Smart cities and communities (SCC) constitute a new paradigm in urban development. SCC ideate a data-centered society aimed at improving efficiency by automating and optimizing activities and utilities. Information and communication technology along with 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 modeling are described along with open research challenges and standardization to help introduce advanced driver assistance systems and automated vehicle functionality in traffic. To fully realize the potential of SCC, to create a holistic view on a city level, availability of data from different stakeholders is necessary. Further, though AI technologies provide accurate predictions and classifications, there is an ambiguity regarding the correctness of their outputs. This can make it difficult for the human operator to trust the system. Today there are no methods that can be used to match function requirements with the level of detail in data annotation in order to train an accurate model. Another challenge related to trust is explainability: models can have difficulty explaining how they came to certain conclusions, so it is difficult for humans to trust them.

As human drivers, we instinctively employ our understanding of other road users’ behaviour for enhanced efficiency of our drive and safety of the traffic. In recent years, different aspects of assisted and autonomous driving have gotten a lot of attention from the research and industrial community, including the aspects of behaviour modelling and prediction of future state. In this paper, we address the problem of modelling and predicting agent behaviour and state in a roundabout traffic scenario. We present three ways of modelling traffic in a roundabout based on: (i) the roundabout geometry; (ii) mean path taken by vehicles inside the roundabout; and (iii) a set of reference trajectories traversed by vehicles inside the roundabout. The roundabout models are compared in terms of exit-direction classification and state (i.e., position inside the roundabout) prediction of query vehicles inside the roundabout. The exit-direction classification and state prediction are based on a particle-filter classifier algorithm. The results show that the roundabout model based on set of reference trajectories is better suited for both the exit-direction and state prediction.

Autonomous robotic systems operating in the vicinity of other agents, such as humans, manually driven vehicles and other robots, can model the behaviour and estimate intentions of the other agents to enhance efficiency of their operation, while preserving safety. We propose a data-driven approach to model the behaviour of other agents, which is based on a set of trajectories navigated by other agents. Then, to evaluate the proposed behaviour modelling approach, we propose and compare two methods for agent intention estimation based on: (i) particle filtering; and (ii) decision trees. The proposed methods were validated using three datasets that consist of real-world bicycle and car trajectories in two different scenarios, at a roundabout and at a t-junction with a pedestrian crossing. The results validate the utility of the data-driven behaviour model, and show that decision-tree based intention estimation works better on a binary-class problem, whereas the particle-filter based technique performs better on a multi-class problem, such as the roundabout, where the method yielded an average gain of 14.88 m for correct intention estimation locations compared to the decision-tree based method.