An Ontology for Collaborative Navigation Among Autonomous Cars, Drivers, and Pedestrians in Smart Cities

While existing transportation research is mostly focused on taking the behavior of different travelers (mostly drivers) into account in traffic situations, currently there is a gap in research that addresses collaboration among all travelers. To fill this gap, we propose to develop the foundational knowledge for collaboration among travelers and the surrounding infrastructure using advanced navigation systems. Our vision is that unlike current navigation systems that assist drivers and pedestrians with navigation within urban cities in isolation, the future generation of navigation systems will be collaborative where drivers, autonomous cars, and pedestrians will interact and share their mobility needs and preferences to meet a specific objective. These objectives could be car crash avoidance, pedestrian accident avoidance, or environmentally friendly mobility, among other things. This paper presents an ontology as the foundation for the proposed collaborative navigation, which is an important feature of smart cities. Navigation sensors, which are commonplace and anticipated to be widespread in smart cities, constitute the underlying information for the proposed ontology where interactions between different participants are conceptualized.