The Weather and Pollution Sensing for Intelligent Transport Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Adverse road weather and pollution are challenging for human drivers, urban populations, and for automated vehicles. To reach the potential safety, comfort, and efficiency benefits of cooperative, connected, and automated mobility (CCAM), vehicles need to sense road conditions and see beyond the fog and/or rain wall. In addition, existing solutions for road weather services are limited in their scope, mostly by: i) scalability, ii) offline processing, and iii) high latencies. Therefore, there is a need for integrated solutions that can extract the most benefits from a real-time analysis of the data gathered from road weather sensing technologies and provide an on-time appropriate reaction to the end-user and/or to the automated vehicles. This objective requires a higher level of intelligence to be integrated into the i) sensing, ii) communication infrastructures, and iii) cloud/MEC storage and processing platforms. In doing so, decentralized aggregation for robust and timely decisions can be easily achieved.

The emergence of C-ITS standards, based on a common ITS station communication architecture, is an opportunity to break up the historical separation in non-interoperable silos. Therefore, exploiting and further extending C-ITS standards has the potential to expand the local data collection mechanisms from traditional road weather data sources to completely innovative ones. A new generation of solutions is now possible, taking advantage of the integration of roadside units and road weather/pollution stations, vehicle data, road sensors, and ultimately the mobile device data from each handheld device from road users.

This Special Issue aims to highlight recent breakthroughs in road weather and air pollution sensing in the scope of CCAM technologies and applications; therefore, we seek high-quality submissions featuring both robust theoretical advances and practical engineering aspects. The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Weather-aware cooperative perception;
• Standards to accommodate weather/pollution data;
• Field trials;
• Road weather or pollution models;
• Impact of adverse road weather conditions in automated driving;
• Road sensors;
• Onboard pollution sensors;
• Cooperative sensing;
• Security and privacy issues;
• Massive machine type communications for CCAM;
• Software agents for cooperative sensing;
• Ad-hoc and mobile networks for the collection layer;
• High-definition dynamic maps with weather and pollution data;
• Weather and pollution sensing technology;
• Big data and AI for weather or pollution prediction;
• Personal handheld devices as sensing peripherals;
• Vehicular communications;
• Case studies;
• etc.

Prof. Dr. Joaquim Ferreira
Prof. Dr. Nadjib Aitsaadi
Guest Editors

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