The goal of the project is to provide a secure foundation for a transportation system that increasingly relies on the cooperation, connectedness, and automation of vehicles to achieve increases in safety, efficiency, and capacity. The financial losses attributable to congestion in America's transportation infrastructure are more than $1 trillion annually and the parallel loss of life in vehicle collisions is 40,000 deaths per year. Cooperative, autonomous vehicles are expected to increase the throughput of vehicles; reduce emissions, fuel consumption, and injuries; extend personal transportation to the disabled and elderly; and lessen the number and size of roadways.
This project leverages a multi-disciplinary group, composed of security, transportation, control, and communication researchers to secure an automated transportation system that is available to all vehicles, trusted or not, that may experience impaired connectivity. The team is (1) developing a secure and resilient control regime for automated vehicles, (2) building a framework based on the physical layer to enable vehicles to establish peer trust, and (3) providing a trusted infrastructure the ability to securely gather and disseminate traffic and environmental data to vehicles for optimal route planning and accident avoidance using Bayesian inference on Markov models.
The proposed research will advance the knowledge in many fields: secure and resilient control, VANET security, trust establishment and management, physical-layer security, decision theory, and secure protocol design. Results from this research will be disseminated in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. The research will provide opportunities for research training for underrepresented students at undergraduate and graduate levels.
