So to display the V2X work carried out the video showcases the
achievements of the work package and gives a good overview of what artifacts have been generated.

Originally there were plans to have not only a pilot carried out by professional drivers but also a public day where members of the public, press and related industry were invited to attend a series of presentations, talks and hands on drives around the city of Stuttgart to unveil the TransSec truck to the public. Again due to CoVid-19 these events had to be cancelled for public health safety reasons which have left the consortium with a sense of anti-climax. As the project partners have worked tireless to realise the objectives of TransSec there would have been no better platform to share those achievements with the public.

As a result the consortium have been motivated to make the final review a worthy replacement, we can only hope that the enthusiasm of the partners is not lost over the virtual setting!

The Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) is the semi-annual flagship conference of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society and focuses on wireless, mobile, and vehicular technology. IEEE VTC2021-Spring will be held 25-28 April 2021 in Helsinki, Finland and will feature world-class plenary speakers, tutorials, technical as well as application sessions, and an innovative Industry Track.

The conference paper is titled “A Pedestrian Evacuation Model for ITS based on Cell Transmission Model and Linear Programming”, with Ruisong Han, Martin Tolan, Frances Cleary and Fan Zhang from TSSG, Waterford Institute of Technology as authors. With the development work in the WP6 Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications, TSSG researchers found that the V2P (Vehicle-to-Pedestrian) application developed within WP6 can achieve better functionalities, with innovative evacuation models designed and implemented.

Earlier, a survey on the disaster evacuation solutions by the team found that current solutions neither fully utilize the modern communications techniques such as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communications nor have a practical and optimized model for evacuating vehicles and pedestrians. Thus, the team has proposed an improved route-based linear programming (IRLP) optimization model for evacuation, which is specially tailored for the emergency evacuation problem of pedestrians in ITS. Specifically, the proposed model utilizes the Cell Transmission Model (CTM) and linear programming to model the pedestrian evacuation. Figure 1 illustrates the cell representation of a road network where a security event in Cell 1 will be communicated to the pedestrians in other virtual cells through V2P. Then, we can further use the proposed linear programming equations to calculate an optimized evacuation plan with the cell representation.

The research results highlight that the proposed model can optimize the pedestrian flow to alleviate potential congestion (caused by adopting similar evacuation routes) when the density of pedestrian is high. This is a great supplement to the current research since existing work may either use microscopic or macroscopic models, without taking the benefits of the two to improve overall evacuation efficiency. Besides, with more vehicle-based attacks in recent years, V2X solutions with evacuation algorithms and applications accompanied can better ensure road security.

Below is the abstract of the paper:

System-Optimal Dynamic Traffic Assignment (SODTA) problem optimizes the time-dependent traffic flow of a transportation network, with varied objectives and complicated constraints. Traffic management applications of Intelligent Transports Systems (ITS), such as emergency evacuation, network optimization, and route planning, rely on SO-DTA models to obtain sophisticated solutions to optimize network performance. In this paper, an improved route-based linear programming (IRLP) optimization model is proposed, specially tailored for the emergency evacuation problem of pedestrians in ITS. The proposed model utilizes the Cell Transmission Model (CTM) and linear programming to model the pedestrian evacuation and introduces penalty labels in the IRLP formulations to solve the holding-back flow issue. Besides, when designing the model, the categories of transmission cells are simplified to make the model more practical, compared to some previous research work. Finally, a series of simulation experiments, including the comparison to the real-world shortest-path evacuation strategies, are conducted to showcase the effectiveness in saving valuable evacuation time.

Analysis: To obtain a more comprehensive analysis of a situational context using a data fusion module that fuses and processes vehicle monitoring data.

Detection: One of the primary objectives of the project is pre-crash detection implemented onboard the vehicle to detect vulnerable objects on/off-road.

Maneuvering: Our aim is to implement an autonomous system into vehicles in order to perform emergency maneuvering procedures to bring a vehicle to a safe halt in the case of a potential crash being detected.

Positioning: Precise vehicle positioning is critical to the project. This includes both on-road (lane) and off-road positioning and navigational systems.

Security: Another primary objectives for the project is to implement a highly-secure network of communication systems for V2V, V2I and V2P communications to be used for critical information exchange.

Monitoring: Vehicle movement will be monitored closely, especially during transport of dangerous goods. The TransSec platform will incorporate the alarm/eCall system within its implementation.

As each pilot test run was completed the drivers would complete questionnaires to capture their thoughts and feedback Re the overall driving experience and how TransSec affected that experience.

Due to CoVid-19 the whole pilot study had to be scrapped. The consortium could not guarantee the safety of the drivers (from a Covid-19 perspective) therefore in the interest of safety the decision was made to cancel the pilot study completely.

As can be seen from the figure below significant effort was spent in the integration of the various WPs and their associated technologies but the partners are confident that the results can be presented in an equally pleasing manner via the various video demonstrators that will be made available over the next few months.

With the research work carried in D6.8 CyberSecurity of TransSec, Dr Han, the WP6 Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) leader, found that most of the security standards for ITS-G5 are a little outdated and not well supported by commercial off-the-shelf products. Also, conventional access control in V2X is role-based and coarse-grained, which lacks flexibility in securing the critical assets. Thus, TSSG researchers have utilised their expertise in V2X, IoT and cybersecurity and proposed a dynamic fine-grained access control framework for cooperative intelligent transport systems named FACT.

In FACT, an open-source, high-performance, resource-efficient, XACML3 standard-compatible Policy Decision Point (PDP) is integrated with an Enhanced Authorization Authority (EAA) to provide effective and accurate access decisions expressed as Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) policies. Thus, the proposed framework can support ABAC and realize smarter authorization and communication choices. Also, it can support more C-ITS authorization contexts than the traditional framework. Figure 1 below illustrates two use cases proposed by the paper. In these use cases, the EAA can evaluate the incoming resources request, checks the relevant attributes, evaluates against its policies, and grant corresponding communication rights dynamically.

Below is the abstract of the paper:

The architecture of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) from ETSI enables a variety of physical access methods, ITS applications and services to be offered to road users. The architecture requires enhanced authorization to ensure communication security and privacy. The relevant ETSI architecture includes a high-level design for security management and identifies the need for flexible and dynamic access control. However, most existing access control solutions support only coarse-grained functionality. In this paper, we propose a dynamic fine-grained access control framework for cooperative intelligent transport systems named FACT. In FACT, an open-source, high-performance, resource-efficient, XACML3 standard-compatible Policy Decision Point (PDP) is integrated with an Enhanced Authorization Authority (EAA) to provide effective and accurate access decisions expressed as Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) policies. The proposed FACT Authorization Framework is an implementation of a C-ITS EAA and employs an event driven architecture and a non-blocking computational model for enhancing the performance and reducing the resource consumption in a fog node. The proposed solution was validated in terms of reliability, resource usage, and latency.

One of the major elements of TransSec is the support for the pan-European emergency call (eCall) standard, which, up until this point, has been focused towards smaller, domestic vehicles and on post-crash situations. The goal of the eCall service is to lower the time between the occurrence of a roadside incident and the response of emergency services to that incident.

A standard European eCall is formed by two elements: a voice component, and a data component. The voice component involves vehicle occupants speaking to operators at a public safety answering point (PSAP), while the data component is a transmission of vehicular data to the PSAP.

Additionally, under pan-European eCall, there are two trigger mechanisms for eCall: automatic and manual. An automatic eCall would be triggered in such situations where in-vehicle sensors detect a crash or other roadside incident involving the vehicle. In contrast, a manual eCall is triggered by a vehicle occupant in any other situation where assistance from emergency services is required (ill/injured occupant, etc.)

eCall for TransSec

Implementation of an eCall system to fit TransSec presented a number of challenges. Primarily, the objective of TransSec is to prevent the misuse of heavy-goods vehicles. This means that when an emergency call is to be triggered via TransSec, it is possible that the driver of the vehicle intends to cause harm to others using that vehicle. Such a situation would make the voice component of an emergency call problematic, as the driver of the vehicle may not necessarily be trustworthy, thereby downplaying a dangerous situation while in conversation with a PSAP operator, leading to lack of emergency response.

For this reason, it was decided that TransSec eCall will not include a voice call component. The innovative eCall solution we have built is a direct reflection of the project’s overall goals.

The custom eCall implementation for TransSec is a primarily-automatic eCall triggering mechanism activated by on-board systems designed to calculate the risk of a roadside incident.

Upon determining a valid risk of an incident occurring, TransSec’s array of on-board sensor systems communicate to the eCall hardware to send an eCall message to a PSAP and alert emergency services.

Once a trigger has been received by the eCall device, collection and encoding of data begins. TransSec is compliant with the eCall Minimum Set of Data (MSD) set down by CEN EN 15722, and includes all required information (such as vehicle location, vehicle identification number, timestamp, etc.), encoded using ASN.1 unaligned packed encoding rules (UPER). This data is transmitted directly to a Public Safety Answering Point, from where the required emergency services can be dispatched.

The hardware & software

The TransSec eCall system uses commercial off-the-shelf components to build an eCall device which fits seamlessly into the TransSec ecosystem, allowing for other components of TransSec to easily communicate with the eCall device to trigger any required alerts.

The hardware for the in-vehicle system (IVS) is comprised of a Raspberry Pi, with a connected USB modem for data communications and a 7-inch touch screen for user interface and interaction with the eCall application.

We have developed a full software package for the eCall in-vehicle system which handles the management of emergency call sessions, whether automatic or manually triggered via the user interface.

For the purpose of demonstrator testing, a PSAP simulator was also built to aid in monitoring eCall message transmission and data validation.

The PSAP simulator is used to decode and display any incoming eCall MSD messages. This tool was primarily used to verify that any MSD encoding done prior to message transmission was in line with the standard eCall Minimum Set of Data.

Interface design

The IVS and PSAP application interfaces were designed with the primary goal being to offer easy access to the required functionality and information. Both applications went through several design iterations.

As can be seen above, simplicity was at the core of the IVS application interface design. The IVS will naturally be housed in-vehicle, so all of its functionality needed to be accessible at a glance with limits on the amount of required interactions.

Wrap-up

eCall is a major feature in the push towards increased road safety, and TransSec fully embraces the system with our own spin on emergency call, customised to fit the goals of the project.

The innovative pre-crash eCall system helps to add an extra layer of safety and security to TransSec, and will be seamlessly integrated into the overall package to aid in achieving our goal of enhanced road transport security and to stop the misuse of heavy-goods vehicles on the road.

As usual all of the partners got an opportunity to present their work to the consortium in person while also using the stage to answer any of the open issues that still remained. As always with EU projects, the final year is paramount these types of projects as all of the effort and research carried out culminates in the final set of deliverables which determines the overall success of the project. Much of the time in this plenary was spend planning out how to best present the set of results to not only the PO & the set of reviewers but also to interested stakeholders and the general public.

Looking ahead to the final year does have a lot of challanges and will require a lot of effort but it also gave the consortium members a chance to socialise and let off a bit of steam within the famous night life areas of Vienna. Job done with the plenary and its back to our respective countries to complete the project and deliver all of the outcomes for the TransSec project.

As TransSec completes its second year all of the work packages are well and truly on their way to meeting the objectives set out for them. Another busy year was had with not only the submission of 25 deliverables but also the completion of the projects’ mid-term review held with the projects officer and the set of reviewers assigned to the project.

The sheer number of deliverables was astounding considering that 12 of them were in month 24 itself thereby keeping all consortium member busy. The breakdown of the deliverables submitted consisted of 16 reports while the remaining 9 deliverables were all demonstrators that covered everything from hyper accurate GNSS positioning to enhanced V2X communications and precise object detection and map generation.

The set of deliverables for the second year of the TransSec project consists of:

• 25 deliverables
• 9 of which are public deliverables
• 16 reports
• 9 demonstrators

The progress made to date has placed the consortium in a very good position for the remaining year of the project, if the current velocity is sustained then the outputs of the TransSec project will be not only of a very high quality but also of great importance and relevance to the transport and safety community.