Design and Application of Intelligent Transportation Multi-Source Data Collaboration Framework Based on Digital Twins

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The author needs to revise the paper as follows:

1- The language - grammar needs extensive revision, e.g. the abstract can not use past tense "This paper built ..." etc. Also many problems that make the paper unclear, e.g. The first paragraph in the introduction 

2- The research problem is not clear in the introduction section. 

3- the contribution is not clear. A paragraph that summarizes the contribution can be added at the end of the introduction section 

4- figures are not clear. use high resolution figures , e.g. figure 3

5-  The paper is written as a chapter not an article, rewrite the paper and change the structure 

6- too many data input to the digital twin, it is not clear how these input can be treated and merged to give useful output. 

7- the reference are not enough. Add more reference from the field of traffic flow prediction, spatio-temporal flow prediction and forecasting , there should be a section about related work that shows the state of the art in this field 

Author Response

Dear Prof.:

Thank you very much for the review report for my paper submitted to Applied Sciences.

According to your comments, we modify the paper as follows:

1. Revise the title of the paper to add"digital twin", the title is written as “Design and application of intelligent transportation multi-source data collaboration framework based on digital twins”.
2. Revise the structure of the article and highlight the research contribution.
3. Modify the keyword to add "digital twin".
4. Change the color of Figure1, Datalayer of Figure2 ,enhance Figure3 and add ordinate of Figure8 (Figure8 becomes Figure9 due to structural adjustment)
5. Add five references about GPS trajectory and spatio-temporal data processing, and add comparison in Table1.
6. Rewrite the Introduction to highlight contributions and Outlines.
7. Reorganize the case study and explain the type of each data and the way of collaboration.
8. Revise grammar, paragraph cohesion, and English expression extensively.

All modifications have been marked up using the "Track Changes" function.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time to evaluate our work and for your insightful comments that have resulted in an improved manuscript. We would also like to thank you for handling our submission efficiently and professionally. We hope our revised paper can be judged to have met the high standard of Applied Sciences.

The responses to your review comments are attached in the Word file.

Sincerely yours,

Xihou Zhang

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1.  Your introduction does not justify the research title you proposed.  In your Introduction, the topic of digital twin has been mostly discussed and somehow, this is not related to your title.  I suggest you revise your title or revise your introduction part so that they form a single idea that is not confusing to your readers.  Digital twin discussion pertaining to ITS is not also elaborated.  Please revise.

2. In your last paragraph, you talked about the application of digital twin to ITS, however, the previous paragraph does not provide enough discussion about the use of GPS data to study ITS.  I suggest that you include the following literature to support what were the things obtained from using GPS traces.

Magsino, E. R., & Ho, I. W. H. (2022). An enhanced information sharing roadside unit allocation scheme for vehicular networks. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Guo, Y., Li, B., Lu, Z., & Zhou, J. (2022). A novel method for road network mining from floating car data. Geo-spatial Information Science, 25(2), 197-211.

Shi, Y., Wang, D., Ni, Z., Liu, H., Liu, B., & Deng, M. (2022). A Sequential Pattern Mining Based Approach to Adaptively Detect Anomalous Paths in Floating Vehicle Trajectories. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Wang, S., Niu, X., Fournier-Viger, P., Zhou, D., & Min, F. (2022). A graph based approach for mining significant places in trajectory data. Information Sciences, 609, 172-194.

Magsino, E., Ching, G. R., Espiritu, F. M., & Go, K. (2022). Evaluating Stable Matching Methods and Ridesharing Techniques in Optimizing Passenger Transportation Cost and Companionship. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 11(11), 556.

Felemban, E., & Ur Rehman, F. (2022). An Interactive Analysis Platform for Bus Movement: A Case Study of One of the World’s Largest Annual Gathering. In IoT for Sustainable Smart Cities and Society (pp. 125-143). Springer, Cham.

3.  In your last paragraph, the discussion about cyber-physical systems has not been discussed or elaborated in your previous discussions.  

4.  The last paragraph must be separated in two paragraphs, where the first paragraph contains your major contributions.  Enumerate and elaborate on them.  The second paragraph should now discuss the outline of your paper.

5.  I am also wondering, is the Introduction labeled as Section 0?

6.  The acronym DD does not justify its meaning of digital twin data module.  Should it be renamed to DTDM?

7. In Figure 1, intersection labeled Digital Twin is not easily recognizable because it is colored blue, just like the Physical Entity circle.  Please change this.

8.  What is "Ss data"?

9.  The various data, e.g., Dp, Dv, Dk, etc., have not been defined or discussed. At least the authors should provide the readers with definitions about what examples of these data are.

10.  In Table 1, I think the suggested literatures above should be studied or be compared with too.  

11.  When referring to the figure, use "Figure 2", instead of "Fig. 2".

12.  In Figure 2, there are four layers with a single statement discussion.  I suggest that you further elaborate the different layers and place it in bullets for easy recognition.

13.  In Section 2.2.1, you discussed BIM and IoT.  However, as a reader, how do I visualize where IoT is in your Figure 2?  How is IoT related to BIM which is part of your Data Layer?

14.  In page 4, 2nd to the last sentence. "preproces"  ==> "preprocess".  Please check spelling.

15.  Figure 3 must be enhanced because it is not readable in normal view.

16.  In equation (2), the "-" means negative?   If so, then "-" multiplied by "-" should be positive?  What are x, y, and z and their corresponding primed variables?  This may be obvious but it is the responsibility of the authors that every variable is well-defined.

17.  please check subject-verb agreement too.  Many to mention here.

18.  If the sampling time is 1 second and delete data whose speed is zero after five seconds, isn't this impractical since there are vehicles which are near the intersection and has to stop for more than 5 seconds, right?  You need to justify this more.

In the paper below, such scenario is characterized as idle time or vehicle idling.

Magsino, E. R. (2021, July). Investigating the operational dynamics of different transportation modes in vehicular networks. In 2021 International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT) (pp. 246-250). IEEE.

19.  You should also discuss your GPS dataset.

20.  The Haversine formula must be cited properly.

21.  In equation (5), shouldn't the average speed be that of the given literature below?  Why?  It is because your dataset contains vehicle speeds!  Equation (5) is the same as equation (3) in the literature below, too!

Magsino, E. R. (2021, July). Investigating the operational dynamics of different transportation modes in vehicular networks. In 2021 International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT) (pp. 246-250). IEEE. 

22.  Why were the time of study only from 8-9am and 1730-1830 only?  Please justify.

23.  What are the axes labels in Figure 8?

24.  In Figure 9, it is obvious that the intersections have peak values.  However, the other intersections should be included and then, that is the time you say that intersections A and B and A, B, and D have the peak in during rush hours.

25.  In Table 4, accuracy is measured as what?

26.  I think that Figure 11 should be part of your methodology and not included in the latter part of the paper.  Figure 11 allowed me to understand your proposed work and this should be placed and discussed in the earlier sections of your paper, e.g., methodology.

Author Response

Dear Prof.:

Thank you very much for the review report for my paper submitted to Applied Sciences.

According to your comments, we modify the paper as follows:

1. Revise the title of the paper to add"digital twin", the title is written as “Design and application of intelligent transportation multi-source data collaboration framework based on digital twins”.
2. Revise the structure of the article and highlight the research contribution.
3. Modify the keyword to add "digital twin".
4. Change the color of Figure1, Datalayer of Figure2 ,enhance Figure3 and add ordinate of Figure8 (Figure8 becomes Figure9 due to structural adjustment)
5. Add five references about GPS trajectory and spatio-temporal data processing, and add comparison in Table1.
6. Rewrite the Introduction to highlight contributions and Outlines.
7. Reorganize the case study and explain the type of each data and the way of collaboration.
8. Revise grammar, paragraph cohesion, and English expression extensively.

All modifications have been marked up using the "Track Changes" function.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time to evaluate our work and for your insightful comments that have resulted in an improved manuscript. We would also like to thank you for handling our submission efficiently and professionally. We hope our revised paper can be judged to have met the high standard of Applied Sciences.

The responses to your review comments are attached in the Word file.

Sincerely yours,

Xihou Zhang

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Congratulations to Authors on the idea of modeling ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) using the concept of Digital Twins.

However, there are issues that should be addressed:

1-The abstract should be further developed in order to clarify more precisely paper content and its aims, methodology employed and contributed innovations.

2-"Digital-twin" keyword should be  included in keyword list.

3- Reading the paper, relations between digital twin methodology and ITS shows a bit confusing; this ambiguity begins with the section title “1- Improved digital Twin Architecture based in ITS”. Is the modeling of ITS based on Digital  twin  or is the Digital twin methodology based in ITS?

4-Problem formulation. There is not a clear and synthetic problem formulation. From the point of view of this paper, what does an intelligent transport system mean?  What are the most important problems and issues that an intelligent transport system(ITS) address and solve and for which the contribution of suggested digital twin methodology is an added  value?

5-The article should be ameliorated from the point of view of cohesion and  organization, being sometimes difficult to follow the relationship between its parts.

6-Abstract announces that a case study would verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework but this is not shown in the text.

7-The methodology of digital twins is very sophisticated and their use poses implementation problems not being always clear that it is the best alternative from an economic and development  points of view if compared to existing and tested simulation alternatives. No reference is made to these issues.

8-The case study must be reformulated  in a way that its data boundaries become well delimited and its source clearly identified.

9-Page 3. The meaning of symbols such as the components of vector DD should be clarified, avoiding the need to read references.

10-References. Given the relevance in the text of spatio-temporal issues, additional  references covering this topic in the context of GPS data should be added.

Author Response

Dear Prof.:

Thank you very much for the review report for my paper submitted to Applied Sciences.

According to your comments, we modify the paper as follows:

1. Revise the title of the paper to add"digital twin", the title is written as “Design and application of intelligent transportation multi-source data collaboration framework based on digital twins”.
2. Revise the structure of the article and highlight the research contribution.
3. Modify the keyword to add "digital twin".
4. Change the color of Figure1, Datalayer of Figure2 ,enhance Figure3 and add ordinate of Figure8 (Figure8 becomes Figure9 due to structural adjustment)
5. Add five references about GPS trajectory and spatio-temporal data processing, and add comparison in Table1.
6. Rewrite the Introduction to highlight contributions and Outlines.
7. Reorganize the case study and explain the type of each data and the way of collaboration.
8. Revise grammar, paragraph cohesion, and English expression extensively.

All modifications have been marked up using the "Track Changes" function.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time to evaluate our work and for your insightful comments that have resulted in an improved manuscript. We would also like to thank you for handling our submission efficiently and professionally. We hope our revised paper can be judged to have met the high standard of Applied Sciences.

The responses to your review comments are attached in the Word file.

Sincerely yours,

Xihou Zhang

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors made the required modifications 

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have addressed all my concerns/questions/suggestions.