AI-Driven Traffic Control and Management Systems for Smart Cities

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 October 2025 | Viewed by 483

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
Interests: intelligent decision making; optimal control of nonlinear systems; data analysis; stochastic control

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Guest Editor
State Key Laboratory of Automotive Simulation and Control, Jilin University, Changchun 130022, China
Interests: reinforcement learning; model predictive control; human–machine augmentation; human–machine cooperative game theory
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
School of Automation and Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China
Interests: artificial intelligence technologies; machine vision and robotics; image processing and pattern recognition

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid urbanization and increasing vehicle ownership in cities worldwide have led to significant challenges in traffic management and transportation efficiency. Conventional traffic control systems often struggle to adapt to dynamic traffic conditions, resulting in congestion, frequent traffic accidents, increased travel times, and environmental pollution. In recent years, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with traffic control and management systems has emerged as a promising solution to these challenges. Crucially, the real-world impact of these AI advancements is determined by their deployment within complex cyber–physical systems involving sensors, embedded devices, and communication networks. This integration offers unprecedented opportunities for developing intelligent, adaptive, and responsive transportation networks.

We invite authors to submit original and unpublished results utilizing AI-based approaches, such as Machine Learning (ML), Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and other related cyber–physical methods, on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

  • Traffic scene perception for driver state recognition and the behavior prediction of traffic participants;
  • Methods for understanding and predicting traffic flows and traffic states;
  • Decision-making, planning, control algorithms, and end-to-end approaches for autonomous vehicles;
  • Embedded AI, edge computing, and hardware acceleration for real-time traffic control and autonomous driving systems;
  • Intelligent transportation management systems for optimizing traffic networks;
  • Multi-agent interaction mechanisms (human–AI and agent–agent) for traffic control and management systems;
  • Traffic system modeling, simulation, and scenario generation techniques;
  • Cyber–physical systems (CPSs) modeling, integration, and co-simulation in intelligent transportation;
  • Real-world deployment and validation of AI-based traffic solutions using sensors, IoT devices, and vehicular networks.
  • Safety, interpretability, and ethical frameworks for AI-based traffic control and management.

Prof. Dr. Chunyue Song
Prof. Dr. Shuyou Yu
Prof. Dr. Beiping Hou
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • intelligent transportation systems
  • traffic scene perception
  • intelligent decision
  • intelligent vehicles
  • human-ai systems
  • multi-agent systems
  • traffic simulation
  • embedded systems
  • cyber-physical systems
  • machine learning
  • vision-language models
  • large language models
  • reinforcement learning

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

21 pages, 545 KiB  
Article
Spatial-Temporal Traffic Flow Prediction Through Residual-Trend Decomposition with Transformer Architecture
by Hongyang Wan, Haijiao Xu and Liang Xie
Electronics 2025, 14(12), 2400; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14122400 - 12 Jun 2025
Viewed by 277
Abstract
Accurate traffic forecasting is challenging due to the complex spatial-temporal interdependencies of large road networks and sudden speed changes caused by unexpected events. Traditional models often struggle with the non-stationary and volatile characteristics of traffic time series. While existing sequence decomposition methods can [...] Read more.
Accurate traffic forecasting is challenging due to the complex spatial-temporal interdependencies of large road networks and sudden speed changes caused by unexpected events. Traditional models often struggle with the non-stationary and volatile characteristics of traffic time series. While existing sequence decomposition methods can capture stable long-term trends and periodic information, they fail to address complex fluctuation patterns. To tackle this issue, we propose the Spatial-Temporal traffic flow prediction with residual and trend Decomposition Transformer (STDformer), which decomposes time series into different components, thus enabling more accurate modeling of both short-term and long-term dependencies. Our method processes the time series in parallel using the Trend Decomposition Block and the Spatial-Temporal Relation Attention. The Spatial-Temporal Relation Attention captures dynamic spatial correlations across the road network, while the Trend Decomposition Block decomposes the series into trend, seasonal, and residual components. Each component is then independently modeled by the Temporal Modeling Block to capture its unique temporal dynamics. Finally, the outputs from the Temporal Modeling Block are fused through a selective gating mechanism, combined with the Spatial-Temporal Relation Attention output to produce the final prediction. Extensive experiments on PEMS traffic datasets demonstrate that STDformer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art traffic flow prediction methods, particularly under volatile conditions. These results validate STDformer’s practical utility in real-world traffic management, highlighting its potential to assist traffic managers in making informed decisions and optimizing traffic efficiency. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI-Driven Traffic Control and Management Systems for Smart Cities)
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