An Eco-Friendly Multimodal Route Guidance System for Urban Areas Using Multi-Agent Technology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research is very relevant. Authors present a holistic solution to the problem of increasing traffic and therefore emissions. Another aspect that goes in favor of this study is real-world experiments which were conducted the two cities. Use of public transport is encouraged by such proposals and therefore this reviewer deems this proposal very timely and complete with some exceptions that are listed below:

The authors did not provide a comparison with [53] which seems to be closest technique to the proposed technique based on Table 1? How does the proposed technique compare with [53] if we ignore routing guidance?

Section 3.2 needs to be written in a more professional manner. It reads like a white paper.

Line 454 - Authors explain how many agents are created on each testing machine however they do not provide any pretext to agent creation and why are so many agents being created in the first place. This information is not available in the previous text. What is the significance of these numbers? The graph (fig 7) is not conclusive in this respect. More description of AGlobe works should be included. This authors believes that this is a critical piece of information that is missing from the paper.

This author does not see how these few lines are important and need to be included:
However, the traffic data fetcher agent has a guard element on the message ‘Send Real Time Traffic Data’. This message is sent only once the traffic updates become available. In other words, the guard element acts as a condition for sending the message.
Don't all systems have such checks? Using the name "guard elements" for this does not seem like a right choice of words either.

Some more questions that this reviewer would like to be answered:
- What are the cost implications of employing such a system?
- How many sensors are required to cover a large metropolitan?
- How much does a sensor cost?
- It is not clear how layered transport segments are more useful than say no-layered segments?
- When all agents are feeding to the same system how is this not a centralized system?

Some other minor mistakes:
- Line 57- Fuel efficient vehicles or simply electric vehicles.
- Line 205 - suffered from several shortcomings
- Line 216 - fix citations
- Table 2 - Row 3 - Collects what?
- Graphs and figures are not clear. Text should be legible.
- Authors have excessively use the word "the" throughout the manuscript. This needs to be fixed.

Overall, it is a well researched and implemented study.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

We suggest a development of the conclusions in order to better highlight the contributions.

Show the importance of using multi-agent technologies in the intelligent multimodal transport system, proposed in the 2 routes.

How much is the travel time reduced?

There are delays, queues, even accidents in urban traffic. And these can be considered

In the multi-agent system proposed, for the calculation of CO2 emissions takes into account the etalon (standard) vehicles on the routes or the existing formulas in the specialized literature.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

One of the experiments, Section 6.2, did not have sufficient details about the result. They were depending on examples instead of a solid experiment. However, they have done excellent work in the rest of the experimental study.

Please address.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx