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Many cities across the world are looking to use technology and innovation to improve the overall efficiency and safety for their residents. At the heart of these smart-city plans, a variety of intelligent transportation system technologies can be used to improve safety, enhance mobility measures (e.g., traffic flow), and minimize environmental impacts of a city’s mobility ecosystem. Early implementations of these ITS technologies often take place in affluent cities, where there are many funding opportunities and suitable areas for deployment. However, it is critical that we also develop smart city solutions that are focused on improving conditions of disadvantaged and environmental justice communities, whose residents have suffered the most from unmitigated urban sprawl and its environmental and health impacts. As a leading example, Inland Southern California has grown to be one of the largest hubs of goods movement in the world. Numerous logistics facilities such as warehouses, rail facilities, and truck depots have rapidly spread throughout these communities, with the local residents bearing a disproportionate burden of truck traffic, poor air quality, and adverse health effects. Further, the majority of residents have lower-wage jobs and very few mobility options, other than low-end personal car ownership. To improve this situation, UC Riverside researchers have focused their smart city research on these impacted communities, finding innovative solutions to eco-friendly traffic management, developing better-shared (electric) mobility solutions for the community, improving freight movements, and enhancing the transition to vehicle electrification. Numerous research and development projects are currently underway in Inland Southern California, spanning advanced smart city modeling and impact analysis, community outreach events, and real-world technology demonstrations. This chapter describes several of these ITS solutions and their potential for improving many cities around the world. 

Connected and automated trucks (CATs) have the potential to transform the transportation system and logistics industry. Their unique features, such as operational strategies and truck driving behaviors, can affect transportation system performance. For successful development, testing and deployment of CATs, analysis, modeling, and simulation (AMS) plays an important role, especially in evaluating the impacts of CAT technologies on existing transportation systems. This paper presents a comprehensive review and assessment of up-to-date studies related to CAT AMS, focusing on three correlated elements: CAT applications, data, and tools. The research delves into CAT applications from individual CAT and CAT fleet to CAT-involved traffic. It explores available data sources relevant to CAT system use cases, assessing their potential issues and opportunities. The study also reviews existing AMS tools used to analyze CAT applications at both operational performance and network integration levels, emphasizing research needs in CAT-specific tools development. The findings identify the data needs and point out that existing AMS tools may not capture the complexity of CAT operation, which involves driving behaviors, vehicle-to-everything communications, autonomous capabilities, and response to truck-specific scenarios. The study will lay a solid foundation for further development of the AMS framework for CATs and provide guidance to future research of CAT applications. 

Driver State Monitoring (DSM) is paramount for improving driving safety for both drivers of ego-vehicles and their surrounding road users, increasing public trust, and supporting the transition to autonomous driving. This paper introduces a Transformer-based classifier for DSM using an in-vehicle camera capturing raw Bayer images. Compared to traditional RGB images, we opt for the original Bayer data, further employing a Transformer-based classification algorithm. Experimental results prove that the accuracy of the Bayer Color-filled type images is only 0.61% lower than that of RGB images. Additionally, the performance of Bayer data is closely comparable to RGB images for DSM purposes. However, utilizing Bayer data can offer potential advantages, including reduced camera costs, lower energy consumption, and shortened Image Signal Processing (ISP) time. These benefits will enhance the efficacy of DSM systems and promote their widespread adoption. 

The emergence of battery electric trucks (BETs) in recent years has shown great promise in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in urban freight logistics. However, designing a customer-oriented dispatching strategy for a BET fleet is more complex than traditional vehicle routing problems (VRP) due to several constraints, such as limited driving range, potential need for en route recharging, and long recharging times. Also, in practice, the uncertain travel times in urban transportation network may lead to the violation of scheduled customer time windows and impact overall energy consumption. To better utilize the BET fleet, this paper introduces a robust BET dispatching problem with backhauls and time windows under travel time uncertainty, which aims to minimize the overall fleet energy consumption while also minimizing the risk of violating customer time window. A mathematical optimization model based on novel route-related sets is developed, and an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) metaheuristic algorithm is used to find robust dispatching solutions. Based on real-world data from a truck fleet in San Bernardino County, California, a simulation study is conducted to demonstrate the robustness of the solutions obtained by the proposed method. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis with respect to uncertainty parameters is performed to assess the trade-off between the overall fleet energy consumption and the robustness of the solutions. 

: In the challenging realm of object detection under rainy conditions, visual distortions significantly hinder accuracy. This paper introduces Rain-Adapt Faster RCNN (RAF-RCNN), an innovative end-to-end approach that merges advanced deraining techniques with robust object detection. Our method integrates rain removal and object detection into a single process, using a novel feature transfer learning approach for enhanced robustness. By employing the Extended Area Structural Discrepancy Loss (EASDL), RAF-RCNN enhances feature map evaluation, leading to significant performance improvements. In quantitative testing of the Rainy KITTI dataset, RAF-RCNN achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 51.4% at IOU [0.5, 0.95], exceeding previous methods by at least 5.5%. These results demonstrate RAF-RCNN's potential to significantly enhance perception systems in intelligent transportation, promising substantial improvements in reliability and safety for autonomous vehicles operating in varied weather conditions. 

Connected vehicle-based eco-driving applications have emerged as effective tools for improving energy efficiency and environmental sustainability in the transportation system. Previous research mainly focused on vehicle-level or link-level technology development and assessment using real-world field tests or traffic microsimulation models. There is still high uncertainty in understanding and predicting the impact of these connected eco-driving applications when they are implemented on a large scale. In this paper, a computationally efficient and practically feasible methodology is proposed to estimate the potential energy savings from one eco-driving application for heavy-duty trucks named Eco-Approach and Departure (EAD). The proposed methodology enables corridor-level or road network–level energy saving estimates using only road length, speed limit, and travel time at each intersection as inputs. This technique was validated using EAD performance data from traffic microsimulation models of four trucking corridors in Carson, California; the estimates of energy savings using the proposed methodology were around 1% average error. The validated models were subsequently applied to estimate potential energy savings from EAD along truck routes in Carson. The results show that the potential energy savings vary by corridor, ranging from 1% to 25% with an average of 14%. 

Perceiving the environment is one of the most fundamental keys to enabling Cooperative Driving Automation, which is regarded as the revolutionary solution to addressing the safety, mobility, and sustainability issues of contemporary transportation systems. Although an unprecedented evolution is now happening in the area of computer vision for object perception, state-of-the-art perception methods are still struggling with sophisticated real-world traffic environments due to the inevitable physical occlusion and limited receptive field of single-vehicle systems. Based on multiple spatially separated perception nodes, Cooperative Perception (CP) is born to unlock the bottleneck of perception for driving automation. In this paper, we comprehensively review and analyze the research progress on CP, and we propose a unified CP framework. The architectures and taxonomy of CP systems based on different types of sensors are reviewed to show a high-level description of the workflow and different structures for CP systems. The node structure, sensing modality, and fusion schemes are reviewed and analyzed with detailed explanations for CP. A Hierarchical Cooperative Perception (HCP) framework is proposed, followed by a review of existing open-source tools that support CP development. The discussion highlights the current opportunities, open challenges, and anticipated future trends. 

A significant challenge in the field of object detection lies in the system's performance under non-ideal imaging conditions, such as rain, fog, low illumination, or raw Bayer images that lack ISP processing. Our study introduces "Feature Corrective Transfer Learning", a novel approach that leverages transfer learning and a bespoke loss function to facilitate the end-to-end detection of objects in these challenging scenarios without the need to convert non-ideal images into their RGB counterparts. In our methodology, we initially train a comprehensive model on a pristine RGB image dataset. Subsequently, non-ideal images are processed by comparing their feature maps against those from the initial ideal RGB model. This comparison employs the Extended Area Novel Structural Discrepancy Loss (EANSDL), a novel loss function designed to quantify similarities and integrate them into the detection loss. This approach refines the model's ability to perform object detection across varying conditions through direct feature map correction, encapsulating the essence of Feature Corrective Transfer Learning. Experimental validation on variants of the KITTI dataset demonstrates a significant improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP), resulting in a 3.8-8.1% relative enhancement in detection under non-ideal conditions compared to the baseline model, and a less marginal performance difference within 1.3% of the mAP@[0.5:0.95] achieved under ideal conditions by the standard Faster RCNN algorithm. 

A large number of Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) applications are being designed, developed, and deployed in order to greatly improve our transportation systems in terms of safety, mobility, and reducing environmental impacts. These benefits can be quantified by a variety of performance measures that are often cited in the literature. However, most of these CAV applications are typically designed to improve transportation systems only in a particular dimension, usually focusing on either safety, mobility, or the environment. Very few research papers have considered a wider range or combination of performance measures across multiple dimensions, examining potential co-benefits or tradeoffs between these measures. For example, you can design a CAV application that greatly improves safety, but it might come at the cost of reducing traffic throughput. Further, the design of the CAV applications is often static and limited to specific traffic scenarios and conditions. CAVs that can adapt to different conditions, and be “tunable” for different societal needs will have much greater impact and versatility. In this presentation, we examine various co-benefits and tradeoffs of current CAV applications and consider how we can design these systems to have greater flexibility when it comes to deployment. We cite not only different CAV applications evaluated in simulation, but also real-world CAV deployments that operate on various testbeds, such as the Innovation Corridor located in Riverside, California. Based on this analysis, we can consider several new research directions for future CAV deployments.