Road accidents and traffic congestion are serious problems for global transport systems. Connected vehicles (CV) and automated vehicles (AV) are among the most heavily researched automotive technologies to reduce road accidents and improve road efficiency. They have paramount safety, economic, road efficiency and mobility benefits. However, both AV and CV technologies have inherent shortcomings. In view of the limitations of CV and AV, the COSAFE project investigates the technology of connected intelligent vehicles (CIV). The idea is motivated by the observation that vehicles are increasingly intelligent with various levels of autonomous functionalities, which are enabled by more sensing and computing resources. The massive sensor and computing resources of vehicles and the transport infrastructure could be shared and exploited through effective cooperation of the CIVs to improve road safety and efficiency (RSE). Sensing information that can be shared include driving paths, moving objects within the drivable area, scene semantics (such as traffic lights, traffic signs and on-road markings) and driving manuverments (e.g. turning and giving way), etc. With resource sharing and cooperation, connected intelligent vehicles can have comprehensive perception of driving environments; innovative technologies, applications and systems could be developed to reduce road accidents and improve transport network efficiency. To our best knowledge, there is no research reported on the CIV technologies and applications.
While CIV holds great potentials, there are still many challenges and unanswered questions, for example unclear road safety impact of CIV with various levels of vehicle intelligence, security and safety issues for resource sharing and cooperation, and vehicles networking issue. This COSAFE RISE project directly addresses these issues by developing innovative vehicular networking and resource sharing and cooperation mechanisms, and integrating them into CIV to develop cooperative CIV technologies and applications.
The overall scientific R&I objectives (RO) of this COSAFE project include:
- RO-1: Identify the key impact, opportunities and challenges of CIV for road transport networks.
- RO-2: Research and develop reliable & high capacity vehicular communication and networking solutions with high reliability and capacity under dynamic mobile network scenarios.
- RO-3: Research and design scalable, effective and secure cooperative sensing and computing (CSC) mechanisms and algorithms for CIVs with heterogeneous sensing and computing resources.
- RO-4: Develop and pilot test novel cooperative CIV technologies and applications with robust CSC to reduce road accidents and improve road efficiency.
- RO-5: Understand the traffic pattern of CIV applications and quantify its impact on V2X communication performance, develop effective CIV application traffic prediction method, and develop service-oriented network resource management schemes to maximize resource utilization and RSE performance.
