Modelling a smart motorway – the conference

Having attended the International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems (CISIS) in Sydney earlier this month, I had the opportunity to hear a lot of new ideas around the Internet of Things (IoT) – but I must admit that it also felt that you can put any word into IoT to help a paper be more up to date!

I presented my own paper about how to model a smart motorway on the first day as part of the Vehicular Ad Hoc Network’s (VANET) workshop that brought together people from around the world to discuss how the IoT can be used in transport networks. The paper was received well, and I had several questions about how it could be further applied and how cars could become automated on the motorway. As part of the workshop we also heard a presentation on emission free cars and a car that is also monitoring your health.

As the conference went on, I was thinking about how the main ideas from my paper could be applied to some other areas discussed. I concluded that the behavioural models could be used to predict how humans randomly act in several applications. Such as a tractor drone predicting how a human walking past it could act using AI or a self-driving car calculating that the driver in front will randomly change lane on a motorway.

Internet of Agricultural Things (IoAT)

The main keynote speaker at the conference focused on the use of the IoAT and how a farm can be run autonomously and more efficiently with less wastage of crop. It was suggested that it could be all carried out by drones both on the ground and in the air. The drones can monitor crops or track livestock and download the livestock’s health information from the IoT devices. The advantage of using drones’ instead of satellites is that the drones can continuously monitor the crops rather than wait for the satellite to be overhead.

The main advancement this paper presented was the idea of how a farm could be completely autonomous. This would include everything from the tractors sowing the crop to the combine harvesters harvesting it. There are the security issues to consider as with all drones but especially with a combine harvester driving itself!

VANET

A VANET is a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network that allows vehicles to use the IoT devices. This is one of the many stages for self-driving cars to become a reality. Smart motorways will rely on VANETs in order to communicate with self-driving cars in the future and to be the host for vehicle-to-vehicle communication. This will be a gradual process as the vehicles become more autonomous and drivers start to become passengers.

At the conference, a researcher from the Fukuoka Institute of Technology in Japan presented a paper on how a car can monitor a driver’s heart rate. This got me thinking about how this idea can be further developed and applied to a self-driving car. For example, a driver may be having a medical emergency, such as a heart attack, and the self-driving car would be able to detect this through sensors. The car could then take control from the driver and drive the now passenger to the hospital. At the same time, the car could send a message to the hospital to alert them that the passenger requires medical attention.

This scenario would require a lot of IoT devices speaking to each other though. On top of this, it would require a system that can work out what the data means – and that’s one of the big data challenges being faced today. For example, a driver’s heart rate may increase due to an animal running in front of the car and you do not want your car driving you to the hospital at this point!

There are a few ideas being suggested for processing this data using edge computing where the data is sent up into a cloud to be analysed. However, before your car can work out if you are having a heart attack vs sneezing, it will require extensive research and there’s also the challenge of building up people’s trust with autonomous vehicles.

The next steps

If you are interested in reading my smart motorway paper, here is the link: Modelling a Smart Motorway

The use of autonomous vehicles/drones has many applications and is slowly starting to become a reality. However, there will always be the challenge of improving the public’s perception of self-driving cars. If you’re interested in this topic, drop me a line – I would be very happy to further discuss any of my ideas here or the behavioural models controlling a self-driving car.

Author

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Ed Richardson

Ed graduated from Bournemouth University with a Masters in IT in 2018. His main area of research has been around smart transport including smart motorways and self-driving cars. Ed is a member of the ETC community in the SAP Supply Chain practice.