Intelligent Transportation Applications in Smart Cities: A Standards-Oriented Mapping Review

Abstract

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) increasingly combine sensing, communication, computation, data platforms, and mobility services. This article presents a structured, literature-based mapping review of ITS applications from a standards-oriented perspective. The study analyzes 42 studies organized into five thematic groups and evaluated through 63 article–standard assessments using selected ITU-T Recommendations as an analytical lens. The rubric used in this work examined whether each study reported, or allowed reviewers to infer, evidence on architecture, data handling, interoperability, security and privacy, deployment assumptions, and digital-twin capabilities. Partial alignment was the most frequent outcome, accounting for 25 of 63 article–standard assessments (39.7%). At group level, satisfactory or optimal alignment occurred in 5 of 8 assessments (62.5%) in the digital-twin group and in 3 of 13 (23.1%) in the Big Data group; in the latter, 6 of 13 assessments (46.2%) showed limited or no alignment. Stronger alignment was usually found when studies described architectures, data flows, sensing mechanisms, service workflows, physical–virtual modeling, or system-management components relevant to the Recommendation, and weaker alignment when they focused mainly on algorithms, datasets, prediction accuracy, authentication, or secure dissemination without sufficient detail on interfaces, data governance, gateway roles, deployment conditions, or platform integration. The review proposes a five-dimension standards-facing reporting checklist addressing interoperability, data lifecycle and governance, security and privacy, operational readiness, and standards-facing evidence. It supports traceable reporting through explicit evidence-status categories and locations, and can be implemented as a Standards and Interoperability Reporting Statement (SIRS) for authors, reviewers, and editors. Overall, the findings show that standards-oriented assessment depends not only on technical performance but also on explicit and traceable integration evidence, while the proposed reporting profile provides a practical mechanism for making such evidence more systematically visible in future ITS studies.