Massive Information Scavenging with Intelligent Transportation Systems

The goal of the MISC project is to devise efficient, secure and dependable system architectures for a massively distributed urban scanner composed of private cars, taxis, city buses and trucks, which, while pursuing their usual routes at various speeds in a scattered fashion, are capable of gathering, storing, processing, and disseminating massive amounts of data. Depending on the sensing equipment installed in the vehicle, the captured data sets can be extremely rich and varied, including information about road conditions, traffic characteristics, commercial services, environmental parameters, and sampled measurements of critical infrastructures (such as the water distribution network and the local power grid). As an important addition, the envisioned massive data gathering system shall take the human factor into consideration, exploiting novel wearable sensing technology to collect vital biomedical data about drivers and passengers on urban transportation.

Vehicles may act upon the received data by disseminating vital information about the environment or critical infrastructures, or storing the collected data about commercial services and points of interest in a distributed manner, making it available to everyone in a peer-to-peer fashion. Decision makers can exploit the wealth of collected data for urban planning, risk assessment or adaptive transportation scheduling. As an example, real-time data about driver fatigue could be explored by public transportation authorities to improve job assignment and driver rotation schedules, thus increasing the safety of the transportation system. To avoid traffic disruption, leakage of private data, misinformation or chaotic behavior due to active attacks by means of bogus data, the integrity of the stored data and of the resulting information flows must meet the highest security standards.