An Improved Simulated Annealing Technique for Enhanced Mobility in Smart Cities

Vehicular traffic congestion is a significant problem that arises in many cities. This is due to the increasing number of vehicles that are driving on city roads of limited capacity. The vehicular congestion significantly impacts travel distance, travel time, fuel consumption and air pollution. Avoidance of traffic congestion and providing drivers with optimal paths are not trivial tasks. The key contribution of this work consists of the developed approach for dynamic calculation of optimal traffic routes. Two attributes (the average travel speed of the traffic and the roads’ length) are utilized by the proposed method to find the optimal paths. The average travel speed values can be obtained from the sensors deployed in smart cities and communicated to vehicles via the Internet of Vehicles and roadside communication units. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to three other algorithms: the simulated annealing weighted sum, the simulated annealing technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution and the Dijkstra algorithm. The weighted sum and technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution methods are used to formulate different attributes in the simulated annealing cost function. According to the Sheffield scenario, simulation results show that the improved simulated annealing technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution method improves the traffic performance in the presence of congestion by an overall average of 19.22% in terms of travel time, fuel consumption and CO2 emissions as compared to other algorithms; also, similar performance patterns were achieved for the Birmingham test scenario

Centralized simulated annealing for alleviating vehicular congestion in smart cities

Vehicular traffic congestion is a serious problem arising in many cities around the world, due to the increasing number of vehicles utilizing roads of a limited capacity. Often the congestion has a considerable influence on the travel time, travel distance, fuel consumption and air pollution. This paper proposes a novel dynamic centralized simulated annealing based approach for finding optimal vehicle routes using a VIKOR type of cost function. Five attributes: the average travel speed of the traffic, vehicles density, roads width, road traffic signals and the roads' length are utilized by the proposed approach to find the optimal paths. The average travel speed and vehicles density values can be obtained from the sensors deployed in smart cities and communicated to vehicles and roadside communication units via vehicular ad hoc networks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with four other algorithms, over two test scenarios: Birmingham and Turin city centres. These show the proposed method improves traffic efficiency in the presence of congestion by an overall average of 24.05%, 48.88% and 36.89% in terms of travel time, fuel consumption and CO2 emission, respectively, for a test scenario from Birmingham city in the UK. Additionally, similar performance patterns are achieved for the a test with data from Turin, Italy

Review of trends in automatic human activity recognition using synthetic audio-visual data

An in-depth study of knowledge and technologies was made related to the various scientific, technical, and industrial domains necessary for the acquisition of skills and capabilities for the design and development of a multisensory fusion system for vehicle cockpits. After an extensive literature review, it was possible to determine the baselines of the solution to be developed and obtain a pipeline prototype.This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020. Human and material resources have also been supported by the European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Programme (COMPETE 2020) [Project number 039334; Funding Reference: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-039334]