Human-Centered Traffic Management Supporting Smart Cities and the Metaverse.

In recent years, urban centers have increasingly been equipped with sensing, storage, and computational capabilities in the form of road infrastructure and intelligent vehicles, making cities smarter. These advancements make it possible for traffic management systems to provide enhanced traffic solutions to people, thus, improving the quality of their daily life. In this paper, we focus on an AI-based, human-centered traffic management system in a smart city context, which represents a core Metaverse application. The system considers both drivers’ and traffic flow requirements in order to route vehicles safely and effectively. Our personalized route planner takes into account all relevant factors, such as the use of virtual edge servers to obtain real-time traffic data and vehicle sensing capabilities to estimate human behavior and state of alertness to achieve personalized and context-aware vehicle routing. The proposed system also aims to satisfy the demand for virtual edge computing resources in the context of smart cities and the Metaverse by re-routing vehicles based on computing resource availability at the micro clouds. One of the main challenges of the proposed system is ensuring its adoption rate in the user’s daily life. We therefore argue that, to increase the penetration rate of the proposed solution, it is essential to inform the user about the reasoning behind the decisions made by the AI-based route planning system with explainable AI strategies and emphasize how adopting such a system can improve their quality of life.