Audio-Text Multimodal Speech Recognition via Dual-Tower Architecture for Mandarin Air Traffic Control Communications

In air traffic control communications (ATCC), misunderstandings between pilots and controllers could result in fatal aviation accidents. Fortunately, advanced automatic speech recognition technology has emerged as a promising means of preventing miscommunications and enhancing aviation safety. However, most existing speech recognition methods merely incorporate external language models on the decoder side, leading to insufficient semantic alignment between speech and text modalities during the encoding phase. Furthermore, it is challenging to model acoustic context dependencies over long distances due to the longer speech sequences than text, especially for the extended ATCC data. To address these issues, we propose a speech-text multimodal dual-tower architecture for speech recognition. It employs cross-modal interactions to achieve close semantic alignment during the encoding stage and strengthen its capabilities in modeling auditory long-distance context dependencies. In addition, a two-stage training strategy is elaborately devised to derive semantics-aware acoustic representations effectively. The first stage focuses on pre-training the speech-text multimodal encoding module to enhance inter-modal semantic alignment and aural long-distance context dependencies. The second stage fine-tunes the entire network to bridge the input modality variation gap between the training and inference phases and boost generalization performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed speech-text multimodal speech recognition method on the ATCC and AISHELL-1 datasets. It reduces the character error rate to 6.54% and 8.73%, respectively, and exhibits substantial performance gains of 28.76% and 23.82% compared with the best baseline model. The case studies indicate that the obtained semantics-aware acoustic representations aid in accurately recognizing terms with similar pronunciations but distinctive semantics. The research provides a novel modeling paradigm for semantics-aware speech recognition in air traffic control communications, which could contribute to the advancement of intelligent and efficient aviation safety management.

Communication Resource-Efficient Vehicle Platooning Control With Various Spacing Policies

Platooning represents one of the key features that connected automated vehicles may possess as it allows multiple automated vehicles to be maneuvered cooperatively with small headways on roads. However, a critical challenge in accomplishing automated vehicle platoons is to deal with the effects of intermittent and sporadic vehicle-to-vehicle data transmissions caused by limited wireless communication resources. This paper addresses the co-design problem of dynamic event-triggered communication scheduling and cooperative adaptive cruise control for a convoy of automated vehicles with diverse spacing policies. The central aim is to achieve automated vehicle platooning under various gap references with desired platoon stability and spacing performance requirements, while simultaneously improving communication efficiency. Toward this aim, a dynamic event-triggered scheduling mechanism is developed such that the intervehicle data transmissions are scheduled dynamically and efficiently over time. Then, a tractable co-design criterion on the existence of both the admissible event-driven cooperative adaptive cruise control law and the desired scheduling mechanism is derived. Finally, comparative simulation results are presented to substantiate the effectiveness and merits of the obtained results.

Traffic Control Based on Integrated Kalman Filtering and Adaptive Quantized Q-Learning Framework for Internet of Vehicles

Intelligent traffic control requires accurate estimation of the road states and incorporation of adaptive or dynamically adjusted intelligent algorithms for making the decision.In this article,these issues are handled by proposing a novel framework for traffic control using vehicular communications and Internet of Things data.The framework integrates Kalman filtering and Q-learning.Unlike smoothing Kalman filtering,our data fusion Kalman filter incorporates a process-aware model which makes it superior in terms of the prediction error.Unlike traditional Q-learning,our Q-learning algorithm enables adaptive state quantization by changing the threshold of separating low traffic from high traffic on the road according to the maximum number of vehicles in the junction roads.For evaluation,the model has been simulated on a single intersection consisting of four roads:east,west,north,and south.A comparison of the developed adaptive quantized Q-learning(AQQL)framework with state-of-the-art and greedy approaches shows the superiority of AQQL with an improvement percentage in terms of the released number of vehicles of AQQL is 5%over the greedy approach and 340%over the state-of-the-art approach.Hence,AQQL provides an effective traffic control that can be applied in today’s intelligent traffic system.

Urban Traffic Control Meets Decision Recommendation System:A Survey and Perspective

Urban traffic control is a multifaceted and demanding task that necessitates extensive decision-making to ensure the safety and efficiency of urban transportation systems.Traditional approaches require traffic signal professionals to manually intervene on traffic control devices at the intersection level,utilizing their knowledge and expertise.However,this process is cumbersome,labor-intensive,and cannot be applied on a large network scale.Recent studies have begun to explore the applicability of recommendation system for urban traffic control,which offer increased control efficiency and scalability.Such a decision recommendation system is complex,with various interdependent components,but a systematic literature review has not yet been conducted.In this work,we present an up-to-date survey that elucidates all the detailed components of a recommendation system for urban traffic control,demonstrates the utility and efficacy of such a system in the real world using data and knowledgedriven approaches,and discusses the current challenges and potential future directions of this field.

Ultimately Bounded Output Feedback Control for Networked Nonlinear Systems With Unreliable Communication Channel: A Buffer-Aided Strategy

This paper concerns ultimately bounded output-feedback control problems for networked systems with unknown nonlinear dynamics. Sensor-to-observer signal transmission is facilitated over networks that has communication constraints.These transmissions are carried out over an unreliable communication channel. In order to enhance the utilization rate of measurement data, a buffer-aided strategy is novelly employed to store historical measurements when communication networks are inaccessible. Using the neural network technique, a novel observer-based controller is introduced to address effects of signal transmission behaviors and unknown nonlinear dynamics.Through the application of stochastic analysis and Lyapunov stability, a joint framework is constructed for analyzing resultant system performance under the introduced controller. Subsequently, existence conditions for the desired output-feedback controller are delineated. The required parameters for the observerbased controller are then determined by resolving some specific matrix inequalities. Finally, a simulation example is showcased to confirm method efficacy.

Targeted multi-agent communication algorithm based on state control

As an important mechanism in multi-agent interaction,communication can make agents form complex team relationships rather than constitute a simple set of multiple independent agents.However,the existing communication schemes can bring much timing redundancy and irrelevant messages,which seriously affects their practical application.To solve this problem,this paper proposes a targeted multiagent communication algorithm based on state control(SCTC).The SCTC uses a gating mechanism based on state control to reduce the timing redundancy of communication between agents and determines the interaction relationship between agents and the importance weight of a communication message through a series connection of hard-and self-attention mechanisms,realizing targeted communication message processing.In addition,by minimizing the difference between the fusion message generated from a real communication message of each agent and a fusion message generated from the buffered message,the correctness of the final action choice of the agent is ensured.Our evaluation using a challenging set of Star Craft II benchmarks indicates that the SCTC can significantly improve the learning performance and reduce the communication overhead between agents,thus ensuring better cooperation between agents.

Regional Multi-Agent Cooperative Reinforcement Learning for City-Level Traffic Grid Signal Control

This article studies the effective traffic signal control problem of multiple intersections in a city-level traffic system.A novel regional multi-agent cooperative reinforcement learning algorithm called RegionSTLight is proposed to improve the traffic efficiency.Firstly a regional multi-agent Q-learning framework is proposed,which can equivalently decompose the global Q value of the traffic system into the local values of several regions Based on the framework and the idea of human-machine cooperation,a dynamic zoning method is designed to divide the traffic network into several strong-coupled regions according to realtime traffic flow densities.In order to achieve better cooperation inside each region,a lightweight spatio-temporal fusion feature extraction network is designed.The experiments in synthetic real-world and city-level scenarios show that the proposed RegionS TLight converges more quickly,is more stable,and obtains better asymptotic performance compared to state-of-theart models.

Cluster DetectionMethod of Endogenous Security Abnormal Attack Behavior in Air Traffic Control Network

In order to enhance the accuracy of Air Traffic Control(ATC)cybersecurity attack detection,in this paper,a new clustering detection method is designed for air traffic control network security attacks.The feature set for ATC cybersecurity attacks is constructed by setting the feature states,adding recursive features,and determining the feature criticality.The expected information gain and entropy of the feature data are computed to determine the information gain of the feature data and reduce the interference of similar feature data.An autoencoder is introduced into the AI(artificial intelligence)algorithm to encode and decode the characteristics of ATC network security attack behavior to reduce the dimensionality of the ATC network security attack behavior data.Based on the above processing,an unsupervised learning algorithm for clustering detection of ATC network security attacks is designed.First,determine the distance between the clustering clusters of ATC network security attack behavior characteristics,calculate the clustering threshold,and construct the initial clustering center.Then,the new average value of all feature objects in each cluster is recalculated as the new cluster center.Second,it traverses all objects in a cluster of ATC network security attack behavior feature data.Finally,the cluster detection of ATC network security attack behavior is completed by the computation of objective functions.The experiment took three groups of experimental attack behavior data sets as the test object,and took the detection rate,false detection rate and recall rate as the test indicators,and selected three similar methods for comparative test.The experimental results show that the detection rate of this method is about 98%,the false positive rate is below 1%,and the recall rate is above 97%.Research shows that this method can improve the detection performance of security attacks in air traffic control network.

Beyond 5G Networks: Integration of Communication, Computing, Caching, and Control

In recent years,the exponential proliferation of smart devices with their intelligent applications poses severe challenges on conventional cellular networks.Such challenges can be potentially overcome by integrating communication,computing,caching,and control(i4C)technologies.In this survey,we first give a snapshot of different aspects of the i4C,comprising background,motivation,leading technological enablers,potential applications,and use cases.Next,we describe different models of communication,computing,caching,and control(4C)to lay the foundation of the integration approach.We review current stateof-the-art research efforts related to the i4C,focusing on recent trends of both conventional and artificial intelligence(AI)-based integration approaches.We also highlight the need for intelligence in resources integration.Then,we discuss the integration of sensing and communication(ISAC)and classify the integration approaches into various classes.Finally,we propose open challenges and present future research directions for beyond 5G networks,such as 6G.

Cyclic-Pursuit-Based Circular Formation Control of Mobile Agents with Limited Communication Ranges and Communication Delays

This article addresses the circular formation control problem of a multi-agent system moving on a circle in the presence of limited communication ranges and communication delays.To minimize the number of communication links,a novel distributed controller based on a cyclic pursuit strategy is developed in which each agent needs only its leading neighbour’s information.In contrast to existing works,we propose a set of new potential functions to deal with heterogeneous communication ranges and communication delays simultaneously.A new framework based on the admissible upper bound of the formation error is established so that both connectivity maintenance and order preservation can be achieved at the same time.It is shown that the multi-agent system can be driven to the desired circular formation as time goes to infinity under the proposed controller.Finally,the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by some simulation examples.

Novel Distance Measures on Hesitant Fuzzy Sets Based on Equal-Probability Transformation and Their Application in Decision Making on Intersection Traffic Control

The purpose of this study is to reduce the uncertainty in the calculation process on hesitant fuzzy sets(HFSs).The innovation of this study is to unify the cardinal numbers of hesitant fuzzy elements(HFEs)in a special way.Firstly,a probability density function is assigned for any given HFE.Thereafter,equal-probability transformation is introduced to transform HFEs with different cardinal numbers on the condition into the same probability density function.The characteristic of this transformation is that the higher the consistency of the membership degrees in HFEs,the higher the credibility of the mentioned membership degrees is,then,the bigger the probability density values for them are.According to this transformation technique,a set of novel distance measures on HFSs is provided.Finally,an illustrative example of intersection traffic control is introduced to show the usefulness of the given distance measures.The example also shows that this study is a good complement to operation theories on HFSs.

Evolution of Road Traffic Congestion Control:A Survey from Perspective of Sensing,Communication,and Computation

Road traffic congestion can inevitably de-grade road infrastructure and decrease travel efficiency in urban traffic networks,which can be relieved by employing appropriate congestion control.Accord-ing to different developmental driving forces,in this paper,the evolution of road traffic congestion control is divided into two stages.The ever-growing num-ber of advanced sensing techniques can be seen as the key driving force of the first stage,called the sens-ing stage,in which congestion control strategies ex-perienced rapid growth owing to the accessibility of traffic data.At the second stage,i.e.,the communica-tion stage,communication and computation capabil-ity can be regarded as the identifying symbols for this stage,where the ability of collecting finer-grained in-sight into transportation and mobility reality improves dramatically with advances in vehicular networks,Big Data,and artificial intelligence.Specifically,as the pre-requisite for congestion control,in this paper,ex-isting congestion detection techniques are first elab-orated and classified.Then,a comprehensive survey of the recent advances for current congestion control strategies with a focus on traffic signal control,vehi-cle route guidance,and their combined techniques is provided.In this regard,the evolution of these strate-gies with continuous development of sensing,com-munication,and computation capability are also intro-duced.Finally,the paper concludes with several re-search challenges and trends to fully promote the in-tegration of advanced techniques for traffic congestion mitigation in transportation systems.

A Robust Conformer-Based Speech Recognition Model for Mandarin Air Traffic Control

This study aims to address the deviation in downstream tasks caused by inaccurate recognition results when applying Automatic Speech Recognition(ASR)technology in the Air Traffic Control(ATC)field.This paper presents a novel cascaded model architecture,namely Conformer-CTC/Attention-T5(CCAT),to build a highly accurate and robust ATC speech recognition model.To tackle the challenges posed by noise and fast speech rate in ATC,the Conformer model is employed to extract robust and discriminative speech representations from raw waveforms.On the decoding side,the Attention mechanism is integrated to facilitate precise alignment between input features and output characters.The Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer(T5)language model is also introduced to handle particular pronunciations and code-mixing issues,providing more accurate and concise textual output for downstream tasks.To enhance the model’s robustness,transfer learning and data augmentation techniques are utilized in the training strategy.The model’s performance is optimized by performing hyperparameter tunings,such as adjusting the number of attention heads,encoder layers,and the weights of the loss function.The experimental results demonstrate the significant contributions of data augmentation,hyperparameter tuning,and error correction models to the overall model performance.On the Our ATC Corpus dataset,the proposed model achieves a Character Error Rate(CER)of 3.44%,representing a 3.64%improvement compared to the baseline model.Moreover,the effectiveness of the proposed model is validated on two publicly available datasets.On the AISHELL-1 dataset,the CCAT model achieves a CER of 3.42%,showcasing a 1.23%improvement over the baseline model.Similarly,on the LibriSpeech dataset,the CCAT model achieves a Word Error Rate(WER)of 5.27%,demonstrating a performance improvement of 7.67%compared to the baseline model.Additionally,this paper proposes an evaluation criterion for assessing the robustness of ATC speech recognition systems.In robustness evaluation experiments based on this criterion,the proposed model demonstrates a performance improvement of 22%compared to the baseline model.

Traffic flow of connected and automated vehicles at lane drop on two-lane highway: An optimization-based control algorithm versus a heuristic rules-based algorithm

This paper investigates traffic flow of connected and automated vehicles at lane drop on two-lane highway. We evaluate and compare performance of an optimization-based control algorithm(OCA) with that of a heuristic rules-based algorithm(HRA). In the OCA, the average speed of each vehicle is maximized. In the HRA, virtual vehicle and restriction of the command acceleration caused by the virtual vehicle are introduced. It is found that(i) capacity under the HRA(denoted as C_(H)) is smaller than capacity under the OCA;(ii) the travel delay is always smaller under the OCA, but driving is always much more comfortable under the HRA;(iii) when the inflow rate is smaller than C_(H), the HRA outperforms the OCA with respect to the fuel consumption and the monetary cost;(iv) when the inflow rate is larger than C_(H), the HRA initially performs better with respect to the fuel consumption and the monetary cost, but the OCA would become better after certain time. The spatiotemporal pattern and speed profile of traffic flow are presented, which explains the reason underlying the different performance. The study is expected to help for better understanding of the two different types of algorithm.

Learning-Based Admission Control for Low-Earth-Orbit Satellite Communication Networks

Satellite communications has been regarded as an indispensable technology for future mobile networks to provide extremely high data rates,ultra-reliability,and ubiquitous coverage.However,the high dynamics caused by the fast movement of low-earth-orbit(LEO)satellites bring huge challenges in designing and optimizing satellite communication systems.Especially,admission control,deciding which users with diversified service requirements are allowed to access the network with limited resources,is of paramount importance to improve network resource utilization and meet the service quality requirements of users.In this paper,we propose a dynamic channel reservation strategy based on the Actor-Critic algorithm(AC-DCRS)to perform intelligent admission control in satellite networks.By carefully designing the longterm reward function and dynamically adjusting the reserved channel threshold,AC-DCRS reaches a long-run optimal access policy for both new calls and handover calls with different service priorities.Numerical results show that our proposed AC-DCRS outperforms traditional channel reservation strategies in terms of overall access failure probability,the average call success rate,and channel utilization under various dynamic traffic conditions.

Intelligent 3-Way Priority-Driven Traffic Light Control System for Emergency Vehicles

The problem of traffic congestion is a significant phenomenon that has had a substantial impact on the transportation system within the country. This phenomenon has given rise to numerous intricacies, particularly in instances where emergency situations occur at traffic light intersections that are consistently congested with a high volume of vehicles. This implementation of a traffic light controller system is designed with the intention of addressing this problem. The purpose of the system was to facilitate the operation of a 3-way traffic control light and provide priority to emergency vehicles using a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensor and Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) Architecture Based Microcontroller. This research work involved designing a system to mitigate the occurrence of accidents commonly observed at traffic light intersections, where vehicles often need to maneuver in order to make way for emergency vehicles following a designated route. The research effectively achieved the analysis, simulation and implementation of wireless communication devices for traffic light control. The implemented prototype utilizes RFID transmission, operates in conjunction with the sequential mode of traffic lights to alter the traffic light sequence accordingly and reverts the traffic lights back to their normal sequence after the emergency vehicle has passed the traffic lights.

An integrated and cooperative architecture for multi-intersection traffic signal control

Traffic signal control(TSC)systems are one essential component in intelligent transport systems.However,relevant studies are usually independent of the urban traffic simulation environment,collaborative TSC algorithms and traffic signal communication.In this paper,we propose(1)an integrated and cooperative Internet-of-Things architecture,namely General City Traffic Computing System(GCTCS),which simultaneously leverages an urban traffic simulation environment,TSC algorithms,and traffic signal communication;and(2)a general multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm,namely General-MARL,considering cooperation and communication between traffic lights for multi-intersection TSC.In experiments,we demonstrate that the integrated and cooperative architecture of GCTCS is much closer to the real-life traffic environment.The General-MARL increases the average movement speed of vehicles in traffic by 23.2%while decreases the network latency by 11.7%.

Adaptive signal control and coordination for urban traffic control in a connected vehicle environment: A review

Existing signal control systems for urban traffic are usually based on traffic flow data from fixed location detectors.Because of rapid advances in emerging vehicular communication,connected vehicle(CV)-based signal control demonstrates significant improvements over existing conventional signal control systems.Though various CV-based signal control systems have been investigated in the past decades,these approaches still have many issues and drawbacks to overcome.We summarize typical components and structures of these existing CV-based urban traffic signal control systems and digest several important issues from the summarized vital concepts.Last,future research directions are discussed with some suggestions.We hope this survey can facilitate the connected and automated vehicle and transportation research community to efficiently approach next-generation urban traffic signal control methods and systems.

Resource allocation for D2D-assisted haptic communications

Haptic communications is recognized as a promising enabler of extensive services by enabling real-time haptic control and feedback in remote environments,e.g.,teleoperation and autonomous driving.Considering the strict transmission requirements on reliability and latency,Device-to-Device(D2D)communications is introduced to assist haptic communications.In particular,the teleoperators with poor channel quality are assisted by auxiliaries,and each auxiliary and its corresponding teleoperator constitute a D2D pair.However,the haptic interaction and the scarcity of radio resources pose severe challenges to the resource allocation,especially facing the sporadic packet arrivals.First,the contentionbased access scheme is applied to achieve low-latency transmission,where the resource scheduling latency is omitted and users can directly access available resources.In this context,we derive the reliability index of D2D pairs under the contention-based access scheme,i.e.,closed-loop packet error probability.Then,the reliability performance is guaranteed by bidirectional power control,which aims to minimize the sum packet error probability of all D2D pairs.Potential game theory is introduced to solve the problem with low complexity.Accordingly,a distributed power control algorithm based on synchronous log-linear learning is proposed to converge to the optimal Nash Equilibrium.Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed learning algorithm.

Dynamic Event-Triggered Consensus Control for Input Constrained Multi-Agent Systems With a Designable Minimum Inter-Event Time

This paper investigates the consensus control of multi-agent systems(MASs) with constrained input using the dynamic event-triggered mechanism(ETM).Consider the MASs with small-scale networks where a centralized dynamic ETM with global information of the MASs is first designed.Then,a distributed dynamic ETM which only uses local information is developed for the MASs with large-scale networks.It is shown that the semi-global consensus of the MASs can be achieved by the designed bounded control protocol where the Zeno phenomenon is eliminated by a designable minimum inter-event time.In addition,it is easier to find a trade-off between the convergence rate and the minimum inter-event time by an adjustable parameter.Furthermore,the results are extended to regional consensus of the MASs with the bounded control protocol.Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.