Wireless Positioning Applications in Multipath Environments

Funklokalisierung in der Umgebung mit der Mehrwegeausbreitung In den vergangenen Jahren wurde zunehmend Forschung im Bereich drahtlose Sensornetzwerk (engl. „Wireless Sensor Network“) betrieben. Lokalisierung im Innenraum ist ein vielversprechendes Forschungsthema, das in den Literaturen vielfältig diskutiert wird. Jedoch berücksichtigen die meisten Arbeiten einen wichtigen Faktor nicht, nämlich die Mehrwegeausbreitung, welche die Genauigkeit der Lokalisierung beeinflusst. Diese Arbeit bezieht sich auf Lokalisierungsanwendungen in UWB (Ultra-Breitband-Technologie)- und WLAN (drahtloses lokales Netzwerk)- Systemen im Fall von Mehrwegeausbreitung. Zur Steigerung der Robustheit der Lokalisierungsanwendungen bei Mehrwegeausbreitung wurden neuartige Lokalisierungsalgorithmen, die auf der Auswertung der Ankunftszeit (engl. „Time of Arrival“, ToA), der empfangenen Signalstärke (engl. „Received Signal Strength“, RSS) und dem Einfallswinkel (engl. „Angle of Arrival“, AoA) basieren, vorgestellt und untersucht. Bei Mehrwegeausbreitung ist die Fragen den direkten Pfad zu lösen, da der direkte Pfad (engl. „Direct Path“, DP) schwächer als anderer Pfad sein kann. In dieser Arbeit werden daher neuartige Algorithmen zur Flankendetektion der empfangenen Signale für UWB Systeme entwickelt, um die Positionsbestimmung zu verbessern: Es gibt die kooperative Flankendetektion (engl. „Joint Leading Edge Detection“, JLED), die erweiterte maximalwahrscheinlichkeitbasierte Kanalschätzung (engl. „Improved Maximum Likelihood Channel Estimation“, IMLCE) und die Flankendetektion mit untervektorraumbasiertem Verfahren (engl. „Subspace based Approaches“, SbA). Bei der kooperativen Flankendetektion werden zwei Kriterien herangezogen nämlich die minimale Fläche und das minimale mittlere Quadrat des Schätzfehlers (engl. „Minimum Mean Squared Error“, MMSE). Weiterhin wird ein monopulsbasierter Kanalschätzer (engl. „Monopulse based Channel Estimator“, MCE) entwickelt, um die möglicherweise falsche Kombinationen der Flanken (engl. „Leading Edge Combination“, LEC) auszuschließen. Zudem wird in der Arbeit der erweiterte MLCE vorgestellt, der aus einem groben und einem genauen Schätzungsschritt besteht. Bei dem neuartigen untervektorraumbasierten Verfahren werden ein statischer und ein Schwundkanal untersucht. Im ersten Fall wird die Kombination der Rückwärtssuchalgorithmus mit untervektorraumbasierten Verfahren untersucht. Zudem wird im zweiten Fall ein untervektorraumbasierte Verfahren im Frequenzbereich vorgestellt. Für die RSS-basierte Lokalisierung wird ein Fingerabdruckverfahren (engl. „Fingerprint Approach“) und ein neuartiger Entfernungsschätzer basierend auf der Kanalenergie entwickelt und implementiert. Schließlich wird in der Arbeit ein Lokalisierungssystem mit Winkelschätzern inklusive einer entsprechenden Kalibrierung auf einer 802.11a/g Hardwareplattform vorgestellt. Dazu wird ein neuartiger Trägerschätzer und Kanalschätzer entwickelt.In the past several years there has been more growing research on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The indoor localization is a promising research topic, which is discussed variously in some literatures. However, the most work does not consider an important factor, i.e. the multi-path propagation, which affects the accuracy of the indoor localization. This work dealt with the indoor localization applied in UWB (Ultra Wide Band) and WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) systems in the case of multi-path propagation. To improve the robustness of the applications of localization in the case of multi-path propagation, novel localization algorithms based on the evaluation of the Time of Arrival (ToA), the Received Signal Strength (RSS) and the Angle of Arrival (AoA) were proposed and investigated. In the ToA based localization systems, the detection of shortest signal propagation time plays a critical role. In the case of multi-path propagation, the Direct Path (DP) needs to be resolved because the DP may be weaker than Multi Path Components (MPC). Thus the novel algorithms for leading edge detection were developed in this work in order to improve the accuracy of localization, namely Joint Leading Edge Detection (JLED), Improved Maximum Likelihood Channel Estimation (IMLCE) and the leading edge detection with Subspace based Approaches (SbA). Two criteria were proposed and referenced for the JLED, namely Minimum Area (MA) and Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE). Furthermore, a monocycle-based channel estimator was developed to mitigate the fake LECs (Leading Edge Combination). The estimation error of JLED was theoretically analyzed and simulated for evaluation of the estimator. IMLCE consists of a coarse and a fine estimation step. The coarse position of the first correlation peak shall be found with the Search Back Algorithms (SBA), which is followed by MLCE-algorithms. The novel SbA was investigated in a static and a fading channel. In the former case, the iterative algorithm, which combines SbA with SBA, was investigated. In the latter case, the FD-SbA (Frequency Domain - SbA) was proposed, which requires to calculate the covariance matrix in the FD. For the RSS based localization, fingerprint approach and the novel channel energy based distance estimator were investigated and developed in this dissertation. Finally, a localization system using AoA estimation and the initial calibration was presented on an 802.11a/g hardware platform. A novel Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) estimator and channel estimator were investigated and developed. The measurement campaigns were made for one, two and four fixed stations, respectivel

Spatio-temporal traffic flow estimation and optimum control in sensor-equipped road networks

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.With rapid urbanization, ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) has been deployed in some metropolitan areas to relieve traffic congestion and traffic accidents by traffic flow prediction and optimum traffic control. Due to temporary deployment of sensors, sensor malfunction and lossy communication systems, data missing problems has drawn significant attention from both academia and industry. Missing traffic data problem has negative impact on traffic flow prediction and optimum traffic control because ATIS (Advance Traveler Information Systems) and ATMS (Advance Traffic Management Systems) both rely on reliable, accurate and consistent traffic data measurements. Furthermore, adaptive traffic control is the most effective method to relieve traffic congestion and maximize road capacity. In this thesis, an Optimum Closed Cut (OCC) based spatio-temporal imputation technique was proposed, which can fully exploit the spatial-temporal correlation and road topological information in urban traffic network. The road topological information and flow conservation law can be explored to further improve the estimation performance while reducing the number of sensors involved in the data imputation, hence improving the computational efficiency. Besides, this thesis investigated the fundamental limits of missing traffic data estimation accuracy in urban networks using the spatio-temporal random effects (STRE) model. Furthermore, a hybrid dynamical system was investigated, which incorporates flow swap process, green-time proportion swap process and flow divergence for a general network with multiple OD pairs and multiple routes. A novel control policy was proposed to fill the gap by only adjusting the green-time proportion vector, and a sufficient condition was derived for the existence of equilibrium of the dynamical system under the mild constraints that (1) the travel cost function and stage pressure function should be continuous functions; (2) the flow and green-time proportion swap processes project all flow and green-time proportion vectors on the boundary of the feasible region onto itself. The condition of unique equilibrium was derived for fixed green-time proportion vector and it is shown that with varying green-time proportion vector, the set of equilibria is a compact, non-convex set, and with the same partial derivative of travel cost function with respect to the flow and green-time proportion vectors. Finally, the stability of the proposed dynamical system was proved by using Lyapunov stability analysis

A Joint Traffic Flow Estimation and Prediction Approach for Urban Networks

Classical methods of traffic flow prediction with missing data are generally implemented in two sequential stages: a) imputing the missing data by certain imputation methods such as kNN, PPCA based methods etc.; b) using parametric or non-parametric methods to predict the future traffic flow with the completed data. However, the errors generated in missing data imputation stage will be accumulated into prediction stage, and thus will negatively influence the prediction performance when missing rate becomes large. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a Joint Traffic Flow Estimation and Prediction (JT-FEP) approach, which considers the missing data as additional unknown network parameters during a deep learning model training process. By updating missing data and the other network parameters via backward propagation, the model training error can generally be evenly distributed across the missing data and future data, thus reducing the error propagation. We conduct extensive experiments for two missing patterns i.e. Completely Missing at Random (CMAR) and Not Missing at Random (NMAR) with various missing rates. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of JTFEP over existing methods

Traffic State Prediction and Traffic Control Strategy for Intelligent Transportation Systems

The recent development of V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle), V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure), V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) and vehicle automation technologies have enabled the concept of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) to be tested and explored in practice. Traffic state prediction and control are two key modules for CAV systems. Traffic state prediction is important for CAVs because adaptive decisions, control strategies such as adjustment of traffic signals, turning left or right, stopping or accelerating and decision-making of vehicle motion rely on the completeness and accuracy of traffic data. For a given traffic state and input action, the future traffic states can be predicted via data-driven approaches such as deep learning models. RL (Reinforcement Learning) - based approaches gain the most popularity in developing optimum control and decision-making strategies because they can maximize the long-term award in a complex system via interaction with the environment. However, RL technique still has some drawbacks such as a slow convergence rate for high-dimensional states, etc., which need to be overcome in future research. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art solutions for traffic state prediction and traffic control strategies

Joint estimation of mode and time of day choice accounting for arrival time flexibility, travel time reliability and crowding on public transport

This study develops joint choice models of mode and departure time for implementation in MetroScan, a new version of TRESIS (Hensher and Ton, 2002). Separate models are estimated for work and non-work purposes, testing all practical alternatives of model structure with a rich set of explanatory variables. The contributions of the current work to the existing TRESIS are twofold. First, travel demand for non-work purposes such as shopping, social and recreation are explicitly modelled in MetroScan as opposed to TRESIS that scales the demand for work purposes to obtain non-work travel demand. Second, choices of travel mode and departure time become more sensitive to situational factors such as the flexibility of arrival time, the reliability of travel time and crowding. Willingness to pay for various improvements to the level of service is derived. We describe and demonstrate how the proposed models are applied in the general modelling framework of MetroScan

BRefine: Achieving High-Quality Instance Segmentation

Instance segmentation has been developing rapidly in recent years. Mask R-CNN, a two-stage instance segmentation approach, has demonstrated exceptional performance. However, the masks are still very coarse. The downsampling operation of the backbone network and the ROIAlign layer loses much detailed information, especially from large targets. The sawtooth effect of the edge mask is caused by the lower resolution. A lesser percentage of boundary pixels leads to not-fine segmentation. In this paper, we propose a new method called Boundary Refine (BRefine) that achieves high-quality segmentation. This approach uses FCN as the foundation segmentation architecture, and forms a multistage fusion mask head with multistage fusion detail features to improve mask resolution. However, the FCN architecture causes inconsistencies in multiscale segmentation. BRank and sort loss (BR and S loss) is proposed to solve the problems of segmentation inconsistency and the difficulty of boundary segmentation. It is combined with rank and sort loss, and boundary region loss. BRefine can handle hard-to-partition boundaries and output high-quality masks. On the COCO, LVIS, and Cityscapes datasets, BRefine outperformed Mask R-CNN by 3.0, 4.2, and 3.5 AP, respectively. Furthermore, on the COCO dataset, the large objects improved by 5.0 AP

Cooperative Incident Management in Mixed Traffic of CAVs and Human-Driven Vehicles

Traffic incident management in metropolitan areas is crucial for the recovery of road systems from accidents as well as the mobility and safety of the community. With the continuous improvement in computation and communication technologies, connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) exhibit the potential to relieve incident-induced traffic degradation. To understand the benefits of CAVs on traffic incidents, this paper models the impacts of CAVs with joint consideration of microscopic CAV driving behaviors and macroscopic traffic assignment in mixed traffic environment comprising both CAVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs). Firstly, a generic traffic assignment model with mixed traffic is proposed to analyze the mixed traffic process from the macroscopic perspective. Then, we incorporate the traffic assignment model with bottleneck delays and incident effects from the microscopic perspective, to model the dynamic road system with incident effects in mixed traffic environment. Furthermore, cooperating with the mixed traffic assignment model, dynamic signal control policies are presented according to different incident severities, and the conditions for equilibrium existence, uniqueness and stability of the road system are derived. The analytical results indicate that road system stability with incident effects is closely related to the incident severity, signal control policy as well as penetration rate and spatial distribution of CAVs. Finally, simulation results are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed incident management policy in improving the recovery rate and system stability of road networks