AI in Smart Cities: Challenges and approaches to enable road vehicle automation and smart traffic control

Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) constitute a new paradigm in urban development. SCC ideates on a data-centered society aiming at improving efficiency by automating and optimizing activities and utilities. Information and communication technology along with the internet of things enables data collection and with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) situation awareness can be obtained to feed the SCC actors with enriched knowledge. This paper describes AI perspectives in SCC and gives an overview of AI-based technologies used in traffic to enable road vehicle automation and smart traffic control. Perception, Smart Traffic Control and Driver Modelling are described along with open research challenges and standardization to help introduce advanced driver assistance systems in traffic. AI technologies provide accurate prediction and classifcation; however, the models do not provide any evidence on their output making them hard to trust for a human operator. In addition, there are currently no methods that can be used to describe requirements of how the data should be annotated in order to train an accurate model.