Applying Neural-Symbolic Cognitive Agents in Intelligent Transport Systems to reduce CO2 emissions

Providing personalized feedback in Intelligent Transport Systems is a powerful tool for instigating a change in driving behaviour and the reduction of CO₂ emissions. This requires a system that is capable of detecting driver characteristics from real-time vehicle data. In this paper, we apply the architecture and theory of a Neural-Symbolic Cognitive Agent (NSCA) to effectively learn and reason about observed driving behaviour and related driver characteristics. The NSCA architecture combines neural learning and reasoning with symbolic temporal knowledge representation and is capable of encoding background knowledge, learning new hypotheses from observed data, and inferring new beliefs based on these hypotheses. Furthermore, it deals with uncertainty and errors in the data using a Bayesian inference model, and it scales well to hundreds of thousands of data samples as in the application reported in this paper. We have applied the NSCA in an Intelligent Transport System to reduce CO₂ emissions as part of an European Union project, called EcoDriver. Results reported in this paper show that the NSCA outperforms the state-of-the-art in this application area, and is applicable to very large data.