Urban traffic congestion is a pandemic illness affecting many cities around the world. We have developed and tested a new model for traffic signal optimization based on the combination of three key techniques: 1) genetic algorithms (GAs) for the optimization task; 2) cellular-automata-based microsimulators for evaluating every possible solution for traffic-light programming times; and 3) a Beowulf Cluster, which is a multiple-instruction-multiple-data (MIMD) multicomputer of excellent price/performance ratio. This paper presents the results of applying this architecture to a large-scale real-world test case in a congestion situation, using four different variables as fitness function of the GA. We have simulated a set of congested scenarios for ¿La Almozara¿ in Saragossa, Spain. Our results in this extreme case are encouraging: As we increase the incoming volume of vehicles entering the traffic network - from 36 up to 3600 vehicles per hour - we get better performance from our architecture. Finally, we present new research directions in this area.

Deep neural networks have proved promising results in many applications and fields, but they are still assimilated to a black box. Thus, it is very useful to introduce interpretability aspects to prevent the blind application of deep networks. This paper proposed an interpretable morphological convolutional neural network called Morph-CNN for pattern recognition, where morphological operations were incorporated using counter-harmonic mean into the convolutional layer in order to generate enhanced feature maps. Morph-CNN was extensively evaluated on MNIST and SVHN benchmarks for digit recognition. The different tested configurations showed that Morph-CNN outperforms the existing methods.

Advances in Data Science permeate every field of Transportation Science and Engineering, resulting in developments in the transportation sector that are data-driven. Nowadays, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) could be arguably approached as a “story” intensively producing and consuming large amounts of data. A diversity of sensing devices densely spread over the infrastructure, vehicles or the travelers’ personal devices act as sources of data flows that are eventually fed into software running on automatic devices, actuators or control systems producing, in turn, complex information flows among users, traffic managers, data analysts, traffic modeling scientists, etc. These information flows provide enormous opportunities to improve model development and decision-making. This work aims to describe how data, coming from diverse ITS sources, can be used to learn and adapt data-driven models for efficiently operating ITS assets, systems and processes; in other words, for data-based models to fully become actionable. Grounded in this described data modeling pipeline for ITS, we define the characteristics, engineering requisites and challenges intrinsic to its three compounding stages, namely, data fusion, adaptive learning and model evaluation. We deliberately generalize model learning to be adaptive, since, in the core of our paper is the firm conviction that most learners will have to adapt to the ever-changing phenomenon scenario underlying the majority of ITS applications. Finally, we provide a prospect of current research lines within Data Science that can bring notable advances to data-based ITS modeling, which will eventually bridge the gap towards the practicality and actionability of such models.

This paper capitalizes on the increasingly high relevance gained by data-intensive technologies in the development of intelligent transportation system, which calls for the progressive adoption of adaptive, self-learning methods for solving modeling, simulation, and optimization problems. In this regard, certain mechanisms and processes observed in nature, including the animal brain, have proved themselves to excel not only in terms of efficiently capturing time-evolving stimuli, but also at undertaking complex tasks by virtue of mechanisms that can be extrapolated to computer algorithms and methods. This paper comprehensively reviews the state-of-the-art around the application of bioinspired methods to the challenges arising in the broad field of intelligent transportation system (ITS). This systematic survey is complemented by an initiatory taxonomic introduction to bioinspired computational intelligence, along with the basics of its constituent techniques. A focus is placed on which research niches are still unexplored by the community in different ITS subareas. The open issues and research directions for the practical implementation of ITS endowed with bioinspired computational intelligence are also discussed in detail.

Traffic Light Detection is a problem differently approached by many research groups around the world. Here we present a novel technique to detect suspended traffic lights, based on colors and features such as black area of traffic lights or area of lighting lamps. Additionally, the traffic light distance is estimated aiming at slowing down and stopping in the correct position, in case of red light. Some preliminary test results are presented to assess both the detection rate and the distance estimation.