Improving Transportation Systems

Dan WorkCivil and Environmental Engineering, UC BerkeleyCenter for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)dbwork@berkeley.edu

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• Congestion • Environmental impact• Equity and accessibility• Safety and security • Aging infrastructure• Emergency

preparedness, response, and mitigation

21st century transportation challenges

[Transportation Research Board 09; EPA Green Book 10]

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• Still lack basic ability to track the flow of goods and people across our infrastructure.

• Need improvements in real-time: – sensing– estimation– control– Systems integration

• 21st century challenges will force a tighter integration between our physical transportation infrastructure and computing infrastructure

How to meet these challenges

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• The resulting transportation systems are “Cyber Physical Systems” (CPS)– CPS are characterized by tight

coupling of and coordination between computational and physical resources

– adds capabilities to physical systems that we could not feasibly add in any other way

– Driven by the ubiquity of sensors and cheap computing

• Understanding these systems is truly a grand challenge across disciplines and domains

Transportation cyber physical systems

Internet

sensordata

information,control

built environment

[CPS Executive Summary 08]

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• Cell phones are the world’s largest sensor network:

– 3 billion devices– Global coverage, human centric– Increasingly connected,

programmable

Understanding human mobility

• Wikipedia for the physical world– “First draft” of our interaction with

the environment, in real-time– Crowd-sourced data– Participatory sensing– Information distribution

Mobile Millennium – traffic estimation with cell phones

• Partnership between UC Berkeley, Nokia, Navteq Caltrans, and US DOT SafeTrip 21 initiative

• Deployment of thousands of cars in Northern California

• Participating users download Mobile Millennium Traffic Pilot (available at traffic.berkeley.edu) on a GPS and java enabled phone

• Phones receive live information on map application

Mobile Century – proof of concept

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• Prototype System– Run Feb. 8, 2008– Multi-lane highway with

heavy morning and evening congestion

– Ground truth: Loop detectors, HD film crew on bridges.

– Rich data set for future traffic modelling and estimation research

165 UC Berkeley Graduate Student Drivers

100 rental cars 70+ Support Staff

165 UC BerkeleyGraduate Student Drivers

Accident delays

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BayTripper.org• Real-time trip planning • Leverage GPS etc for: Real

time: next bus, train, metro• Bike routes by ridesf.com• Taxi integration• Carshare (future)

BayTripper – mobile multi-modal trip planning

[Jariyasunaunt et al, TRB ‘10]

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• Need to merge the timescales of internet innovation with the longevity of physical infrastructure– Platform for innovation and adaptability– Interoperability and portability– Enable national / global scale systems of systems

• Need reliable transportation CPS from unreliable components– Sensors will fail, will be attacked– Computing systems will have bugs and security vulnerabilities

Designing transportation CPS

[ CPS Executive Summary 08]

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• Security: networked systems open up the potential for large, coordinated attacks on physical systems

• Privacy: need to monitor movements of goods and people without compromising privacy

Security and privacy

[Hoh Mobisys 08, KXAN 09]

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• Transportation system improvements will come from innovations in merging physical infrastructure with computational infrastructure.

• Challenge is how to do this without compromising safety, reliability, security, and privacy.

• Requires collaboration between government, academia, and industry

Concluding remarks