Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation to Evaluate the Performance and Constraints of the Red-light Violation Warning Application on Arterial Roads

Understanding the safety and mobility impacts of Connected Vehicle (CV) applications is critical for ensuring effective implementations of these applications. This dissertation provides an assessment of the safety and mobility impacts of the Red-Light Violation Warning (RLVW), a CV-based application at signalized intersections, under pre-timed signal control and semi-actuated signal control utilizing Emulator-in-the-loop (EILS), Software-in-the-loop (SILS), and Hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) environments. Modern actuated traffic signal controllers contain several features with which controllers can provide varying green intervals for actuated phases, skip phases, and terminate phases depending on the traffic demand fluctuation from cycle to cycle. With actuated traffic signal operations, there is uncertainty in the end-of-green information provided to the vehicles using CV messages. The RLVW application lacks accurate input information about when exactly a phase is going to be terminated since this termination occurs when a gap of a particular length is encountered at the detector. This study compares the results obtained with the use of these three aforementioned simulation platforms and how the use of the platforms impacts the assessed performance of the modeled CV application. In addition, the study investigates using HILS and a method to provide an Assured Green Period (AGP) which is a definitive time when the green interval will end to mitigate the uncertainties associated with the green termination and to improve the performance of the CV application. The study results showed that in the case of pre-timed signal control, there are small differences in the assessed performance when using the three simulated platforms. However, in the case of the actuated control, the utilization of EILS showed significantly different results compared to the utilization of the SILS and the HILS platforms. The use of the SILS and the HILS platforms produced similar results. The differences can be attributed to the variations in the time lag between vehicle detection and the use of this information between the EILS and the other two platforms. In addition, the results showed that the reduction in red-light running due to RLVW was significantly higher with pre-timed control compared to the reduction with semi-actuated control. The reason is the uncertainty in the end-of-green intervals provided in the messages communicated to the vehicles, as stated above. In the case of semi-actuated control, the results showed that the safety benefits of the RLVW without the use of AGP were limited. On the other hand, the study results showed that by introducing the AGP, the RLVW can reduce the number of red-light running events at signalized intersections by approximately 92% with RLVW utilization of 100%. However, the results show that the application of the AGP, as applied and assessed in this dissertation, can have increased stopped delay and approach delay under congested traffic conditions. This issue will need to be further investigated to determine the optimal setting of the AGP considering both mobility and safety impacts

Synthesis of Reactive Protocols for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

We present a synthesis method for communication protocols for active safety applications that satisfy certain formal specifications on quality of service requirements. The protocols are developed to provide reliable communication services for automobile active safety applications. The synthesis method transforms a specification into a distributed implementation of senders and receivers that together satisfy the quality of service requirements by transmitting messages over an unreliable medium. We develop a specification language and an execution model for the implementations, and demonstrate the viability of our method by developing a protocol for a traffic scenario in which a car runs a red light at a busy intersection

Safety monitoring for autonomous systems: interactive elicitation of safety rules

Un moniteur de sécurité actif est un mécanisme indépendant qui est responsable de maintenir le système dans un état sûr, en cas de situation dangereuse. Il dispose d'observations (capteurs) et d'interventions (actionneurs). Des règles de sécurité sont synthétisées, à partir des résultats d'une analyse de risques, grâce à l'outil SMOF (Safety MOnitoring Framework), afin d'identifier quelles interventions appliquer quand une observation atteint une valeur dangereuse. Les règles de sécurité respectent une propriété de sécurité (le système reste das un état sûr) ainsi que des propriétés de permissivité, qui assurent que le système peut toujours effectuer ses tâches. Ce travail se concentre sur la résolution de cas où la synthèse échoue à retourner un ensemble de règles sûres et permissives. Pour assister l'utilisateur dans ces cas, trois nouvelles fonctionnalités sont introduites et développées. La première adresse le diagnostique des raisons pour lesquelles une règle échoue à respecter les exigences de permissivité. La deuxième suggère des interventions de sécurité candidates à injecter dans le processus de synthèse. La troisième permet l'adaptation des exigences de permissivités à un ensemble de tâches essentielles à préserver. L'utilisation des ces trois fonctionnalités est discutée et illustrée sur deux cas d'étude industriels, un robot industriel de KUKA et un robot de maintenance de Sterela.An active safety monitor is an independent mechanism that is responsible for keeping the system in a safe state, should a hazardous situation occur. Is has observations (sensors) and interventions (actuators). Safety rules are synthesized from the results of the hazard analysis, using the tool SMOF (Safety MOnitoring Framework), in order to identify which interventions to apply for dangerous observations values. The safety rules enforce a safety property (the system remains in a safe state) and some permissiveness properties, ensuring that the system can still perform its tasks. This work focuses on solving cases where the synthesis fails to return a set of safe and permissive rules. To assist the user in these cases, three new features are introduced and developed. The first one addresses the diagnosis of why the rules fail to fulfill a permissiveness requirement. The second one suggests candidate safety interventions to inject into the synthesis process. The third one allows the tuning of the permissiveness requirements based on a set of essential functionalities to maintain. The use of these features is discussed and illustrated on two industrial case studies, a manufacturing robot from KUKA and a maintenance robot from Sterela

An Overview of MOOS-IvP and a Brief Users Guide to the IvP Helm Autonomy Software

This document describes the IvP Helm - an Open Source behavior-based autonomy application for unmanned vehicles. IvP is short for interval programming - a technique for representing and solving multi-objective optimizations problems. Behaviors in the IvP Helm are reconciled using multi-objective optimization when in competition with each other for influence of the vehicle. The IvP Helm is written as a MOOS application where MOOS is a set of Open Source publish-subscribe autonomy middleware tools. This document describes the configuration and use of the IvP Helm, provides examples of simple missions and information on how to download and build the software from the MOOS-IvP server at www.moosivp.org

An Overview of MOOS-IvP and a Users Guide to the IvP Helm - Release 4.2.1

This document describes the IvP Helm - an Open Source behavior-based autonomy application for unmanned vehicles. IvP is short for interval programming - a technique for representing and solving multi-objective optimizations problems. Behaviors in the IvP Helm are reconciled using multi-objective optimization when in competition with each other for influence of the vehicle. The IvP Helm is written as a MOOS application where MOOS is a set of Open Source publish-subscribe autonomy middleware tools. This document describes the configuration and use of the IvP Helm, provides examples of simple missions and information on how to download and build the software from the MOOS-IvP server at www.moos-ivp.org.United States. Office of Naval Research (Code 311

Multilevel Runtime Verification for Safety and Security Critical Cyber Physical Systems from a Model Based Engineering Perspective

Advanced embedded system technology is one of the key driving forces behind the rapid growth of Cyber-Physical System (CPS) applications. CPS consists of multiple coordinating and cooperating components, which are often software-intensive and interact with each other to achieve unprecedented tasks. Such highly integrated CPSs have complex interaction failures, attack surfaces, and attack vectors that we have to protect and secure against. This dissertation advances the state-of-the-art by developing a multilevel runtime monitoring approach for safety and security critical CPSs where there are monitors at each level of processing and integration. Given that computation and data processing vulnerabilities may exist at multiple levels in an embedded CPS, it follows that solutions present at the levels where the faults or vulnerabilities originate are beneficial in timely detection of anomalies. Further, increasing functional and architectural complexity of critical CPSs have significant safety and security operational implications. These challenges are leading to a need for new methods where there is a continuum between design time assurance and runtime or operational assurance. Towards this end, this dissertation explores Model Based Engineering methods by which design assurance can be carried forward to the runtime domain, creating a shared responsibility for reducing the overall risk associated with the system at operation. Therefore, a synergistic combination of Verification & Validation at design time and runtime monitoring at multiple levels is beneficial in assuring safety and security of critical CPS. Furthermore, we realize our multilevel runtime monitor framework on hardware using a stream-based runtime verification language

An Overview of MOOS-IvP and a Users Guide to the IvP Helm Autonomy Software

This document describes the IvP Helm -- an Open Source behavior-based autonomy application for unmanned vehicles. IvP is short for interval programming -- a technique for representing and solving multi-objective optimizations problems. Behaviors in the IvP Helm are reconciled using multi-objective optimization when in competition with each other for influence of the vehicle. The IvP Helm is written as a MOOS application where MOOS is a set of Open Source publish-subscribe autonomy middleware tools. This document describes the configuration and use of the IvP Helm, provides examples of simple missions and information on how to download and build the software from the MOOS-IvP server at www.moosivp.org

Wireless Networking for Vehicle to Infrastructure Communication and Automatic Incident Detection

Vehicular wireless communication has recently generated wide interest in the area of wireless network research. Automatic Incident Detection (AID), which is the recent focus of research direction in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), aims to increase road safety. These advances in technology enable traffic systems to use data collected from vehicles on the road to detect incidents. We develop an automatic incident detection method that has a significant active road safety application for alerting drivers about incidents and congestion. Our method for detecting traffic incidents in a highway scenario is based on the use of distance and time for changing lanes along with the vehicle speed change over time. Numerical results obtained from simulating our automatic incident detection technique suggest that our incident detection rate is higher than that of other techniques such as integrated technique. probabilistic technique and California Algorithm. We also propose a technique to maximize the number of vehicles aware of Road Side Units (RSUs) in order to enhance the accuracy of our AID technique. In our proposed Method. IEEE 802.11 standard is used at RSUs with multiple antennas to assign each lane a specific channel. To validate our proposed approach. we present both analytical and simulation scenarios. The empirical values which are obtained from both analytical and simulation results have been compared to show their consistency. Results indicate that the IEEE 802.11 standard with its beaconing mechanism can be successfully used for Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications

Development of a reusable top-level control architecture for a robotic manipulator

The capabilities of a robotic system are strongly constrained by the capabilities of its control software. The development of this software represents a substantial fraction of the development effort of the overall system, due in part to the difficulty of reusing software written for previous robotic applications. A reusable software control architecture therefore has enormous potential to expedite the development and reduce the cost of this development process. This thesis presents a component-based reusable architecture for the top-level control of a robotic manipulator, developed within the Open Robot Control Software (Orocos) framework. This framework enables the development of software components that are applicable to a variety of robotic manipulators. The software is implemented on an existing manipulator platform as a demonstration of basic functionality. Simulations are conducted to verify adaptability to other kinematic arrangements