A novel block-chain based secure cross-domain interaction approach for intelligent transportation systems

Energy-efficient cooperative transmission for intelligent transportation systems

This paper presents a framework to model and analyze the survivability and vulnerability of intelligent transportation system (ITS) networks. The proposed framework includes qualitative and quantitative approaches and can be implemented during the planning and design phase of new ITS projects or assess the survivability and vulnerability of existing ITS networks. The qualitative approach is based on Survivable System Analysis (SSA). It identifies threat mitigation strategies for each threat identified and provides suggestions for improved security and survivability. The paper also presents a quantitative survivable system analysis approach that is aimed to compute the essentiality of ITS network components and rank-order these essentialities to determine the most essential components of the network. The proposed framework provides a significant addition to the current design practices by integration system security, vulnerability, and survivability into the design, operation, and management of ITS networks. While the case-study presented in the paper focused on ITS networks, the proposed framework can be applied to any other critical infrastructure distribution, control, and monitoring networks.

Typical intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are comprised of geographically distributed ITS devices including sensors, cameras and dynamic message signs (DMS). There are several options for providing data communication between these field devices and traffic management centers (TMC). Wireless networks are attractive due to their relatively lower cost and ease of deployment compared to fixed networks. However, these face unique security and signal interference problems, and deploying new wireless networks can require significant equipment investment. In this work, a new extremely low-cost wireless strategy for ITS network communication is presented. This approach applies control channels of the Network Trunking System (NTS), a licensed radio frequency to support the voice communication, to control DMS operation under the National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol (NTCIP). Because the NTS network has already installed in the metropolitan, urban, and rural areas in Oklahoma, it provides a cheap deployment solution requiring only additional adapter devices. Long term operation and maintenance costs can further be amortized between voice and data services. The proposed technique is compared to the existing ITS wireless networking strategies and hybrid network strategies merging wired and wireless networks deployed in Oklahoma. Details of the strategy for using wireless networking in the Oklahoma ITS and experiences with wireless ITS device deployment are also provided.

Performance measures play a critical role in the operation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), because they provide feedback to the operators regarding system operations and efficiency. Traffic management systems use archived data, provided by various sensors, as a basis for describing normal conditions and predicting traffic conditions that may be expected at a particular time and place in the highway system. However, data quality is one of the principal concerns of archived ITS data users for the following reasons: 1) Manual inspection techniques are unable to detect significant errors because of the large volume of ITS data; 2) Only minimal error detection can be performed as the data is being collected; 3) Sensors may only fail intermittently and not affect long-term averages; 4) Sensor failures may be masked by congestion or incidents. This project examined several quality control issues on one of the nation’s busiest sections of Interstate, the Borman expressway (I-80/94). Various tests such as speed and volume comparisons, data availability and average effective vehicle length test were developed and applied, revealing significant inconsistency in data quality provided by different detection technologies. Results that document these problems are presented in this study and causes of non-random changes are identified. Finally, several recommendations for improving construction and configuration procedures are proposed. Several simple performance metrics are also documented that transportation agencies can use to assess the quality of traffic data and sustain that quality over time.

A novel energy efficient IRS-relay network for ITS with Nakagami-m fading channels

Some transportation planning and traffic operations–intelligent transportation system (ITS) groups are cooperating on data-sharing initiatives, including the use of archived ITS data for planning statistics. However, conventional procedures for the calculation of annual average traffic statistics need to be updated to accommodate the incomplete nature of archived ITS data. The effects of various missing data patterns on several existing and modified annual average statistic calculation procedures were tested. Five locations were chosen for the study: two urban Interstate highways with significant commuter traffic, one urban parkway with commuter traffic and recreational trips, and two rural roads with pronounced seasonal patterns. A complete year of data was obtained for each study location; then missing data patterns (as identified from an empirical study) were simulated by randomly or systematically removing data. At urban locations in which commuter traffic dampens seasonality patterns, a significant amount of missing data (up to 8 months of consecutive missing data) can be tolerated with little to no effect on annual average traffic statistics. All calculation procedures provided similar results at the urban locations. For the two rural locations, 1 month of missing data still resulted in tolerable error for most procedures, whereas 2 months of missing data were close to or exceeded tolerable error levels for most procedures. Modifications of conventional calculation procedures (that account for small gaps in data on a daily basis) are better suited to archived ITS data.

With the recent advent of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and their associated data collection and archiving capabilities, there is now a rich data source for transportation professionals to develop capacity values for their own jurisdictions. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on the best approach for estimating capacity from ITS data. The motivation of this paper is to compare and contrast four of the most popular capacity estimation techniques in terms of (1) data requirements, (2) modeling effort required, (3) estimated parameter values, (4) theoretical background, and (5) statistical differences across time and over geographically dispersed locations. Specifically, the first method is the maximum observed value, the second is a standard fundamental diagram curve fitting approach using the popular Van Aerde model, the third method uses the breakdown identification approach, and the fourth method is the survival probability based on product limit method. These four approaches were tested on two test beds: one is located in San Diego, California, U.S., and has data from 112 work days; the other is located in Shanghai, China, and consists of 81 work days. It was found that, irrespective of the estimation methodology and the definition of capacity, the estimated capacity can vary considerably over time. The second finding was that, as expected, the different approaches yielded different capacity results. These estimated capacities varied by as much as 26 % at the San Diego test site and by 34 % at the Shanghai test site. It was also found that each of the methodologies has advantages and disadvantages, and the best method will be the function of the available data, the application, and the goals of the modeler. Consequently, it is critical for users of automatic capacity estimation techniques, which utilize ITS data, to understand the underlying assumptions of each of the different approaches.

Through research and lessons learned from early intelligent transportation systems (ITS) deployers, it has been concluded that the procurement of goods and services to support ITS deployments represents a major obstacle for transportation agencies responsible for deploying ITS. This obstacle can be attributed to the challenges associated with the procurement of goods and services to support the deployment of complex information technology (IT) systems. In response to this challenge, innovative procurement methods have been established. In an effort to aid state and local transportation agencies with the identification of appropriate innovative procurement methods, the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) funded Project 3-77 with the objective of developing a guide to ITS procurement. A research team was established to develop the guide and an NCHRP research panel was established to oversee the development of the guide. As a result of this research it was determined that project, agency and environment characteristics and systems engineering and project management principles are key inputs into the process used to identify an appropriate procurement approach for a specified ITS project. A decision model was developed to represent this process.

Research efforts carried out on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improving safety and efficiency of road transportation have been focused on cars, where vehicular communications have demonstrated to enhance the driver awareness with active services that improve fatality statistics. Although common vehicles accidents have been reduced in the last years, those involving vulnerable road users remain. Cyclists and motorcyclists cover a whole area where ITS and telematics should be embedded with no doubt, given the incremental popularity of bikes and motorbikes in urban mobility and short interurban routes. For this reason, this work takes the key objective of integrating two-wheelers within the future cooperative ITS network. Hence, a novel communication device especially adapted to cyclists and motorcyclists has been designed, by integrating vehicular wireless communications (i.e. IEEE 802.11p) and considering interface limitations. From the protocols perspective the work is focused on IPv6, and considers two-wheelers as part of the Future Internet. In fact, a great success of the proposal is exploiting the synergy between IETF (Internet) and ITS-specific protocols coming from ISO and ETSI, creating a novel active system to improve two-wheel transport safety through Cooperative Awareness Messaging (CAM) over IPv6. The embedded communication node for two-wheelers includes the proper software to warn the driver about the approaching of a regular vehicle through audio and visual notifications. Moreover, its counterpart for common cars has also been developed, but using an Android application running on a handheld device connected to a regular IPv6 in-vehicle network.

This paper proposes a system level study of an adaptive communication gateway for Intelligent Vehicles (IV) in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This study starts with the analysis of the different communications standards that are expected to link the IV to mobile devices inside the vehicle, other IVs in the ITS network, the road side unites and the existing wireless infrastructures into three types namely, Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), Wide Area Network (WAN) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). An adaptive communication gateway architecture is devised to support Multimode Multiband (MMMB) operation. This architecture accounts for the need for concurrent operation of multiple communication links and address the different challenges proper to the ITS applications

This thesis presents a work in progress related to the use of Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) data to actuate an adaptive control system on an autonomous vehicle operating in an Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The autonomous passenger vehicle has rapidly matured from a speculative concept to a reality that is quickly appearing within our sightlines. Autonomous (also called self-driving, driverless, or robotic) vehicles have long been predicted in science fiction and discussed in popular science media. Recently, major corporations have announced plans to begin selling such vehicles in the near future, and some jurisdictions have passed legislation to allow such vehicles to operate legally on public roads. Autonomous vehicles will be performing intelligent functions (navigation, maneuver, behavior, or task) by perceiving the environment and implementing a responsive action based on HUMS input. Once these vehicles begin to operate on public roads as a norm, safety and reliability becomes a major factor. The implementation or expanded use of HUMS can perceivably render these systems reliable and safe to operate in any environment or mode. This thesis also depicts a notational framework for HUMS in autonomous vehicles operating on ITS networks and future research needed to make this a reality. Keywords: Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS), Reliability, Adaptive Systems, Prognostics, Autonomous Vehicle, Intelligent Transportation System

More than 10 years ago, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) began to standardize the communication between vehicles and infrastructure in so-called “Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).” This communication is supposed to be self-organized, which means, it has to be operated without the assistance from an access network. However, since most of the communication components are deployed in an inhomogeneous manner by vehicle operators “in the wild,” the security aspects are—for the lack of a better word—challenging at least. We will examine the security of ITS networks by discussing different modes of possible attacks.

The wireless mesh network (WMN) is an economical low-power solution to provide wireless broadband access in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). This paper investigates how to deploy access points (APs) to improve throughput and quality-of-service (QoS), when the multihop communication is used to extend the coverage of wireless ITS network. Frequency planning is suggested to improve the capacity with QoS provisioning and to make the system more scalable. To investigate the overall tradeoffs among QoS, throughput, and coverage, we develop an analytical model to evaluate throughput, frame delay, and jitter for the considered ITS WMN using the carrier-sense multiple-access (CSMA) medium access control (MAC) protocol. Then, we apply an optimization approach to determine the optimal separation distances between APs with the delay requirement. To provide a guideline for network planning, we compare the uniform-spacing and increasing-spacing AP deployment strategies. The uniform-spacing strategy is to make all the APs with the same separation distance. In the increasing-spacing strategy, the separation distances between APs are increased from the central AP to the outer APs. Because of the shorter separation distance, the AP closer to the central AP can deliver higher traffic. It is shown that the increasing-spacing strategy outperforms the uniform-spacing strategy in terms and a profit function, considering the capacity and the total cost for deploying APs.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) typically rely on massive sources of data to monitor the transportation system, estimate its current state, forecast its future state, and react with a set of control and management strategies in real time. This requires the prompt processing of a variety of data sources that is consistently changing with time and typically challenging to combine (and make sense of) in real time. This paper presents thoroughly the studies related to big data applications in ITS and its associated challenges.

With the use of technologies, ‘cities’ are able to control everything from traffic lights to the distribution of water in the city, traffic, environment, social actions, health, education, urban planning, security, and public administration, are some of the main areas of activity. The implementation of technology also brings other concerns such as data security and vulnerability and the privacy of individuals. The evolution of intelligent transport systems (ITS) has been accelerated, multifaceted, and often based on the technological advances considered revolutionary for the Urban Mobility sector. Recently, the widespread use of ITS in the operation and management of urban mobility is part of everyday life. Numerous tools are now available for a variety of contexts and scales, with applications that directly impact both locally and globally. This dissertation seeks to analyze the security risk within smart cities. It addresses the theme of what are intelligent transport systems and what are the main solutions to ensure the safety of these systems. To this end, is performed an analysis and classification of ITS threats. With the help of the NS-3 network simulator to model, the ITS communications architecture and the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) traffic simulator an urban road area scenario was generated. Finally, lessons learned and future research challenges to improve the security of ITS systems are presented.KeywordsSmart citySafetyPrivacyDataInfrastructuresMobilityInternet of Things (IoT)Traffic controlE-GovernanceCybersecurityHackers