Toward a personalized autonomous transportation system: Vision, challenges, and solutions

The fragmented design of intelligent transportation systems creates isolated intelligent systems. Resource competition and information gaps are fierce and widespread, worsening traffic issues and degrading overall service levels. Therefore, empowered by advanced technologies, an evolution toward an autonomous transportation system (ATS) is observed. This evolution aims to develop a collaborative and sustainable ecosystem, prompting interoperability within the cloud-edge-device continuum. It can, accordingly, dismantle internal resource barriers and achieve a systematic balance between demand and supply with less human intervention. Despite the promising vision of an ATS, it encounters three key challenges: disparate data, deficient models, and conflicting interests in supporting autonomous and personalized mobility. Hence, as an innovative solution, a trustworthy, private, and equal-serving framework called TPE is designed. It seamlessly integrates blockchain, federated learning, and large-scale models to deploy a trustworthy operating environment, process private data for globally shareable knowledge, and develop a foundation model for personalized adaptation, respectively. Consequently, ATSs empowered by TPE can serve diverse user groups both privately and equally.