Leveraging Intelligent Transportation Systems and Smart Vehicles Using Crowdsourcing: An Overview

The current and expected future proliferation of mobile and embedded technology provides unique opportunities for crowdsourcing platforms to gather more user data for making data-driven decisions at the system level. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Vehicular Social Networks (VSN) can be leveraged by mobile, spatial, and passive sensing crowdsourcing techniques due to improved connectivity, higher throughput, smart vehicles containing many embedded systems and sensors, and novel distributed processing techniques. These crowdsourcing systems have the capability of profoundly transforming transportation systems for the better by providing more data regarding (but not limited to) infrastructure health, navigation pathways, and congestion management. In this paper, we review and discuss the architecture and types of ITS crowdsourcing. Then, we delve into the techniques and technologies that serve as the foundation for these systems to function while providing some simulation results to show benefits from the implementation of these techniques and technologies on specific crowdsourcing-based ITS systems. Afterward, we provide an overview of cutting edge work associated with ITS crowdsourcing challenges. Finally, we propose various use-cases and applications for ITS crowdsourcing, and suggest some open research directions.