198,614 research outputs found
Agile Data Offloading over Novel Fog Computing Infrastructure for CAVs
Future Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) will be supervised by
cloud-based systems overseeing the overall security and orchestrating traffic
flows. Such systems rely on data collected from CAVs across the whole city
operational area. This paper develops a Fog Computing-based infrastructure for
future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) enabling an agile and reliable
off-load of CAV data. Since CAVs are expected to generate large quantities of
data, it is not feasible to assume data off-loading to be completed while a CAV
is in the proximity of a single Road-Side Unit (RSU). CAVs are expected to be
in the range of an RSU only for a limited amount of time, necessitating data
reconciliation across different RSUs, if traditional approaches to data
off-load were to be used. To this end, this paper proposes an agile Fog
Computing infrastructure, which interconnects all the RSUs so that the data
reconciliation is solved efficiently as a by-product of deploying the Random
Linear Network Coding (RLNC) technique. Our numerical results confirm the
feasibility of our solution and show its effectiveness when operated in a
large-scale urban testbed.Comment: To appear in IEEE VTC-Spring 201
Deploying Wireless Sensor Devices in Intelligent Transportation System Applications
As future intelligent infrastructure will bring together and connect individuals, vehicles and infrastructure through wireless communications, it is critical that robust communication technologies are developed. Mobile wireless sensor networks are self-organising mobile networks where nodes exchange data without the need for an underlying infrastructure. In the road transport domain, schemes which are fully infrastructure-less and those which use a combination of fixed (infrastructure) devices and mobile devices fitted to vehicles and other moving objects are of significant interest to the ITS community as they have the potential to deliver a ‘connected environment’ where individuals, vehicles and infrastructure can co-exist and cooperate, thus delivering more knowledge about the transport environment, the state of the network and who indeed is travelling or wishes to travel. This may offer benefits in terms of real-time management, optimisation of transportation systems, intelligent design and the use of such systems for innovative road charging and possibly carbon trading schemes as well as through the CVHS (Cooperative Vehicle and Highway Systems) for safety and control applications. As the wireless sensor networks technology is still relatively new and very little is known about its real application in the transport domain. Our involvement in the transport-related projects provides us with an opportunity to carry out research and development of wireless sensor network applications in transport systems. This chapter outlines our experience in the ASTRA (ASTRA, 2005), TRACKSS (TRACKSS, 2007) and EMMA (EMMA, 2007) projects and provides an illustration of the important role that the wireless sensor technology can play in future ITS. This chapter also presents encouraging results obtained from the experiments in investigating the feasibility of utilising wireless sensor networks in vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communication in real ITS applications
Human factors of future rail intelligent infrastructure
The introduction of highly reliable sensors and remote condition monitoring equipment will change the form and functionality of maintenance and engineering systems within many infrastructure sectors. Process, transport and infrastructure companies are increasingly looking to intelligent infrastructure to increase reliability and decrease costs in the future, but such systems will present many new (and some old) human factor challenges. As the first substantial piece of human factors work examining future railway intelligent infrastructure, this thesis has an overall goal to establish a human factors knowledge base regarding intelligent infrastructure systems, as used in tomorrow’s railway but also in many other sectors and industries.
An in-depth interview study with senior railway specialists involved with intelligent infrastructure allowed the development and verification of a framework which explains the functions, activities and data processing stages involved. The framework includes a consideration of future roles and activities involved with intelligent infrastructure, their sequence and the most relevant human factor issues associated with them, especially the provision of the right information in the right quantity and form to the right people.
In a substantial fieldwork study, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed to facilitate an understanding of alarm handling and fault finding in railway electrical control and maintenance control domains. These functions had been previously determined to be of immediate relevance to work systems in the future intelligent infrastructure. Participants in these studies were real railway operators as it was important to capture users’ cognition in their work settings. Methods used included direct observation, debriefs and retrospective protocols and knowledge elicitation.
Analyses of alarm handling and fault finding within real-life work settings facilitated a comprehensive understanding of the use of artefacts, alarm and fault initiated activities, along with sources of difficulty and coping strategies in these complex work settings. The main source of difficulty was found to be information deficiency (excessive or insufficient information). Each role requires different levels and amounts of information, a key to good design of future intelligent infrastructure.
The findings from the field studies led to hypotheses about the impact of presenting various levels of information on the performance of operators for different stages of alarm handling. A laboratory study subsequently confirmed these hypotheses.
The research findings have led to the development of guidance for developers and the rail industry to create a more effective railway intelligent infrastructure system and have also enhanced human factors understanding of alarm handling activities in electrical control
Integration of cost-risk assessment of denial of service within an intelligent maintenance system
As organisations become richer in data the function of asset management will have to increasingly use intelligent systems to control condition monitoring systems and organise maintenance. In the future the UK rail industry is anticipating having to optimize capacity by running trains closer to each other. In this situation maintenance becomes extremely problematic as within such a high-performance network a relatively minor fault will impact more trains and passengers; such denial of service causes reputational damage for the industry and causes fines to be levied against the infrastructure owner, Network Rail.
Intelligent systems used to control condition monitoring systems will need to optimize for several factors; optimization for minimizing denial of service will be one such factor. With schedules anticipated to be increasingly complicated detailed estimation methods will be extremely difficult to implement. Cost prediction of maintenance activities tend to be expert driven and require extensive details, making automation of such an activity difficult. Therefore a stochastic process will be needed to approach the problem of predicting the denial of service arising from any required maintenance. Good uncertainty modelling will help to increase the confidence of estimates.
This paper seeks to detail the challenges that the UK Railway industry face with regards to cost modelling of maintenance activities and outline an example of a suitable cost model for quantifying cost uncertainty. The proposed uncertainty quantification is based on historical cost data and interpretation of its statistical distributions. These estimates are then integrated in a cost model to obtain accurate uncertainty measurements of outputs through Monte-Carlo simulation methods. An additional criteria of the model was that it be suitable for integration into an existing prototype integrated intelligent maintenance system. It is anticipated that applying an integrated maintenance management system will apply significant downward pressure on maintenance budgets and reduce denial of service. Accurate cost estimation is therefore of great importance if anticipated cost efficiencies are to be achieved. While the rail industry has been the focus of this work, other industries have been considered and it is anticipated that the approach will be applicable to many other organisations across several asset management intensive industrie
Human factors of future rail intelligent infrastructure
The introduction of highly reliable sensors and remote condition monitoring equipment will change the form and functionality of maintenance and engineering systems within many infrastructure sectors. Process, transport and infrastructure companies are increasingly looking to intelligent infrastructure to increase reliability and decrease costs in the future, but such systems will present many new (and some old) human factor challenges. As the first substantial piece of human factors work examining future railway intelligent infrastructure, this thesis has an overall goal to establish a human factors knowledge base regarding intelligent infrastructure systems, as used in tomorrow’s railway but also in many other sectors and industries.
An in-depth interview study with senior railway specialists involved with intelligent infrastructure allowed the development and verification of a framework which explains the functions, activities and data processing stages involved. The framework includes a consideration of future roles and activities involved with intelligent infrastructure, their sequence and the most relevant human factor issues associated with them, especially the provision of the right information in the right quantity and form to the right people.
In a substantial fieldwork study, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was employed to facilitate an understanding of alarm handling and fault finding in railway electrical control and maintenance control domains. These functions had been previously determined to be of immediate relevance to work systems in the future intelligent infrastructure. Participants in these studies were real railway operators as it was important to capture users’ cognition in their work settings. Methods used included direct observation, debriefs and retrospective protocols and knowledge elicitation.
Analyses of alarm handling and fault finding within real-life work settings facilitated a comprehensive understanding of the use of artefacts, alarm and fault initiated activities, along with sources of difficulty and coping strategies in these complex work settings. The main source of difficulty was found to be information deficiency (excessive or insufficient information). Each role requires different levels and amounts of information, a key to good design of future intelligent infrastructure.
The findings from the field studies led to hypotheses about the impact of presenting various levels of information on the performance of operators for different stages of alarm handling. A laboratory study subsequently confirmed these hypotheses.
The research findings have led to the development of guidance for developers and the rail industry to create a more effective railway intelligent infrastructure system and have also enhanced human factors understanding of alarm handling activities in electrical control
Networking Transportation
Networking Transportation looks at how the digital revolution is changing Greater Philadelphia's transportation system. It recognizes several key digital transportation technologies: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, connected and automated vehicles, digital mapping, Intelligent Transportation Systems, the Internet of Things, smart cities, real-time information, transportation network companies (TNCs), unmanned aerial systems, and virtual communications. It focuses particularly on key issues surrounding TNCs. It identifies TNCs currently operating in Greater Philadelphia and reviews some of the more innovative services around the world. It presents four alternative future scenarios for their growth: Filling a Niche, A Tale of Two Regions, TNCs Take Off, and Moore Growth. It then creates a future vision for an integrated, multimodal transportation network and identifies infrastructure needs, institutional reforms, and regulatory recommendations intended to help bring about this vision
Self-Supervised Traffic Advisors: Distributed, Multi-view Traffic Prediction for Smart Cities
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are becoming more widely deployed,
but it is unclear how to best deploy smart infrastructure to maximize their
capabilities. One key challenge is to ensure CAVs can reliably perceive other
agents, especially occluded ones. A further challenge is the desire for smart
infrastructure to be autonomous and readily scalable to wide-area deployments,
similar to modern traffic lights. The present work proposes the Self-Supervised
Traffic Advisor (SSTA), an infrastructure edge device concept that leverages
self-supervised video prediction in concert with a communication and
co-training framework to enable autonomously predicting traffic throughout a
smart city. An SSTA is a statically-mounted camera that overlooks an
intersection or area of complex traffic flow that predicts traffic flow as
future video frames and learns to communicate with neighboring SSTAs to enable
predicting traffic before it appears in the Field of View (FOV). The proposed
framework aims at three goals: (1) inter-device communication to enable
high-quality predictions, (2) scalability to an arbitrary number of devices,
and (3) lifelong online learning to ensure adaptability to changing
circumstances. Finally, an SSTA can broadcast its future predicted video frames
directly as information for CAVs to run their own post-processing for the
purpose of control.Comment: 2022 IEEE 25th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITSC
Future Trends and Challenges for Mobile and Convergent Networks
Some traffic characteristics like real-time, location-based, and
community-inspired, as well as the exponential increase on the data traffic in
mobile networks, are challenging the academia and standardization communities
to manage these networks in completely novel and intelligent ways, otherwise,
current network infrastructures can not offer a connection service with an
acceptable quality for both emergent traffic demand and application requisites.
In this way, a very relevant research problem that needs to be addressed is how
a heterogeneous wireless access infrastructure should be controlled to offer a
network access with a proper level of quality for diverse flows ending at
multi-mode devices in mobile scenarios. The current chapter reviews recent
research and standardization work developed under the most used wireless access
technologies and mobile access proposals. It comprehensively outlines the
impact on the deployment of those technologies in future networking
environments, not only on the network performance but also in how the most
important requirements of several relevant players, such as, content providers,
network operators, and users/terminals can be addressed. Finally, the chapter
concludes referring the most notable aspects in how the environment of future
networks are expected to evolve like technology convergence, service
convergence, terminal convergence, market convergence, environmental awareness,
energy-efficiency, self-organized and intelligent infrastructure, as well as
the most important functional requisites to be addressed through that
infrastructure such as flow mobility, data offloading, load balancing and
vertical multihoming.Comment: In book 4G & Beyond: The Convergence of Networks, Devices and
Services, Nova Science Publishers, 201
New Generation Sensor Web Enablement
Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement
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