Sensing and monitoring of smart transportation systems

One of the main components of the city infrastructure is its transportation system that often battles with problems such as road congestion, delays, crashes, and emissions. The rapid advances in sensing and communication technology over the last couple of decades have made real-time monitoring and control of large-scale transportation systems feasible. Incorporating real-time sensing, monitoring, communication, and control mechanisms shapes intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which can alleviate many challenges that current transportation systems face. The emergence of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) catalyzes a new technological leap in modern transportation systems. The advancement in sensing and computing provides endless opportunities to utilize rich data generated by traditional sensing infrastructure, CAVs, and the upcoming connected infrastructure to develop real-time transportation planning and management applications. However, the many challenges remain in the form of data quality, data fusion, robust state estimation, elevated demand for network infrastructure to pursue on-site computing capability, and low-latency data exchange. This chapter discusses the evolution of present-day ITS as we know it, the current state-of-the-art practices for sensing and monitoring, and how road transportation will look in the near future. We will also understand the technological developments from a cyber-physical system and the Internet of things perspective. Finally, we will focus on sensor fusion as a possible solution to sensing challenges in the context of traffic state estimation.