Intelligent Transportation Systems

Protocol Design for Real-Time Estimation Using Wireless Sensors

Fallah, Yaser P.
Raja Sengupta
Ammari, Habib M.
2014

This chapter discusses how a wireless sensor network can be built for real-time estimation purposes. The finite capacity of a wireless network in delivering information means that a real-time estimation process has finite accuracy too. Improving accuracy requires faster sampling and more communication; however, faster communication is not always a possibility due to scalability issues and the limited capacity of a network. In fact, in networks where the wireless medium is shared amongst many nodes, the increase in the amount of communication may even have a negative impact on the capacity...

Quantified Traveler: Travel Feedback Meets the Cloud to Change Behavior

Raja Sengupta
Joan Walker
2015

Halting climate change will require a concerted effort to reduce emissions from on-road vehicles. While significant progress has been made to improve vehicle efficiency and reduce CO 2 emissions, surface transportation accounted for half the increase in US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the past two decades. Today, surface transportation accounts for 24 percent of all US emissions. Automobile improvements alone will not be sufficient to meet federal and state emissions targets; policy makers also need to identify solutions that reduce the demand for car travel. Information technology...

A Runtime System for Logical-Space Programming

Pereira, Eloi
Krainer, Clemens
Da Silva, Pedro Marques
Kirsch, Christoph M.
Raja Sengupta
2015

In this paper we introduce logical-space programming, a spatial computing paradigm where programs have access to a logical space model, i.e., names and explicit relations over such names, while the runtime system is in charge of manipulating the physical space. Mobile devices such as autonomous vehicles are equipped with sensors and actuators that provide means for computation to react upon spatial information and produce effects over the environment. The spatial behavior of these systems is commonly specified at the physical level, e.g., GPS coordinates. This puts the responsibility for...

Quantifying Transit Travel Experiences from the Users’ Perspective with High-Resolution Smartphone and Vehicle Location Data: Methodologies, Validation, and Example Analyses

Carrel, Andre
Lau, Peter S. C.
Mishalani, Rabi G.
Raja Sengupta
Joan Walker
2015

While transit agencies have increasingly adopted systems for collecting data on passengers and vehicles, the ability to derive high-resolution passenger trajectories and directly associate them with transit vehicles in a general and transferable manner remains a challenge. In this paper, a system of integrated methods is presented to reconstruct and track travelers usage of transit at a detailed level by matching location data from smartphones to automatic transit vehicle location (AVL) data and by identifying all out-of-vehicle and in-vehicle portions of the passengers trips. High-...

An Unmanned Aerial Traffic Management Solution for Cities Using an Air Parcel Model

Foina, Aislan Gomide
Krainer, Clemens
Raja Sengupta
2015

The Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) market once belonged to professional companies only. Now many amateur pilots fly cheap, smartphone controlled models available in any electronic store. Due to altitude, speed, and weight, these flying objects can cause damage and injury. Hence, a way to manage them is necessary. This paper presents a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) system comprising three components: a UAS electronic identification plate with an embedded logger, a ground identification equipment, and a Traffic Routing System (TRS). This UTM system uses the air parcel model, which divides the...

Quantifying Transit Travel Experiences from the Users’ Perspective with High-resolution Smartphone and Vehicle Location Data: Methodologies, Validation, and Example Analyses

Carrel, Andre
Lau, Peter S. C.
Mishalani, Rabi G.
Raja Sengupta
Joan Walker
2015

While transit agencies have increasingly adopted systems for collecting data on passengers and vehicles, the ability to derive high-resolution passenger trajectories and directly associate them with transit vehicles in a general and transferable manner remains a challenge. In this paper, a system of integrated methods is presented to reconstruct and track travelers usage of transit at a detailed level by matching location data from smartphones to automatic transit vehicle location (AVL) data and by identifying all out-of-vehicle and in-vehicle portions of the passengers trips. High-...

Drones in Smart Cities: Overcoming Barriers Through Air Traffic Control Research

Foina, Aislan Gomide
Raja Sengupta
Lerchi, Patrick
Liu, Zhilong
Krainer, Clemens
2015

Within the last decade, the recent automation of vehicles such as cars and planes promise to fundamentally alter the microeconomics of transporting people and goods. In this paper, we focus on the self-flying planes (drones), which have been renamed Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) by the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA). The most controversial operations envisaged by the UAS industry are small, low-altitude UAS flights in densely populated cities - robotic aircraft flying in the midst of public spaces to deliver goods and information. This subset of robotic flight would be the most valuable...

Cloud Computing in Space

Huang, Jiangchuan
Kirsch, Christoph M.
Raja Sengupta
2015

We apply virtual machine abstractions to networked vehicles, enabling what we call cloud computing in space to create performance isolation between customers. In analogy to conventional system virtualization and cloud computing, there are customer-operated virtual vehicles that essentially perform like real vehicles, although they are in reality hosted by fewer, shared, provider-operated real vehicles. The motion of the virtual vehicles and real vehicles creates migration gain. As a result, cloud computing in space can do better than conventional cloud computing in the sense of realizing...

In Pursuit of the Happy Transit Rider: Dissecting Satisfaction Using Daily Surveys and Tracking Data

Carrel, Andre
Mishalani, Rabi G.
Raja Sengupta
Joan Walker
2016

This paper demonstrates the power and value of connecting satisfaction surveys from public transportation passengers to smartphone tracking data and automatic vehicle location (AVL) data. The high resolution of the smartphone location data allows travel times to be dissected into their individual components, and the connection with AVL data provides objective information on personal-level experiences of the respondents. Analyses show how these data can provide a quantitative understanding of the relationship between planned and provisioned service, and customer satisfaction. In-vehicle...

An Energy-Based Flight Planning System for Unmanned Traffic Management

Liu, Zhilong
Raja Sengupta
2017

In this paper, we proposed an energy-based flight planning system for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). Fuel consumption estimation at the flight planning stage is safety critical in general aviation, because energy-related failures are often life-threatening. However, conservative fuel estimation is not economical and environmentally friendly because carrying unnecessary fuel load burns a lot of extra fuel. The same reasoning holds in UTM. Aviation researchers are actively working on optimizing fuel loading, but such research is lacking in UTM. In this paper, we...