Section: Application Domains

Automation in Smart City

The domain of Smart Cities is still young but it is already a huge market which attracts number of companies and researchers. It is also multi-fold as the words "smart city" gather multiple meanings. Among them one of the main responsibilities of a city, is to organize the transportation of goods and people. In intelligent transportation systems (ITS), ICT technologies have been involved to improve planification and more generally efficiency of journeys within the city. We are interested in the next step where efficiency would be improved locally relying on local interactions between vehicles, infrastructure and people (smartphones).

For the future autonomous vehicle are now in the spotlight, since a lot of works has been done in recent years in automotive industry as well as in academic research centers. Such unmanned vehicles could strongly impact the organisation of the transportation in our cities. However, due to the lack of a definition of what is an "autonomous" vehicle, it is still difficult to see how these vehicles will interact with their environment (eg. road, smart city, houses, grid, etc.). From augmented perception to fully cooperative automated vehicle, the autonomy covers various realities in terms of interaction the vehicle relies on. The extended perception relies on communication between the vehicle and surrounding roadside equipments. That helps the driving system to build and maintain an accurate view of the environment. But at this first stage the vehicle only uses its own perception to make its decisions. At a second stage, it will take advantages of local interaction with other vehicles through car-to-car communications to elaborate a better view of its environment. Such "cooperative autonomy" does not try to reproduce the human behavior anymore, it strongly relies on communication between vehicles and/or with the infrastructure to make decision and to acquire information on the environment. Part of the decision could be centralized (almost everything for an automatic metro) or coordinated by a roadside component. The decision making could even be fully distributed but this put high constraints on the communications. Automated vehicles are just an example of smart city automated processes that will have to share information within the surrounding to make their decisions.