Collaborative Research: CIF: Small: Toward a Science of Vehicular Epidemiology: Computing, Control, and Security

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Vehicle-to-everything communication is a transformational emerging technology that is poised to enhance transportation safety and traffic management, thereby saving lives and yielding major economic gains by alleviating traffic congestion. This technology will enable vehicles to communicate with each other, as well as with traffic signals, road side units, bikes, wheelchairs, and pedestrians to augment situational awareness of all these constituents about road conditions. This project seeks to facilitate the deployment of the vehicle-to-everything communication technology by providing tools to model, design, optimize and secure its integral components, through a cross-disciplinary research effort. The research entails developing novel and computationally tractable mathematical models for (1) characterizing message propagation between the diverse road constituents; (2) jointly optimizing transportation and communication objectives; and (3) thwarting security threats. The educational plan involves fostering a workforce equipped with cross-domain knowledge in transportation engineering and management, electrical engineering, and cyber-security. The project also includes outreach to decision makers in transportation authorities and programs aimed at broadening the representation of under-represented minorities in the science and engineering field, particularly women.Vehicle-to-everything communication intertwines the wireless communications and transportation infrastructures. This creates cross-dependencies between the infrastructures that both raise unique challenges and offer new opportunities which the project addresses through fundamental contributions. Specifically, the project seeks to establish a science of vehicular epidemiology, which combines, draws from and contributes to the epidemiology, optimal control, game theory, and vehicular and wireless communication domains. Towards that end, the project aims to advance theoretical methods, including clustered epidemiological differential equations, optimal control based on Pontryagin's Maximum Principle, and dynamic games over epidemiological formulations, all of which are innovative in the vehicle-to-everything communication context. The project further includes data-driven verification of the theoretical findings, including computation and simulation software that will be shared with the broader research community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.