Collaborative Research: Optimal Sensor Selection and Robust Traffic Detection and Estimation in a World of Connected Vehicles

可靠的交通管理策略需要对道路上的交通水平有准确的了解。尽管联网车辆（CV）的出现为通过无线通信共享车辆位置和速度等交通数据提供了巨大的潜力，但同时存在隐私问题和带宽限制——并非所有用户都想共享，也并非所有车辆都能共享。该项目将通过设计方法来指导选择一些道路使用者进行数据共享和分析，以实时提供准确的交通水平估计，同时解决隐私和带宽问题，从而解决这两个问题。在整个项目中，交通和机器学习科学的培训模块将在德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校和德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校设计，来自代表性不足群体的学生将在德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校招收，其中58%的入学学生是少数民族。该项目将：(i)考虑用户数据的隐私性，从而保持车辆和用户的匿名性；（ii）识别事故导致的交通状况的突然变化；（iii）设计从cv实时收集的交通数据的时变选择；（iv）量化网络带宽限制以及交通状况和道路属性的不确定性。该项目的主要贡献在于推进了cv作为实时移动交通传感器的使用。这涉及到多个学科概念的整合：交通流、网络系统、估计和机器学习理论。具体来说，该项目将研究计算可扩展的方法，交通运营商可以利用这些方法从履历中优化采样数据，同时满足隐私和带宽限制，从而实时监控交通。通过与奥斯汀市和圣安东尼奥市的合作，理论基础将在现实交通设置中得到验证。该研究的广泛影响超越了交通网络：计算算法将适用于涉及偏微分方程网络系统和移动传感平台的相关问题，如机器人和无人机的环境监测。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Reliable traffic management strategies require accurate knowledge of traffic levels on roads. Though the emergence of connected vehicles (CV) offers tremendous potential for sharing traffic data about vehicles' locations and speeds through wireless communications, there are both privacy concerns and bandwidth constraints - not all users want to share and not all vehicles are able to share. This project will address both issues by designing methods to guide the selection of some road users for data sharing and analysis to provide accurate estimation of traffic levels in real time, while addressing privacy and bandwidth issues. Throughout this project, training modules in traffic and machine learning sciences will be designed at both UT San Antonio and UT Austin and students from underrepresented groups will be recruited at UTSA where 58 percent of enrolled students are minorities.The project will: (i) consider privacy of user data hence maintaining anonymity of vehicles and users, (ii) identify sudden changes in traffic conditions due to accidents, (iii) design a time-varying selection of traffic data collected in real-time from CVs, and (iv) quantify limits on the network bandwidth and uncertainty in traffic conditions and road properties. The project's major contribution lies in advancing the use of CVs as real-time, mobile traffic sensors. This involves the integration of concepts from multiple disciplines: traffic flow, networked systems, estimation, and machine learning theories. Specifically, the project will investigate computationally scalable methods that traffic operators can utilize to optimally sample data from CVs while satisfying privacy and bandwidth constraints, thereby monitoring traffic in real-time. The theoretical foundations will be validated with realistic traffic setups through collaborations with the cities of Austin and San Antonio. The broader impact of the research transcends traffic networks: the computational algorithms will be applicable to related problems involving networked systems of partial differential equations and moving sensing platforms such as environmental monitoring by robot and unmanned aerial vehicles.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.