Intelligent Total Transportation Management System for Future Smart Cities
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The organization is basically ok. However, given that this submission aims at an academic technical paper, rather than an instruction or manual for a tool or concept, the authors are suggested to make the structure more fleshy by adding more relevant works for those sub-topics in ways that like 'who' did 'what', and 'what benefit' are brought, etc.
For example, as far as the reviewer is concerned, the traffic management for congestion alleviation in context of cooperative vehicles is a crucial topic in smart city, and many related interesting works have been published, such as 'A Unified Framework for Vehicle Rerouting and Traffic Light Control to Reduce Traffic Congestion. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems', 'Improving the Performance of Transportation Networks: A Semi-Centralized Pricing Approach. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems', 'Multiagent-based Route Guidance for Increasing the Chance of Arrival on Time. 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)' etc. Moreover, vehicle routing is a key topic for traffic management, the criterion or objective is expected to be personalized or diverse in the context of smart city, rather than the conventionally shortest path or fastest path. Recently, the criterion of arriving on time has been widely studied, and the authors may like to review them, e.g., 'Using Reinforcement Learning to Minimize the Probability of Delay Occurrence in Transportation. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology ','Finding the Shortest Path in Stochastic Vehicle Routing: A Cardinality Minimization Approach. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems', 'Improving the Efficiency of Stochastic Vehicle Routing: A Partial Lagrange Multiplier Method. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology', etc.
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the reviewer for the comments, which significantly helped to improve the manuscript. We have addressed all the issues raised in the review. Please find the attached file.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Editor and dear authors,
I thoroughly enjoyed reading and reviewing the present manuscript. It is a reasonably good paper that fits the journal and special issue identity.
I will provide a few critical comments that will help the authors to make some minor/medium amendments and additions that will help this work in terms of its overall rigour, depth and readability.
1. I need the research gap, research aim and objectives of this work to be more explicitly delivered.
2. ‘… offers its total management’ p.3/l.104 is not a research-centred aim to be honest. Make it more modest and more about research (e.g. inform the policy and mobility provision stakeholders about a potential framework that will enable the total management of smart cities).
3. I need a paragraph in the introduction that briefly presents the smart travel modes and interventions that can be in the future part of the smart city’s urban transport system. Please see (and refer) to the following article for guidance and inspiration:
Nikitas, A., Kougias, I., Alyavina, E., & Njoya Tchouamou, E. (2017). How can autonomous and connected vehicles, electromobility, BRT, hyperloop, shared use mobility and mobility-as-a-service shape transport futures for the context of smart cities?. Urban Science, 1(4), 36.
4. Make sure you define early on more explicitly the meanings of two diverse terms underpinning your study i.e. ‘smart city’ and ‘total management’. You did that with smart transport.
5. I want to see a paragraph towards the end of your paper acknowledging the limitations of the study. All studies have certain issues but by recognising them and creating transparency you convince the reader. What could have been done differently for instance to add to your methodology (e.g. interviews with smart transport experts) and how this might limit your study’s genralisability?
6. In lines 73/74 I need a small addition. ‘Smart mobility includes: (i) smart roads, (ii) smart street lights, (iii) smart vehicles, and (iv) smart traffic rules and (v) smart policy-making and legislation
7. What about your future research directions?
I think the work can be of adequate rigour provided that my feedback is addressed.
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the reviewer for the comments, which significantly helped to improve the manuscript. We have addressed all the issues raised in the review. Please find the attached file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Lines 79-83, these categories are proposed by authors or by related literature?
At the end of Introduction a short explanation about the structure of paper is expected; not only a description of issues dealt with.
2.1.: Some reference is expected to be related with the explanation (it seems that all commented is an opinion of authors).
2.2.: Presented classification is based on expert literature or it is a proposal of authors?
2.3. Here the global optimization method is described, but what problem wants to be solved? Which method is this? Why the proposed method? Is there another proposal in the related literature?
2.3. Many explanations seem to be opinions and no justification are made.
2.4. Recommendation about the kind of sensors is made, but not justification is discussed.
2.5. What kind of data is collected? More information is needed.
2.5. No details about different issues comented are provided.
3. The selection of the three references must be explained and justified, showing the relevance of them.
3.1. Markov model is presented but not explained and related with the problem to be solved, and why Markov is selected to be used. More detail is needed in general, and how the model is created is a must in a research paper, not only a description. For example, more information about the "noise" is needed, due to only is commented in a general way.
3.2. The same problems about justification of the proposal and more information about it is needed. Equation 9, for example, must be justified and explained.
3.3. It is not clear, taking into account, a research paper, the contribution. Moreover, information seems to be superficial and more deep explanations should be done.
4. The provided information is not a discussion about the proposal. Nevertheless, it would be useful using this information in previous sections.
5. It is not usual to reference another works to be related to the proposal... According this no new information is provided in this paper, and it could be referenced previously in the text to justify what is new.
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the reviewer for the comments, which significantly helped to improve the manuscript. We have addressed all the issues raised in the review. Please find the attached file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I noticed that the authors revised the manuscript following the comments, and I am fine with the current version.
Author Response
Thank you very much for the recommendation of accepting our paper. Following your suggestion, we have further improved our paper.
We have carefully edited the English writing and fixed the typos. The changes are highlighted in red in the revised manuscript.
Reviewer 3 Report
4. Discussion on possible use of the concept and evaluation of the results
The final contributions are due to previous work. In my opinion should be explained better why are presented here. In addition, the third contribution may need to be referenced.
Author Response
- Discussion on possible use of the concept and evaluation of the results
The final contributions are due to previous work. In my opinion should be explained better why are presented here. In addition, the third contribution may need to be referenced.
Response:
We would like to thank the Editors and Reviewers for their thorough review of the manuscript, excellent comments, and constructive suggestions. Based on this comment, we added a paragraph in the revised manuscript as follows.
Lines: 844-847
Generally, this paper introduced a new concept of ITTM that needs several studies and developments to improve its effectiveness. The authors of this paper have been worked in this field and published several scientific reports. Three contributions regarding this study are presented as follows.
Regarding the third contribution, some ideas are presented in this study, while others were published already. We added references in this contribution [65, 66].
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
