Dynamic traffic congestion pricing and electric vehicle charging management system for the internet of vehicles in smart cities

The integration of the Internet of Vehicles(IoV)in future smart cities could help solve many traffic-related challenges,such as reducing traffic congestion and traffic accidents.Various congestion pricing and electric vehicle charging policies have been introduced in recent years.Nonetheless,the majority of these schemes emphasize penalizing the vehicles that opt to take the congested roads or charge in the crowded charging station and do not reward the vehicles that cooperate with the traffic management system.In this paper,we propose a novel dynamic traffic congestion pricing and electric vehicle charging management system for the internet of vehicles in an urban smart city environment.The proposed system rewards the drivers that opt to take alternative congested-free ways and congested-free charging stations.We propose a token management system that serves as a virtual currency,where the vehicles earn these tokens if they take alternative non-congested ways and charging stations and use the tokens to pay for the charging fees.The proposed system is designed for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks(VANETs)in the context of a smart city environment without the need to set up any expensive toll collection stations.Through large-scale traffic simulation in different smart city scenarios,it is proved that the system can reduce the traffic congestion and the total charging time at the charging stations.

Robot and its living space:A roadmap for robot development based on the view of living space

Robot’s living space Human-robot relationship Robot humanization Hybrid intelligence Human-robot integrated society Robots,as the creation of humans,became an irreplaceable component in human society.With the advancement of technologies,robots have become more and more intelligent and have been widely used in many fields,such as disease diagnosis,customer services,healthcare for the older people,and so on.As robots made our lives much more convenient than ever before,they also brought many potential risks and challenges in technology,security,and ethic.To better understand the development of robots,we proposed a concept of a robot’s living space and analyzed the role of robots in our society.In this paper,we focus on setting a theoretical framework of the robot’s living space to further understand the human-robot relationship.The research in this paper contains three central aspects.First,we interpret the concept of the robot’s living space and the functions of each space.Second,we analyze and summarize the relative technologies which support robots living well in each space.Finally,we provide advice and improvement measures based on a discussion of potential problems caused by the developments of robots.With the trend of robots humanization and human-robot society integration,we should seriously consider how to collaborate with intelligent robots to achieve hybrid intelligence.To build a harmonious human-robot integrated society,studying the robot’s living space and its relationship with humans is the prerequisite and roadmap.

Edge-Enabled Metaverse:The Convergence of Metaverseand Mobile Edge Computing

Metaverse is a virtual environment where users are represented by their avatars to navigate a virtual world having strong links with its physical counterpart.The state-of-the-art Metaverse architectures rely on a cloud-based approach for avatar physics emulation and graphics rendering computation.The current centralized architecture of such systems is unfavorable as it suffers from several drawbacks caused by the long latency of cloud access,such as low-quality visualization.To this end,we propose a Fog-Edge hybrid computing architecture for Metaverse applications that leverage an edge-enabled distributed computing paradigm.Metaverse applications leverage edge devices’computing power to perform the required computations for heavy tasks,such as collision detection in the virtual universe and high-computational 3D physics in virtual simulations.The computational costs of a Metaverse entity,such as collision detection or physics emulation,are performed at the device of the associated physical entity.To validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture,we simulate a distributed social Metaverse application.The simulation results show that the proposed architecture can reduce the latency by 50%when compared with cloud-based Metaverse applications.

Cyber-Syndrome:Concept,Theoretical Characterization,and Control Mechanism

The prevalence of social media and mobile computing has led to intensive user engagement in the emergent Cyber-Physical-Social-Thinking(CPST)space.However,the easy access,the lack of governance,and excessive use has generated a raft of new behaviors within CPST,which affects users’physical,social,and mental states.In this paper,we conceive the Cyber-Syndrome concept to denote the collection of cyber disorders due to excessive or problematic Cyberspace interactions based on CPST theories.Then we characterize the Cyber-Syndrome concept in terms of Maslow’s theory of Needs,from which we establish an in-depth theoretical understanding of Cyber-Syndrome from its etiology,formation,symptoms,and manifestations.Finally,we propose an entropy-based Cyber-Syndrome control mechanism for its computation and management.The goal of this study is to give new insights into this rising phenomenon and offer guidance for further research and development.