Vehicle to Cloud: Big Data for Environmental Sustainability, Energy, and Traffic Management

Introduction

Starting from the early days of civilization to nowadays, one of the irrefutable facts about the humanity is the endless technology development and research beyond the imagination of his ancestors. Behavioral issues for most of the civilizations took place in early days behavioral can be explained by Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which focuses on describing the stages of growth in humans starting from bottom including the physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem as well as self-actualization and self-transcendence (Maslow, 1943). However, the world gets more and more sophisticated, complex and complicated; therefore, majority of the earlier assumptions and theories themselves should continuously evolve to change or reshape in light of the technological improvements and innovations. Contemporary modern daily life enforces people to use digital devices such as computers, personal digital assistants, cell phones as well as online services and infotainment systems which heavily rely on Internet. In this regard, hierarchy of needs could easily be extended in such a way that digital products and services are also included. It is critical to keep in mind that both number and capabilities of these digital products and services increase dramatically in the last two decades in parallel to the escalating demands. In order to meet the requirements, Microsoft, AMD, Intel and IBM has already passed the five billion barrier in the microprocessor transistor counts in the device and making a huge scatter from the Moore’s Law of the doubling of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits. (Schaller, 1997; Moore, 1998). This implies that the future of the humanity will also reshape and adapt itself to the contemporary conditions while more devices and sensors becoming online. In parallel with these, one should bear in mind that more computational power will be available for artificial intelligence and self-aware systems. It is obvious that these next generation systems should be tuned to optimize for sustainable a future.

Sustainability is based on a simple way of thinking about the idea of everything that humanity needs for survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on the natural surrounding conditions. The ability to keep something around for this aim creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony allowing a continuous satisfaction of the items. Main concern areas of sustainability starts with the E3 concept of energy, economy, environment and as well as enriching with commercial, social, financial, agricultural, educational, health related issues of present and future.