Special Issue "Emergent Paradigms and Technologies for Smart and Autonomous Vehicles"

Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides real-time data collection and further analytics via artificial intelligence (AI) provide information that allows vehicles to become smarter and autonomous. Autonomous vehicles use a diversity of sensors like GPS, sonar, lidar, radar, camera, inertial, and odometry modules to allows autonomous driving and safety issues.

Europe’s blue economy includes several expanding sectors: marine energy (offshore wind, ocean energy, oil, and gas), marine bio-industry (food, pharma, cosmetics, and energy produced from fish, algae, and other macro- and micro-organisms), water desalination (for drinkable water), mining (non-fossil minerals are mined in the waters of 15 member states), and underwater construction.

Smart cars/smart and autonomous vehicles can be defined by the integration of connected components in the car to bring added-value services to drivers, passengers, and mobility processes. Intelligent vehicle technologies, like navigation systems, vision and image processing, vehicle environment perception, pattern recognition for vehicles, cognitive and context-aware intelligence, and automotive control and mechatronics allow vehicles to become smarter.

There are many use cases of IoT applications in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), for example, geo-fencing, asset utilization, inventory management, public transport management, traffic monitoring, situational awareness, urban planning, fleet management, predictive maintenance, and traffic safety enhancement. However, similar to other applications, the adoption of IoT in transportation also experiences technical challenges, for instance, security, privacy, standard, regulation, connectivity, network infrastructure, and investment cost.

Global initiatives have been proposed over the years – green economy and Europe’s blue economy includes several expanding sectors. The sustained growth and control of undesirable environmental impact depend on several factors namely related to growth in employment and income are driven by public and private investment into such economic activities, infrastructure, and assets that allow reduced carbon emissions and pollution, enhanced energy and resource efficiency, and prevention of the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

This Special Issue will report high-quality research on recent advances towards IoT and AI in smart vehicles, smart mobility processes, and, more specifically, state-of-the-art theories, methodologies and systems for the design, development, deployment, and innovative use of those convergence technologies to provide insights into the theoretical, digitization, and technological revolution in transportation science, vehicle, and engineering. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Sensor-based traffic data acquisition in the transportation revolution (smart and autonomous cars, public transportation, and underwater robots and vehicles)
• Vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle to anything communication
• Vehicle technology like IoT big data storage and data analytics and mining techniques
• Multi-sensor data fusion for IoT applications
• AI techniques for IoT big data in smart vehicles
• Signal, image, and video processing technologies in smart vehicle
• Autonomous, semi-autonomous, and IoT control
• New theories and applications of AI techniques in vehicle
• Electric vehicle and energy markets
• Vehicle information systems
• Tracking systems for vehicles
• Unmanned aerial vehicles-assisted communications in transport IoT
• IoT-based situational awareness framework for ITS systems
• 5G-enabled IoT sensors and techniques in vehicles
• Edge computing in vehicles
• Standardization process and data exchange in vehicles
• Security measures to protect smart cars and intelligent road systems from cyber threats.

• Digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation under smart vehicles context

Dr. Joao Carlos Amaro Ferreira
Prof. Dr. Ana Maria Madureira
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• IoT
• artificial intelligence
• smart and autonomous vehicles
• digitization
• sustainability
• green and blue economy
• safe AI
• smart cities