IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019 - 34

Research Challenges
and Obstacles
This article began as a response to
the question posed by Weissman:
"Will driverless cars make rails obsolete?" In the near term, we believe
that the diversity provided by multiple systems, relying on emergent
coordination hierarchies, is inherently more resilient than a single
transportation solution. We further

Whether a system survives in a
particular ecosystem should
be the result of how it responds
to conditions.
argue that simulation, contextualized to the expected environment,
is likely the best way to answer
these kinds of questions. As such
we divide research challenges into
two groups: 1) the modeling of nearterm environments as they begin to
incorporate AVs, and 2) the larger
problem of rethinking transportation
systems that are dominated by intelligent machines.
In the first case, we have a series of
familiar actors: passengers, bus drivers, bus companies, autonomous
vehicles, city managers and experts,
etc. These are quite autonomous
and generally act independently. This makes the system highly
dynamic and distributed, and capable of reacting to a transportation
environment that changes frequently and unpredictably.
Existing approaches normally
deal with multi-agent adaptive systems through isolated adaptation:
each actor adapts itself independently from other actors. However,
in a Smart City the problem is
complicated by collective behavior.

Even though agents are generally
autonomous, they dynamically form
collaborative groups (ensemble s),
to ga in benef it s that otherwise
would not be possible.
An example of such an ensemble
is a carpooling ride, which coordinates the adaptation behavior of
multiple entities (car driver, passengers, and carpooling company) and
in return gives them certain benefits
(e.g., a cheap and fast way of
traveling). The membership
of an ensemble may temporarily reduce the flexibility
of its agents. Within this
context, isolated entit y
self-adaptation is not effective. We can easily imagine
what happens if passengers book a tr ip w ith a
ride and then change their
mind and decide not to
travel. It is likely to cause unnecessary delay for the other ride participants (e.g., the car driver will
have a redundant stop) and raise
the cost of the trip for the remaining passengers, including probably
extra charges for the ca nceling
passenger. Alternatively, serious
consequences can arise if a car
gets damaged: isolated adaptation
by the car driver could totally disrupt the passengers' travel plans.
Such a minor issue as a missing
passenger is unlikely to cause more
than a minor fluctuation in the overall behavior of almost any system.
But what happens at the limits?
How does a smart system evacuate
the population of a mountain village under the threat of avalanche
in the middle of a storm? The issue
of adaptation must be studied and
simulated under many scenarios.
In particular, we believe that how
a system behaves in extreme
situations, when many lives are at
stake, is a significant discriminator
in deciding on the transportation
options for a region.
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

The second issue is more nebulous, but no less important, as we
are laying the foundations for it
now. What does the fully intelligent future of transportation look
like? And how do we adjust our policies so that what is implemented
provides for the needs of the regional population?
Mobility exists in a social context - our movement patterns
affect one another, manifested
in public work s such as roads,
railways, and airports. As such,
it is a domain that falls under the
competence of public administrations. In order to promote durable
innovations in this sector, a strong
political engagement is mandatory.
Balancing the need for innovation
to address problems as diverse
as congestion and climate change
requires mechanisms for informing the public in meaningful ways
about potential outcomes (such as
new business opportunities) that
they have a say in.
As transportation continues to
merge with telecommunication,
questions of what the transportation infrastructure of the future
will be are very much in flux. No
one could have predicted that the
Internet would have led to such
a rapid increase in freight transport, for which services across all
transport modes are being used
to meet demand. Similarly, intelligent transportation will continue
to support the social needs of the
public, while also being flexible and
resilient enough to handle inevitable catastrophes (i.e., to evacuate
crowds in the situation of a natural
disaster), that require rapid, mass
movements of people. Whether that
transportation is rails, roads, or
passenger-carrying unmanned aircraft is an open question. We need
to start addressing these questions
now, before we wind up with solutions that nobody wanted.
∕

JUNE 2019

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019

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