VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Personalized Alert Notifications and Evacuation Routes in Indoor Environments

The preparedness phase is crucial in the emergency management process for reaching an adequate level of readiness to react to potential threats and hazards. During this phase, emergency plans are developed to establish, among other procedures, evacuation and emergency escape routes. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can support and improve these procedures providing appropriate, updated and accessible information to all people in the affected zone. Current emergency management and evacuation systems do not adapt information to the context and the profile of each person, so messages received in the emergency might be useless. In this paper, we propose a set of criteria that ICT-based systems could achieve in order to avoid this problem adapting emergency alerts and evacuation routes to different situations and people. Moreover, in order to prove the applicability of such criteria, we define a mechanism that can be used as a complement of traditional evacuation systems to provide personalized alerts and evacuation routes to all kinds of people during emergency situations in working places. This mechanism is composed by three main components: CAP-ONES for notifying emergency alerts, NERES for defining emergency plans and generating personalized evacuation routes, and iNeres as the interface to receive and visualize these routes on smartphones. The usability and understandability of proposed interface has been assessed through a user study performed in a fire simulation in an indoor environment. This evaluation demonstrated that users considered iNeres easy to understand, to learn and to use, and they also found very innovative the idea to use smartphones as a support for escaping instead of static signals on walls and doors

Preliminary study and design of the avionics system for an eVTOL aircraft.

The project consists of the study, creation, implementation, and development of the avionics system of an electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) airplane for an ongoing project from the company ONAEROSPACE. The plane is intended to be for 7 passengers and 1 pilot, with a maximum range of 1000+ km. The fuselage will be formed of carbon fiber composite to reduce weight and it will use electric motors powered by batteries. The avionics system will provide the aircraft with communication and navigation systems, an autonomous Take-Off (T/O) and landing system, as well as the development of cockpit management systems. This document is divided into two parts. The first part begins with the study of all the necessary tools for communication and navigation systems. That means all compulsory antennas and sensors to obtain information about the surroundings (weather, obstacles, other planes¿). The intern communication network to send data from these sensors and antennas to main flight management systems is also studied in this first part. The second part of the project is dedicated to cabin cockpit systems and the study for the future development of autonomous systems. The cabin will have a full-glass cockpit, with touchable screens and an intelligent voice assistant. It will be very ergonomic and simple, with a lot of space in the cabin. In order to have an idea of the cost of the implementation of all the systems for the aircraft, a weight and cost estimation analysis are done at the end of each section. The last part of the project consists of the study of the design of a virtual intelligent voice assistant and the implementation of autonomous systems. Nowadays, the virtual intelligent voice assistant is an artificial intelligence system that works as a pilot monitoring system which assists the pilot in order to decrease the pilot¿s workload. The future idea is that the pilot could tell commands to the voice assistant and do nothing with the hands, just control that everything works correctly. Regarding the autonomous system, the conclusion is that with the existent technology is not possible today. Nevertheless, in the future, when fully autonomous aircraft are possible, the idea is that although being fully autonomous, the pilot can take the control of the aircraft at any moment.OutgoingObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i InfraestructuraObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::11 - Ciutats i Comunitats Sostenible

Comunicações sem fios confiáveis para aplicações veiculares

Doutoramento em Engenharia ElectrotécnicaIn the last decades the number of vehicles travelling in European road has raised significantly. Unfortunately, this brought a very high number of road accidents and consequently various injuries and fatalities. Even after the introduction of passive safety systems, such as seat belts, airbags, and some active safety systems, such as electronic brake system (ABS) and electronic stabilization (ESP), the number of accidents is still too high. Approximately eight per cent of the fatal accidents occur in motorways, in the Portuguese case, the number of fatalities has remained constant in the first decade of the 21st century. The evolution of wireless communications, along with the north-American and European policies that reserve spectrum near the 5,9GHz band for safety applications in the vehicular environment, has lead to the development of several standards. Many of these applications are based on the possibility of using a wireless communication system to warn drivers and passengers of events occurring on the road that can put at risk their own safety. Some examples of safety applications are the hard-brake warning, the wrong-way warning and the accident warning. This work aims to contribute in defining a communication protocol that guarantees the timely dissemination of safety critical events, occurring in scenarios with a high number of vehicles or in the neighbourhood of so called motorway “blackspots”, to all vehicles in the zone of interest. To ensure information integrity and user trust, the proposed system is based on the motorway infrastructure, which will validate all events reported by the vehicles with the usage of several means, such as video surveillance or other sensors. The usage of motorway infrastructure that has full motorway coverage using fixed stations also known as road side units, allows to have a global vision of the interest zone, avoiding the problems associated to networks that depend solely on vehicle to vehicle communication, generally total ad-hoc networks. By using the infrastructure, it is possible to control medium access, avoiding possible badly intended intrusions and also avoiding the phenomenon known as alarm showers or broadcast storm that occur when all vehicles want to simultaneously access the medium to warn others of a safety event. The thesis presented in this document is that it is possible to guarantee in time information about safety events, using an architecture where the road side units are coordinated among themselves, and communicate with on board units (in vehicles) that dynamically register and deregister from the system. An exhaustive and systematic state of the art of safety applications and related research projects is done, followed by a study on the available wireless communications standards that are able to support them. The set of standards IEEE802.11p and ETSI-G5 was created for this purpose and is found to be the more adequate, but care is taken to define a scenario where WAVE enabled and non-enabled vehicles can coexist. The WAVE medium access control protocol suffers from collision problems that do not guarantee a bounded delay, therefore a new protocol (V-FTT) is proposed, based on the adaptation of the Flexible Time Triggered protocol to the vehicular field. A theoretical analysis of the V-FTT applied to WAVE and ETSI-G5 is done, including quantifying a real scenario based on the A5 motorway from Lisbon to Cascais, one of the busiest Portuguese motorways. We conclude the V-FTT protocol is feasible and guarantees a bounded delay.Nas últimas décadas tem-se assistido a um aumento do número de veículos a circular nas vias rodoviárias europeias, trazendo consigo um elevado número de acidentes e como consequência muitos feridos e vítimas mortais. Apesar da introdução de sistemas de segurança passivos, tais como cintos de segurança, airbags e de alguns sistemas de segurança activos, tais como o sistema electrónico de travagem (ABS) e o sistema electrónico de estabilidade (ESP), o número de acidentes continua a ser demasiado elevado. Aproximadamente oito por cento dos acidentes fatais na Europa ocorrem em auto-estradas, no caso Português, o número de vítimas mortais tem-se mantido constante ao longo da primeira década do século XXI. A evolução das comunicações sem fios, acompanhada de políticas europeias e norte-americanas no sentido de reservar frequências próximas dos 5,9GHz para aplicações de segurança no ambiente veicular, levou à especificação de várias normas. A maior parte destas aplicações baseiam-se na possibilidade de usar um sistema confiável de comunicação sem fios para alertar os condutores e passageiros de veículos para eventos ocorridos nas estradas que possam colocar em risco a sua segurança. Exemplos de aplicações de segurança crítica são o aviso de travagem brusca, o aviso de veículo em contra mão e o aviso de acidente na estrada. Este trabalho contribui para a definição de protocolos de comunicação capazes de garantir que a informação sobre eventos relacionados com situações de segurança crítica, que ocorram em cenários com um elevado número de veículos em zonas urbanas ou na vizinhança dos chamados “pontos negros” das auto-estradas, é disseminada com pontualidade por todos os veículos localizados na zona de interesse Por uma questão da integridade das comunicações e confiança dos condutores, o sistema proposto baseia-se na infra-estrutura do concessionário da auto-estrada, que validará os eventos reportados pelos veículos usando vários meios à sua disposição, como por exemplo sistemas de videovigilância e outros sensores. O uso de uma infra-estrutura de comunicações, que dispõe de cobertura integral a partir de estações fixas, permite uma visão global da zona coberta, evitando os problemas associados a redes baseadas apenas na comunicação entre veículos, que são em geral totalmente ad-hoc. O uso da infra-estrutura permite, entre outras vantagens, controlar o acesso ao meio, evitando simultaneamente intrusões de estranhos ao sistema e o fenómeno conhecido como “chuva de alarmes” desencadeado quando todos os veículos querem aceder simultaneamente ao meio para avisar os restantes da existência dum evento de segurança crítica. A tese apresentada neste documento defende que é possível garantir informação atempada sobre eventos que põem em risco a segurança dos veículos a partir de uma arquitectura de interligação entre as estações de comunicações fixas, coordenadas entre si, e unidades móveis (veículos) que se registam e se desligam dinamicamente do sistema. Nesta tese faz-se um levantamento exaustivo e sistemático das aplicações de segurança abordando projectos de investigação relacionados, estudam-se as tecnologias de comunicação sem fios disponíveis e a sua possibilidade de suportar aplicações de segurança rodoviária. Desta análise, conclui-se que a norma norte americana WAVE/IEEE802.11p e a europeia ETSI-G5, criadas especificamente para o efeito são as que mais se adequam à finalidade desejada. Considera-se que o cenário de utilização é evolutivo, podendo coexistirem veículos que não dispõem de sistemas de comunicação com outros que suportam a norma WAVE. Dado que o protocolo de acesso ao meio proposto pela norma WAVE não garante um acesso determinístico ao meio partilhado, propõe-se um novo protocolo, o Vehicular Flexible Time-Triggered protocol (VFTT). Faz-se a análise teórica da viabilidade do protocolo proposto para a norma WAVE e respectiva norma europeia (ETSI-G5). Quantifica-se o protocolo VFTT para um cenário real: a auto-estrada A5 Lisboa-Cascais, uma das autoestradas portuguesas mais movimentadas. Conclui-se que o protocolo é viável e garante um atraso restringido temporalmente