Abstract
Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) provide safer, greener, and more convenient mobility, while reducing the impact on the environment. In recent years, simulation platforms have been employed to study ITS applications, mostly focusing on traffic-related simulations. Despite several research studies on ITS applications and simulation platforms, formal semantic descriptions of intelligent transportation systems have not been addressed yet. In this paper, a semantic model describing intelligent transportation systems for roads is proposed. The semantic model is devised to provide a basis for designing ITS simulation platforms. Building upon the semantic model, an extension to an open building information modeling (BIM) standard, i.e., the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema, is presented. The IFC schema extension is verified and validated using a BIM-based simulation scenario of ITS for roads. It is shown that the proposed IFC-compliant description of ITS for roads provides a formal basis for generating BIM-based simulations and hence facilitates ITS infrastructure modeling in BIM projects. It is concluded that the present work represents a cornerstone for designing BIM-based ITS simulation platforms. In future endeavors, potential standardization and formalization efforts may be discussed.
Highlights
With the semantic model, constructed upon an analysis of knowledge sources relevant to semantic modeling of ITS, a new concept for integrating ITS for roads into building information modeling (BIM) data models has been materialized as an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema extension, which have not been addressed prior to this work for intelligent transportation systems
The test software of the official IFC certification program has been used for verification purposes, i.e., for checking the IFC schema extension and the example IFC model representing the vehicular cloud formation scenario against syntactical and semantic criteria
The results have shown that the proposed IFC schema extension grants proper semantic description of ITS components, relationships between ITS components, and ITS applications
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Et al (2017) have presented an IFC extension that defines entities related to cyber-physical systems deployed for monitoring and control applications [29]. From the information stated above, it is concluded that the existing capabilities of the IFC schema for describing intelligent transportation systems are limited to a few IFC entities for describing infrastructure information for physical road components. To this end, an extension to the IFC schema is required to fill the gap with respect to entities devised for describing the “cyber” components of ITS for roads, i.e., entities not yet available in the IFC schema but relevant to BIM-based modeling of ITS for roads.
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