NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Towards Privacy-Preserving Autonomous Vehicle Sharing Services

在过去的几年里，汽车和科技行业在将计算机化和自动化引入汽车驾驶方面取得了重大飞跃。自动驾驶汽车(AVs)具有从根本上改善交通系统的潜力，它可以显著减少撞车事故，帮助交通流量，减少出行时间和能源消耗，为老年人和残疾人提供关键的移动性，并使车辆共享变得方便、流行和必要。该项目研究与自动车辆共享(AVS)相关的架构和隐私问题，AVS可以通过提供新颖的分时和拼车服务来彻底改变我们的交通体验。分时服务允许不同用户在不重叠的时间段共享自动取款机，而拼车服务允许在同一时间段内进行类似旅行的用户共享自动取款机。有了自动驾驶技术，这两项服务的质量都可以显著提高，使通勤者受益。然而，分时拼车系统需要与用户沟通来组织共享车辆，这并不是没有风险的。在隐私被侵犯的情况下，用户活动的海量信息可能会被曝光。由于AVS特有的问题和要求，现有的隐私保护技术不能有效和高效地应用于AVS，例如位置和时间敏感的出行和多用户协调。本项目针对AVS提出的独特隐私问题，提出了有效、高效的隐私保护技术，可以在用户中推广AVS，本项目的研究将对隐私保护的AV共享服务产生重大的技术影响。该项目将研究分时服务的隐私保护任务匹配问题和拼车服务的隐私保护出行搜索问题，同时将考虑计算和通信开销、意外情况导致的出行延误、过渡出行的成本、用户的社会偏好以及不同的隐私保护级别。拟议的研究活动将引发对其他应用的进一步研究，如社交网络、车载自组织网络、智能电网和电动汽车通信，在这些应用中，隐私是一个重要因素。这项研究的结果将通过会议和期刊出版物、在线文件和软件发布来传播。波士顿和库克维尔地区将为高中和社区大学的学生举办研讨会，并将就拟议的研究发表演讲，展示科学和工程如何提高生活质量，以激发学生对技术的兴趣。将鼓励代表人数不足的小组的学生参加拟议的研究活动。

Over the past several years, the automobile and technology industries have made significant leaps in bringing computerization and automation to car driving. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have the potential to fundamentally improve transportation systems by dramatically reducing crashes, assisting traffic flows, reducing travel time and energy consumption, providing critical mobility to the elderly and disabled, and making vehicle sharing convenient, popular, and necessary. This project studies the architecture and privacy issues related to autonomous vehicle sharing (AVS) that can revolutionize our transportation experience by providing novel time-sharing and ride-sharing services. The time-sharing services allow AVs to be shared by different users at non-overlapping time periods, while the ride-sharing services allow AVs to be shared by users taking similar trips during the same time period. With autonomous driving techniques, the quality of both services can be significantly enhanced to benefit commuters. However, the time- and ride- sharing systems need to communicate with users to organize shared vehicles, which is not risk free. Massive information on users' activities can be exposed in case of privacy breach. Existing privacy-preserving techniques cannot be applied effectively and efficiently in AVS due to problems and requirements unique to AVS, e.g., location- and time- sensitive trips and multi-user coordination. This project addresses the unique privacy problems raised by AVS and proposes effective and efficient privacy-preserving techniques, which can promote AVS among users.The research in this project will have major technological impacts on privacy-preserving AV sharing services. The project will study the privacy-preserving task matching problem for the time-sharing service and the privacy-preserving trip searching problem for the ride-sharing service, while computation and communication overhead, trip delays due to unexpected conditions, costs of transitional trips, users' social preferences, and different privacy protection levels will be considered. The proposed research activities will trigger further research in other applications such as social networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, smart grid, and electric vehicles communications, where privacy is an important factor. The results from this research will be disseminated through conference and journal publications, online documents, and software release. Seminars to high school and community colleges students will be offered in the Boston and Cookeville areas, and presentations regarding the proposed research will be delivered to demonstrate how science and engineering can enhance quality of life in order to stimulate the students' interest in technology. Students in under-represented groups will be encouraged to participate in the proposed research activities.