A Unified Smart Mobility System Integrating Terrestrial, Aerial and Marine Intelligent Vehicles

Smart City is a new concept that relies on digital technologies in order to interact more effectively with its citizens, create new business opportunities and reduce operational costs and resource consumption, while respecting environmental factors and sustainability objectives. Transport of goods and people is at the heart of Smart City activities and influences all other aspects, including economy, tourism, health care, and so on. Great progress has been made in this area, which has led to the emergence of the Smart Mobility concept. However, the current vision of this concept does not adequately reflect the status of the advances perceived by the transportation field. In fact, it is limited only to the on road transportation. Moreover, as the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is becoming more and more important, a common management of all the means of transportation is required. In this paper, we propose a more general vision of the Smart Mobility ecosystem, while specifying standardization bodies for cellular communication technologies for each domain and the directions of future research work towards a consistent deployment of such a wider vision. In future Smart Cities, a multi-modal service of mobility may combine not only classical means of road transportation, such as cars, bikes, buses, but also air transportation means like drones or marine transportation systems. Based on current technologies and standards, we present in this work a comparison between these technologies and discuss the main issues and challenges to have a unified integrated Smart Mobility system.