An Online Decision-Theoretic Pipeline for Responder Dispatch

The problem of dispatching emergency responders to service traffic accidents, fire, distress calls and crimes plagues urban areas across the globe. While such problems have been extensively looked at, most approaches are offline. Such methodologies fail to capture the dynamically changing environments under which critical emergency response occurs, and therefore, fail to be implemented in practice. Any holistic approach towards creating a pipeline for effective emergency response must also look at other challenges that it subsumes - predicting when and where incidents happen and understanding the changing environmental dynamics. We describe a system that collectively deals with all these problems in an online manner, meaning that the models get updated with streaming data sources. We highlight why such an approach is crucial to the effectiveness of emergency response, and present an algorithmic framework that can compute promising actions for a given decision-theoretic model for responder dispatch. We argue that carefully crafted heuristic measures can balance the trade-off between computational time and the quality of solutions achieved and highlight why such an approach is more scalable and tractable than traditional approaches. We also present an online mechanism for incident prediction, as well as an approach based on recurrent neural networks for learning and predicting environmental features that affect responder dispatch. We compare our methodology with prior state-of-the-art and existing dispatch strategies in the field, which show that our approach results in a reduction in response time with a drastic reduction in computational time.Comment: Appeared in ICCPS 201

Emerging privacy challenges and approaches in CAV systems

The growth of Internet-connected devices, Internet-enabled services and Internet of Things systems continues at a rapid pace, and their application to transport systems is heralded as game-changing. Numerous developing CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicle) functions, such as traffic planning, optimisation, management, safety-critical and cooperative autonomous driving applications, rely on data from various sources. The efficacy of these functions is highly dependent on the dimensionality, amount and accuracy of the data being shared. It holds, in general, that the greater the amount of data available, the greater the efficacy of the function. However, much of this data is privacy-sensitive, including personal, commercial and research data. Location data and its correlation with identity and temporal data can help infer other personal information, such as home/work locations, age, job, behavioural features, habits, social relationships. This work categorises the emerging privacy challenges and solutions for CAV systems and identifies the knowledge gap for future research, which will minimise and mitigate privacy concerns without hampering the efficacy of the functions

Procedure to Prepare and Model Speed Data Considering the Traffic Infrastructure, as Part of a Cyber-Physical System

This chapter investigates the relationship between traffic control infrastructure (traffic lights and speed bumps) and the vehicles’ travel speeds, for certain hours and days of the week. The authors propose the following procedures: (1) street segmentation, (2) clustering and categorization of speed data, (3) histograms’ comparison analysis, (4) outlier detection, (5) modeling, and (6) delivering info to the users. Comparing speed histograms, segments with matching infrastructure presented similarities, regardless of the day of the week. Two techniques to model data were employed: polynomial regression and multinomial logistic regression. The algorithms to predict the travel speed category were also developed. The first technique yields on average 91.3% of data categorized correctly, and the second gets 90.09%. The traffic lights and speed bumps, located on the street segments under consideration, were identified as variables causing different travel speeds. The procedure allows to incorporate more traffic elements and can also be applied to other geographical locations

Parallel driving in CPSS: a unified approach for transport automation and vehicle intelligence

The emerging development of connected and automated vehicles imposes a significant challenge on current vehicle control and transportation systems. This paper proposes a novel unified approach, Parallel Driving, a cloud-based cyberphysical-social systems U+0028 CPSS U+0029 framework aiming at synergizing connected automated driving. This study first introduces the CPSS and ACP-based intelligent machine systems. Then the parallel driving is proposed in the cyber-physical-social space, considering interactions among vehicles, human drivers, and information. Within the framework, parallel testing, parallel learning and parallel reinforcement learning are developed and concisely reviewed. Development on intelligent horizon U+0028 iHorizon U+0028 and its applications are also presented towards parallel horizon. The proposed parallel driving offers an ample solution for achieving a smooth, safe and efficient cooperation among connected automated vehicles with different levels of automation in future road transportation systems