Computer Science Department News

Samy El-Tawab's PhD Candidacy Exam will be held in the E&CS Conference Room on April 1st 2011 @ 9:30a.m.

Student: Samy El-Tawab
Advisor: Professor S. Olariu

Location: E&CS building 3rd Floor, Conference room, Date and time:April 1st, 2011 @ 9:30am

Title: "A Cyber Physical System for Highway Applications in Vehicular Networks"



Abstract:

Vehicular Networks is one of the hot research areas these days. Two combinations of communication have been used in the Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) field, Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I). In the United States, motor vehicle traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for all Americans between two and thirty four years of age. In 2006, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 42,642 people were killed in motor vehicle traffic crashes. Among all these accidents, each year, approximately 7,000 highway deaths and 800,000 injuries are associated with about 1.2 million weather-related accidents. The estimated annual cost from these weather-related crashes (deaths, injuries and property) amounts to nearly 42 billion. We wish to design a system that allows car manufactures and traffic engineers to develop different types of applications on highways (i.e. application that gives an alert to drivers with weather conditions including heavy rain, snow, sleet, fog, smoke, dust, ice and black ice can reduce the risks of accidents and improve the safety and efficiency of the roads).

We investigate the integrating between the wireless sensing technology and the vehicle technology to provide a safer, reliable and comfortable road system. We build a Cyber Physical System (CPS) that allows vehicle manufactures to build different types of applications in Vehicular Networks. Our first contribution is a detailed Cyber Physical System to build application for Highways. Our basic idea is to use fixed nodes on the highways that are located beside the road. We combine different types of communications: V 2V , V 2I and Infrastructure-to-infrastructure I2I. For example, as traffic incidents are considered one of the major factors leading to traffic jams; there is a crucial need to develop applications that helps reduces those road incidents. The proposed system will allow vehicle manufactures to build these different types of applications that give the ability and the sufficient data, so the drivers can take intelligent decision about any risks or delay. Our second main contribution of this thesis is to develop an information propagation technique. We have two aims for information propagation. First, we aim to prevent Secondary Accidents. Second, we notify drivers far away from the accident of an expected delay that gives them the option to continue or exit before reaching the incident location. Our third contribution is to address market penetration for our system. Like any new system, customers will need time to get comfortable using it. However, we expect an exponential increase of number of customers who are willing to use applications build over our CPS. In addition to our three components, security will be addressed in our work as a part that completes our cyber physical system. Different types of threats will be discussed and proposed solutions will be offered.