para olharem para o painel de instrumentos ou para o computador de bordo. Isto tem-se revelado bastante útil para o aumento da segurança, estando em crescimento o desenvolvimento de simuladores de condução cada vez mais fiáveis e imersivos, e de novos IVIS integrados num HUD em automóveis.A realização de testes de simulação de condução em veículos com HUD não é fácil de conseguir quando se procura um baixo custo, acessibilidade e um ambiente realista, sendo importante encontrar formas de fazer esses testes de forma mais fácil e em grande escala. Assim, com este trabalho pretendeu-se determinar até que ponto um simulador de baixo custo, baseado num jogo sério, pode ser utilizado em detrimento de um simulador de médio custo, para o estudo da perceção e análise de IVIS num HUD também de baixo custo. Para isso foram efectuadas experiências de simulação, envolvendo 35 partipantes, usando um jogo sério num computador ligado a um volante e pedais (simulador de baixo custo), e um carro real instrumentado no interior de um laboratório (simulador de médio custo de base fixa), ambos com e sem o auxílio de um HUD. Como resultado verificou-se que os condutores tinham a mesma perceção e reação à informação no HUD em ambos os simuladores, tendo sido considerados equivalentes, e por isso, o simulador de baixo custo pode ser utilizado para a análise e validação de IVIS num HUD. Em termos de realismo e controlo, os simuladores são totalmente diferentes, sendo mais imersivo e fácil de controlar um simulador de condução de médio custo. Neste caso, o simulador de baixo custo não consegue substituir um simulador de médio custo, não sendo adequado para estudos mais complexos, ou que possam necessitar de uma maior imersividade e controlo por parte dos condutores