Managed information gathering and fusion for transient transport problems

This paper deals with vehicular traffic management by communication technologies from Traffic Control Center point of view in road networks. The global goal is to manage the urban traffic by road traffic operations, controlling and interventional possibilities in order to minimize the traffic delays and stops and to improve traffic safety on the roads. This paper focuses on transient transport, when the controlling management is crucial. The aim was to detect the beginning time of the transient traffic on the roads, to gather the most appropriate data and to get reliable information for interventional suggestions. More reliable information can be created by information fusion, several fusion techniques are expounded in this paper. A half-automatic solution with Decision Support System has been developed to help with engineers in suggestions of interventions based on real time traffic data. The information fusion has benefits for Decision Support System: the complementary sensors may fill the gaps of one another, the system is able to detect the changing of the percentage of different vehicle types in traffic. An example of detection and interventional suggestion about transient traffic on transport networks of a little town is presented at the end of the paper. The novelty of this paper is the gathering of information - triggered by the state changing from stationer to transient - from ad hoc channels and combining them with information from developed regular channels. --information gathering,information fusion,Kalman filter,transient traffic,Decision Support System

Context Aware Pre-Crash System for Vehicular ad hoc Networks Using Dynamic Bayesian Model

Tragically, traffic accidents involving drivers, motorcyclists and pedestrians result in thousands of fatalities worldwide each year. For this reason, making improvements to road safety and saving people’s lives is an international priority. In recent years, this aim has been supported by Intelligent Transport Systems, offering safety systems and providing an intelligent driving environment. The development of wireless communications and mobile ad hoc networks has led to improvements in intelligent transportation systems heightening these systems’ safety. Vehicular ad hoc Networks comprise an important technology; included within intelligent transportation systems, they use dedicated short-range communications to assist vehicles to communicate with one another, or with those roadside units in range. This form of communication can reduce road accidents and provide a safer driving environment. A major challenge has been to design an ideal system to filter relevant contextual information from the surrounding environment, taking into consideration the contributory factors necessary to predict the likelihood of a crash with different levels of severity. Designing an accurate and effective pre-crash system to avoid front and back crashes or mitigate their severity is the most important goal of intelligent transportation systems, as it can save people’s lives. Furthermore, in order to improve crash prediction, context-aware systems can be used to collect and analyse contextual information regarding contributory factors. The crash likelihood in this study is considered to operate within an uncertain context, and is defined according to the dynamic interaction between the driver, the vehicle and the environment, meaning it is affected by contributory factors and develops over time. As a crash likelihood is considered to be an uncertain context and develops over time, any usable technology must overcome this uncertainty in order to accurately predict crashes. This thesis presents a context-aware pre-crash collision prediction system, which captures information from the surrounding environment, the driver and other vehicles on the road. It utilises a Dynamic Bayesian Network as a reasoning model to predict crash likelihood and severity level, whether any crash will be fatal, serious, or slight. This is achieved by combining the above mentioned information and performing probabilistic reasoning over time. The thesis introduces novel context aware on-board unit architecture for crash prediction. The architecture is divided into three phases: the physical, the thinking and the application phase; these which represent the three main subsystems of a context-aware system: sensing, reasoning and acting. In the thinking phase, a novel Dynamic Bayesian Network framework is introduced to predict crash likelihood. The framework is able to perform probabilistic reasoning to predict uncertainty, in order to accurately predict a crash. It divides crash severity levels according to the UK department for transport, into fatal, serious and slight. GeNIe version 2.0 software was used to implement and verify the Dynamic Bayesian Network model. This model has been verified using both syntactical and real data provided by the UK department for transport in order to demonstrate the prediction accuracy of the proposed model and to demonstrate the importance of including a large amount of contextual information in the prediction process. The evaluation of the proposed system delivered high-fidelity results, when predicting crashes and their severity. This was judged by inputting different sensor readings and performing several experiments. The findings of this study has helped to predict the probability of a crash at different severity levels, accounting for factors that may be involved in causing a crash, thereby representing a valuable step towards creating a safer traffic network

Protocolo adaptativo de disseminação de dados para aplicações de segurança no trânsito em rodovias

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Automação e Sistemas, Florianópolis, 2013.As VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks) são formadas por sistemas de comunicação entre veículos que fazem parte de um ambiente de trânsito e têm seus nós compostos por veículos e por equipamentos fixos que estão presentes ao longo das vias. Estas redes objetivam proporcionar conforto e segurança aos passageiros, por meio de informações sobre acidentes na pista, condição da estrada e aplicações de entretenimento. A disponibilidade e o tempo em que as mensagens trafegam nesta rede são essenciais para tais aplicações. Por isso, as VANETs requerem métodos eficientes e confiáveis para a comunicação de dados. Para prover confiabilidade à difusão de dados em redes veiculares deve-se transpassar alguns problemas como, por exemplo, broadcast storm, nós ocultos, alta colisões de pacotes, redundância de informação, entre outros. Muitos destes problemas persistem em estudos realizados anteriormente. Este trabalho tem por objetivo prover confiabilidade na disseminação de mensagens em aplicações voltadas a segurança no trânsito por meio de um protocolo adaptativo e eficiente. O protocolo proposto é adaptativo pois adapta o período entre transmissões de mensagens de controle de acordo com a densidade da rodovia, a fim de diminuir o número de mensagens geradas na rede. Também visa ser eficiente pois diminui a quantidade de colisões frente a quantidade de pacotes gerados na rede, oferece menor atraso no envio das mensagens e diminui a quantidade de retransmissões em cenários com mais de um alerta na rede. O trabalho envolveu (I) a definição do protocolo proposto, a integração e o uso deste pela aplicação, (II) a implementação de uma aplicação para rodovias com simuladores de redes e de tráfego bidirecionalmente acoplados, (III) avaliação da confiabilidade do protocolo proposto e dos impactos decorrentes do uso do protocolo na aplicação de disseminação de alertas por meio de simulações realizadas em diferentes cenários de densidade de veículos, e (IV) as análises dos resultados experimentais obtidos. Os resultados dos experimentos comprovam que o protocolo proposto, para os cenários simulados é 100 % confiável e que os impactos decorrentes do seu uso não prejudicam as funcionalidades da aplicação, comprovando a eficiência do protocolo.Abstract : The VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks) are formed by communication systems among vehicles which are part of the same traffic environment. Their nodes are composed of vehicles and fixed equipment present along the traffic ways. The aim of these networks is to provide comfort and safety to passengers through information about accidents on the road, road conditions and entertainment applications. The availability and the time span in which these messages move through the network are essential for these applications. Consequently, the VANETs require eficient and reliable methods for data communication. To ensure that data transmission in vehicular networks is reliable certain problems must be overcome, such as broadcast storm, hidden nodes, high collision of packages, information redundancy, among others. Many of these problems persist in previous studies. Thus, this work aims at providing, through an adaptive and eficient protocol, reliability to message transmission in applications targeted at traffic safety. The proposed protocol is adaptive as it adapts the time span between the transmissions of messages according to the road density, in order to decrease the number of messages generated in the network. It also aims at efficiency as it decreases the amount of collisions due to the number of packages generated in the network, presents less delay in message transmission and decreases the amount of retransmissions in scenarios with more than one alert in the network. This research involved (I) the definition of the proposed protocol, its integration and use by the application, (II) the implementation of an application for motorways with network and traffic simulators directionally attached, (III) evaluation of the reliability of the proposed protocol and of the impacts resulting from the use of the protocol in the application of spread of alerts through simulations carried out in diverse scenarios of vehicle density, (IV) the analyses of the experimental results. These results prove that the proposed protocol is 100 % reliable for simulated scenarios and that the impacts produced by its use do not harm the functionalities of the application, proving the eficiency of the protocol

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

Préserver la vie privée des individus grâce aux Systèmes Personnels de Gestion des Données

Riding the wave of smart disclosure initiatives and new privacy-protection regulations, the Personal Cloud paradigm is emerging through a myriad of solutions offered to users to let them gather and manage their whole digital life. On the bright side, this opens the way to novel value-added services when crossing multiple sources of data of a given person or crossing the data of multiple people. Yet this paradigm shift towards user empowerment raises fundamental questions with regards to the appropriateness of the functionalities and the data management and protection techniques which are offered by existing solutions to laymen users. Our work addresses these questions on three levels. First, we review, compare and analyze personal cloud alternatives in terms of the functionalities they provide and the threat models they target. From this analysis, we derive a general set of functionality and security requirements that any Personal Data Management System (PDMS) should consider. We then identify the challenges of implementing such a PDMS and propose a preliminary design for an extensive and secure PDMS reference architecture satisfying the considered requirements. Second, we focus on personal computations for a specific hardware PDMS instance (i.e., secure token with mass storage of NAND Flash). In this context, we propose a scalable embedded full-text search engine to index large document collections and manage tag-based access control policies. Third, we address the problem of collective computations in a fully-distributed architecture of PDMSs. We discuss the system and security requirements and propose protocols to enable distributed query processing with strong security guarantees against an attacker mastering many colluding corrupted nodes.Surfant sur la vague des initiatives de divulgation restreinte de données et des nouvelles réglementations en matière de protection de la vie privée, le paradigme du Cloud Personnel émerge à travers une myriade de solutions proposées aux utilisateurs leur permettant de rassembler et de gérer l'ensemble de leur vie numérique. Du côté positif, cela ouvre la voie à de nouveaux services à valeur ajoutée lors du croisement de plusieurs sources de données d'un individu ou du croisement des données de plusieurs personnes. Cependant, ce changement de paradigme vers la responsabilisation de l'utilisateur soulève des questions fondamentales quant à l'adéquation des fonctionnalités et des techniques de gestion et de protection des données proposées par les solutions existantes aux utilisateurs lambda. Notre travail aborde ces questions à trois niveaux. Tout d'abord, nous passons en revue, comparons et analysons les alternatives de cloud personnel au niveau des fonctionnalités fournies et des modèles de menaces ciblés. De cette analyse, nous déduisons un ensemble général d'exigences en matière de fonctionnalité et de sécurité que tout système personnel de gestion des données (PDMS) devrait prendre en compte. Nous identifions ensuite les défis liés à la mise en œuvre d'un tel PDMS et proposons une conception préliminaire pour une architecture PDMS étendue et sécurisée de référence répondant aux exigences considérées. Ensuite, nous nous concentrons sur les calculs personnels pour une instance matérielle spécifique du PDMS (à savoir, un dispositif personnel sécurisé avec un stockage de masse de type NAND Flash). Dans ce contexte, nous proposons un moteur de recherche plein texte embarqué et évolutif pour indexer de grandes collections de documents et gérer des politiques de contrôle d'accès basées sur des étiquettes. Troisièmement, nous abordons le problème des calculs collectifs dans une architecture entièrement distribuée de PDMS. Nous discutons des exigences d'architectures système et de sécurité et proposons des protocoles pour permettre le traitement distribué des requêtes avec de fortes garanties de sécurité contre un attaquant maîtrisant de nombreux nœuds corrompus

Advanced Strategies for Robot Manipulators

Amongst the robotic systems, robot manipulators have proven themselves to be of increasing importance and are widely adopted to substitute for human in repetitive and/or hazardous tasks. Modern manipulators are designed complicatedly and need to do more precise, crucial and critical tasks. So, the simple traditional control methods cannot be efficient, and advanced control strategies with considering special constraints are needed to establish. In spite of the fact that groundbreaking researches have been carried out in this realm until now, there are still many novel aspects which have to be explored