Design Criteria to Architect Continuous Experimentation for Self-Driving Vehicles

The software powering today's vehicles surpasses mechatronics as the dominating engineering challenge due to its fast evolving and innovative nature. In addition, the software and system architecture for upcoming vehicles with automated driving functionality is already processing ~750MB/s - corresponding to over 180 simultaneous 4K-video streams from popular video-on-demand services. Hence, self-driving cars will run so much software to resemble "small data centers on wheels" rather than just transportation vehicles. Continuous Integration, Deployment, and Experimentation have been successfully adopted for software-only products as enabling methodology for feedback-based software development. For example, a popular search engine conducts ~250 experiments each day to improve the software based on its users' behavior. This work investigates design criteria for the software architecture and the corresponding software development and deployment process for complex cyber-physical systems, with the goal of enabling Continuous Experimentation as a way to achieve continuous software evolution. Our research involved reviewing related literature on the topic to extract relevant design requirements. The study is concluded by describing the software development and deployment process and software architecture adopted by our self-driving vehicle laboratory, both based on the extracted criteria.Comment: Copyright 2017 IEEE. Paper submitted and accepted at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture. 8 pages, 2 figures. Published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library, URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7930218

Computational Challenges in Cooperative Intelligent Urban Transport

This report documents the talks and group work of Dagstuhl Seminar 16091 “Computational Challenges in Cooperative Intelligent Urban Transport”. This interdisciplinary seminar brought researchers together from many fields including computer science, transportation, operations research, mathematics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The seminar included two formats of talks: several minute research statements and longer overview talks. The talks given are documented here with abstracts. Furthermore, this seminar consisted of significant amounts of group work that is also documented with short abstracts detailing group discussions and planned outcomes

PLANNING AND COORDINATION IN DRIVING SIMULATION

We present an overview of coordination and planning tasks that we face with during the development of the AgentDrive simulation platform. We particularly describe an integration of the AgentDrive with a driving simulator OpenDS. We demonstrate how the planning and coordination mechanisms can be applied in a driving simulator for automated driving applications or realistic traffic generation. We emphasize particular planning and/or coordination methods that were already developed using AgentDrive platform

ICT Infrastructure for Cooperative, Connected and Automated Transport in Transition Areas

One of the challenges of automated road transport is to manage the coexistence of conventional and highly automated vehicles, in order to ensure an uninterrupted level of safety and efficiency. Vehicles driving at a higher automation level may have to change to a lower level of automation in a certain area under certain circumstances and certain (e.g. road and weather) conditions. The paper targets the transition phases between different levels of automation. It will review related research, introduce a concept to investigate automation level changes, present some recent research results, i.e. assessing key performance indicators for both analysing driver behaviour and traffic management in light of autonomous vehicles, an initial simulation architecture, and address further research topics on investigation of the traffic management in such areas (called "Transition Areas") when the automation level changes, and development of traffic management procedures and protocols to enable smooth coexistence of automated, cooperative, connected vehicles and conventional vehicles, especially in an urban environment

An Intelligent Transportation System: the Quito City Case Study

Managing traffic in a large city has become a topic of great interest in both politics and science. The costs of poor traffic management have been quantified as losses equal to millions of dollars, not counting the unquantifiable value of the time that a person loses in traffic jams. Intelligent transport systems (ITS) offer a set of innovative solutions specific to the management of different modes of transport. This article focuses on the development of an ITS for the city of Quito that allows smart decision-making to direct heavy haul transporters that want to enter the city via one of its main access routes. Technologies such as Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), in association with the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) communication protocol, facilitate the development of a vehicular management platform/system capable of sending notifications in real-time and issuing instructions to drivers regarding traffic delays along routes, average speeds, etc. The system supports a network of heterogeneous sensors accessible through the web. It can integrate any device that uses HTTP protocol. Time interval and location range testing have been undertaken to refine the accuracy of the system and make it adaptable to any geographic situation. The system allows communicate with the server through MQTT or through web services, using technologies such as: MongoDB and GeoJSON. One of the most relevant results is that the degree of accuracy of the system is within appropriate ranges when compared to commercial applications such as Google Maps and Waze

Internet of Things Applications - From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment

The book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from technology to international cooperation and the global "state of play".The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level. Internet of Things is creating a revolutionary new paradigm, with opportunities in every industry from Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Agriculture, Computer, Electronics Telecommunications, Automotive, Aeronautics, Transportation Energy and Retail to apply the massive potential of the IoT to achieving real-world solutions. The beneficiaries will include as well semiconductor companies, device and product companies, infrastructure software companies, application software companies, consulting companies, telecommunication and cloud service providers. IoT will create new revenues annually for these stakeholders, and potentially create substantial market share shakeups due to increased technology competition. The IoT will fuel technology innovation by creating the means for machines to communicate many different types of information with one another while contributing in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge shared into the Internet of Everything. The success of IoT depends strongly on enabling technology development, market acceptance and standardization, which provides interoperability, compatibility, reliability, and effective operations on a global scale. The connected devices are part of ecosystems connecting people, processes, data, and things which are communicating in the cloud using the increased storage and computing power and pushing for standardization of communication and metadata. In this context security, privacy, safety, trust have to be address by the product manufacturers through the life cycle of their products from design to the support processes. The IoT developments address the whole IoT spectrum - from devices at the edge to cloud and datacentres on the backend and everything in between, through ecosystems are created by industry, research and application stakeholders that enable real-world use cases to accelerate the Internet of Things and establish open interoperability standards and common architectures for IoT solutions. Enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, sensors/actuators, cyber-physical systems, intelligent device management, smart gateways, telematics, smart network infrastructure, cloud computing and software technologies will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from Smart Cities, smart transport, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• Internet of Things in the industrial context: Time for deployment.• Integration of heterogeneous smart objects, applications and services• Evolution from device to semantic and business interoperability• Software define and virtualization of network resources• Innovation through interoperability and standardisation when everything is connected anytime at anyplace• Dynamic context-aware scalable and trust-based IoT Security, Privacy framework• Federated Cloud service management and the Internet of Things• Internet of Things Application

Intelligent Parking Assist for Trucks with Prediction

Truck parking has been identified as a major issue both in the USA and E.U. and has been selected by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) as the most important research need for the trucking industry in 2015 [1]\u2013[5]. The lack of appropriate and convenient parking locations has been the cause of several safety issues over the past years as drivers might be forced to either drive while tired and increase the risk of accidents or park illegally in unsafe locations, which might also pose a safety hazard to them and other drivers. Additionally, the parking shortage also impacts the shipment costs and the environment as the drivers might spend more fuel looking for parking or idling for power when parked in inappropriate locations. The project\u2019s objective is to study the truck parking problem, generate useful information and parking assist algorithms that could assist truck drivers in better planning their trips. By providing information about parking availability to truck drivers, the authors expect to induce them to better distribute themselves among existing rest areas. This would decrease the peak demand in the most popular truck stops and attenuate the problems caused by the parking shortage. In this project, several parking availability prediction algorithms are tested using data from a company\u2019s private truck stops reservation system. The prediction MSE (mean squared error) and classification (full/available) sensitivity and specificity plots are evaluated for different experiments. It is shown that none of the tested algorithms is absolutely better than the others and has superior performance in all situations. The results presented show that a more efficient way would be to combine them and use the most appropriate one according to the situation. A model assignment according to current time of the day and target time for prediction is proposed based on the experiment data

A Survey and Comparison of Low-Cost Sensing Technologies for Road Traffic Monitoring

Abstract This paper reviews low-cost vehicle and pedestrian detection methods and compares their accuracy. The main goal of this survey is to summarize the progress achieved to date and to help identify the sensing technologies that provide high detection accuracy and meet requirements related to cost and ease of installation. Special attention is paid to wireless battery-powered detectors of small dimensions that can be quickly and effortlessly installed alongside traffic lanes (on the side of a road or on a curb) without any additional supporting structures. The comparison of detection methods presented in this paper is based on results of experiments that were conducted with a variety of sensors in a wide range of configurations. During experiments various sensor sets were analyzed. It was shown that the detection accuracy can be significantly improved by fusing data from appropriately selected set of sensors. The experimental results reveal that accurate vehicle detection can be achieved by using sets of passive sensors. Application of active sensors was necessary to obtain satisfactory results in case of pedestrian detection

The Design of an Autoguide System Prototyped for Conventional Vehicle on Highway

Accident problem is a one of the big issue in this country. From the statistic made by Jabatan Keselamatan Jalan Raya Malaysia, the accidents tragedy in Malaysia increase by year. Conventional Vehicle (heavy vehicle) is the top ranking for the numbers of accident happen in Malaysia. Neglect the human factors identified as major causes of heavy vehicle accidents in the PLUS highway in 2007. Based on the research by Department of Traffic Safety PLUS also, 38 percent of heavy vehicle accident caused by driver drowsiness, while 33.4 percent involved drivers who were driving too fast. 14 percent of accidents were attributed to the driver lost control of their vehicles. 14.6 percent were caused by technical problems such as brake failures and tire burst or monasteries. Most of the accident causes is because of the driver. So, the topic has chosen for the final year project ‘The Design of an Autoguide System Prototyped for Conventional Vehicle on highway’ is to replace the driver to control the direction and speed of vehicle. When this system applied to the conventional vehicle, it may reduce the number of accident causes by driver itself. The main steps to build the autoguide prototyped are start with study of literature review. This help to choose the suitable hardware and software such as sensor. After that, design the circuit for the prototyped and programmed the peripheral interface controller (PIC) by using CCompiler. Then, build the complete prototyped and followed by testing the prototyped at the track that build before. This prototyped used PIC16F877A microcontroller as its brain and receive input from ultrasonic sensor(SRF04) at front and side of prototyped. Front sensor while detect the obstacle at front to control the speed and side sensor will detect the wall of track to control the direction or position of prototyped. The prototyped that has developed is to prove about the autoguide system. This can show how the system work and the material needed in order to build the real product of autoguide system in real life