Towards Cloud-based Vehicular Cyber-physical Systems (2017)

We are living in the age of information technology, where we are fully occupied with the revolutionary innovations of the last few decades such as the Internet, mobile devices, wireless communications, social networks, wearables, cloud computing, etc. While these technologies have become integral part of our daily life, we are now anxiously waiting to embrace Internet-of-Things (IoT), intelligent digital assistants, driver-less cars, drone deliveries, virtual reality, and smart city applications. Recently, research community is demonstrating increasing interests about Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that resides in the cross-section of embedded systems, network communications, and scalable distributed infrastructures. The main responsibility of a CPS is to collect sensory data about the physical world and to inform the computation module using communication technologies that processes the data, identifies important insights and notifies back using a feedback loop. These notifications can however be control commands to reconfigure the physical world. Such a setup is a useful method to deploy smart city applications. In this dissertation, we keep our focus onto the smart transport objective using vehicular CPS (VCPS) based systems organization. We have compiled this dissertation with our research contributions in this growing field of VCPS. One of our key contributions in this field is an architecture reference model for the cloud-based CPS, C2PS, where we analytically describe the key properties of a CPS: computation, communication and control, while integrating cloud features to it. We have identified various types of computation and interaction modes of this paradigm as well as describe Bayesian network and fuzzy logic based smart connection to select a mode at any time. It is considered that the true adoption of CPS is only possible through the deployment of the IoT systems. Thus, it is important to have IoT as a foundation in the CPS architectures. Our next contribution is to leverage existing Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) technologies and map them with the standard IoT-Architecture reference model to design the VCPS, Social Internet-of-Vehicles (SIoV). In this process, we have identified the social structures and system interactions among the subsystems involved in the SIoV. We also present a message structure to facilitate different types of SIoV interactions. The ability of dynamic reconfiguration in a C2PS is very appealing. We capture this feature in the VCPS by designing a model-based reconfiguration scheme for the SIoV, where we measure the data workloads of distinct subsystems involved in various types of SIoV interactions. We further use these models to design dynamic adaptation schemes for the subsystems involved in VCPS interactions. Our final contribution is an application development platform based on C2PS design technique that uses server-client based system communications. In this platform, server side is built using JAVA, client side uses Android, message communication uses JSON and every component has its own MySQL database to store the interactions. We use this platform to emulate and deploy SIoV related applications and scenarios. Such a platform is necessary to continue C2PS related research and developments in the laboratory environment.