IoT-driven intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have great potential and capacity to make transportation systems efficient, safe, smart, reliable, and sustainable. The IoT provides the access and driving forces of seamlessly integrating transportation systems from the physical world to the virtual counterparts in the cyber world. In this paper, we present visions and works on integrating the artificial intelligent transportation systems and the real intelligent transportation systems to create and enhance ``intelligence'' of IoT-enabled ITS. With the increasing ubiquitous and deep sensing capacity of IoT-enabled ITS, we can quickly create artificial transportation systems equivalent to physical transportation systems in computers, and thus have parallel intelligent transportation systems, i.e. the real intelligent transportation systems and artificial intelligent transportation systems. The evolution process of transportation system is studied in the view of the parallel world. We can use a large number of long-term iterative simulation to predict and analyze the expected results of operations. Thus, truly effective and smart ITS can be planned, designed, built, operated and used. The foundation of the parallel intelligent transportation systems is based on the ACP theory, which is composed of artificial societies, computational experiments, and parallel execution. We also present some case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of parallel transportation systems.

Medical diagnostic image analysis (e.g., CT scan or X-Ray) using machine learning is an efficient and accurate way to detect COVID-19 infections. However, the sharing of diagnostic images across medical institutions is usually prohibited due to patients’ privacy concerns. This causes the issue of insufficient data sets for training the image classification model. Federated learning is an emerging privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that produces an unbiased global model based on the received local model updates trained by clients without exchanging clients’ local data. Nevertheless, the default setting of federated learning introduces a huge communication cost of transferring model updates and can hardly ensure model performance when severe data heterogeneity of clients exists. To improve communication efficiency and model performance, in this article, we propose a novel dynamic fusion-based federated learning approach for medical diagnostic image analysis to detect COVID-19 infections. First, we design an architecture for dynamic fusion-based federated learning systems to analyze medical diagnostic images. Furthermore, we present a dynamic fusion method to dynamically decide the participating clients according to their local model performance and schedule the model fusion based on participating clients’ training time. In addition, we summarize a category of medical diagnostic image data sets for COVID-19 detection, which can be used by the machine learning community for image analysis. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach is feasible and performs better than the default setting of federated learning in terms of model performance, communication efficiency, and fault tolerance.

To improve the accuracy of diagnosis and the effectiveness of treatment, a framework of parallel healthcare systems (PHSs) based on the artificial systems + computational experiments + parallel execution (ACP) approach is proposed in this paper. PHS uses artificial healthcare systems to model and represent patients’ conditions, diagnosis, and treatment process, then applies computational experiments to analyze and evaluate various therapeutic regimens, and implements parallel execution for decision-making support and real-time optimization in both actual and artificial healthcare processes. In addition, we combine the emerging blockchain technology with PHS, via constructing a consortium blockchain linking patients, hospitals, health bureaus, and healthcare communities for comprehensive healthcare data sharing, medical records review, and care auditability. Finally, a prototype named parallel gout diagnosis and treatment system is built and deployed to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the blockchain-powered PHS framework.

A closed-loop parallel testing system implements more challenging tests to accelerate evaluation and development of autonomous vehicles.

Digital Twin (DT) is an emerging technology and has been introduced into intelligent driving and transportation systems to digitize and synergize connected automated vehicles. However, existing studies focus on the design of the automated vehicle, whereas the digitization of the human driver, who plays an important role in driving, is largely ignored. Furthermore, previous driver-related tasks are limited to specific scenarios and have limited applicability. Thus, a novel concept of a driver digital twin (DDT) is proposed in this study to bridge the gap between existing automated driving systems and fully digitized ones and aid in the development of a complete driving human cyber-physical system (H-CPS). This concept is essential for constructing a harmonious human-centric intelligent driving system that considers the proactivity and sensitivity of the human driver. The primary characteristics of the DDT include multimodal state fusion, personalized modeling, and time variance. Compared with the original DT, the proposed DDT emphasizes on internal personality and capability with respect to the external physiological-level state. This study systematically illustrates the DDT and outlines its key enabling aspects. The related technologies are comprehensively reviewed and discussed with a view to improving them by leveraging the DDT. In addition, the potential applications and unsettled challenges are considered. This study aims to provide fundamental theoretical support to researchers in determining the future scope of the DDT system.

This paper is to discuss the state, trend, and frontiers of development of cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) in China. The demand for developing CPSS is discussed in detail, followed by the Artificial societies, Computational experiments, Parallel execution (ACP) approach for CPSS and knowledge automation. The development of ACP based on CPSS in transportation, energy, information, Internet of Things, and Internet of Minds (IoM) is discussed to demonstrate the cutting-edge applications in CPSS. Finally, the blockchainized IoM technology and the concepts of parallel society are described. This paper will contribute to the transition from the current social construct to a futuristic intelligent society.