Social Signal-Driven Knowledge Automation: A Focus on Social Transportation

Abstract

Urban transportation systems are shaped by factors that include people, vehicles, roads, and the environment, forming a complex and giant system with dynamics, diversity, and uncertainty. Physical signal-driven intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) typically lack the ability to capture social behaviors or crowd willingness, and they achieve only information automation for transportation decision support. The crowdsourcing social signals consist of timely, extensive, comprehensive, and rich intelligence that concern urban dynamics, social behaviors, and traffic environments. Such social signals provide a new paradigm for operating ITS with unstructured semantic data, making knowledge automation for decision intelligence a possibility. This article reviews the knowledge automation paradigms for cyber-physical-social systems (CPSSs) compared with traditional information automation paradigms for cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in ITS, from the perspective of data-driven, modeling space, analytical methodologies, and decision support services. To investigate the key methodology in social spaces that enhance information automation into knowledge automation, we summarize the current research into a multisource heterogeneous social signal-based traffic decision knowledge automation framework and further exploit the computational paradigm and applications scenarios of this framework. Finally, we discuss future challenges for designing and realizing knowledge automation on CPSS in transportation.