C²M² would like to thank Dr. Taimi Olsen, Clemson University, for taking part in our C²M² Distinguished Speaker Series on January 26th, 2022.

Seminar Title

Inclusive Teaching for Today’s Engineering and Science Students

Seminar Abstract

This interactive talk will address our understanding of and interactions with today’s students, as we think through mindsets, motivations, and engagement practices that can work with Gen Zers and be inclusive and support all students. As experienced educators, how do we know what practices are inclusive, and how do we avoid unintentionally adding barriers to student academic success in higher ed?

Speaker Bio

Dr. Taimi Olsen is an educator and faculty developer with four decades of experience in higher education. She is devoted to universal, transparent teaching, bringing her passion to teaching first generation students, women and students of color, international students, and students with disabilities—and to bring educational support to faculty in these positionalities.

• Final Report
• Technology Transfer Report
• Report Data

C²M² is excited to announce the extension of the SC-CVT testbed, which now includes six new signalized intersections. The new intersections will expand the current research and technology development capacity of C²M². The expanded digital infrastructure-supported living lab currently consists of a video-based pedestrian safety system, single lane and multi-lane roadways with varying land use, and roadways with dedicated and shared bike lanes.

C²M² acknowledges the support from Trafficware and Clemson University Facilities to make this expansion happen.

This summer Dr. Gurcan Comert, one of our C²M² Associate Directors, is once again participating in Benedict College’s Summer 2021 “Virtual” Research Institute. Along with a team of advisors from Benedict College, made up of Drs. Negash Begashaw, Samuel Darko, and Balaji Iyangar, Dr. Comert will be mentoring a group of 19 students as they conduct research on various topics related to quantum artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and connected infrastructure. In addition to meeting regularly with their team of advisors to discuss the progress of their research, there will be guest lectures from transportation experts, and time allocated for students to conduct experiments at the McNair Aerospace Center at the University of South Carolina. Students will be focusing on some of the following topics.

• Incident detection and cyber-attack detection Quantum Artificial Intelligence (4 students)
• Road surface distress classification (2 students)
• Detecting illegal removal of barricades using connected infrastructure and users (2 students)
• Literature review works on Urban Air Mobility environmental impacts, infrastructure, manufacturing, and quality control. (6 students)
• Image processing for detecting fiber distributions (1 student)
• Substrate classification problem (3 students)

At the end of the summer, students will present their findings with a virtual poster presentation.

C²M² would like to congratulate Dr. Dimitra Michalaka and Dr. Kweku Brown on the recognition of their ongoing work at The Citadel and for our center. This spring, Dr. Michalaka was been awarded a Service Award for her work as a mentor and faculty leader, while Dr. Brown was been awarded the New Faculty Award for his achievements in teaching, service, and scholarship.

Dr. Dimitra Michalaka is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Citadel, and one of our founding C²M² Associate Directors. Dr. Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Citadel, and one of our supported researchers.

Both Dr. Michalaka and Dr. Brown participate in numerous research, workforce development, and outreach activities in partnership with C²M².

The goal of this project was to aid emergency management agencies and departments of transportation in preparing for a future hurricane-related mass evacuation where self-driving, autonomous vehicles (AVs) can be utilized to assist with evacuating critical transportation need households (CTNH). A survey was developed and administered to over 1000 residents of South Carolina to capture qualitative assessments of willingness to share their future self-driving AVs in evacuation and disaster relief scenarios. Over 30% of respondents indicated they would be willing or very willing to share their self-driving AVs in these scenarios. Ordered logit models were developed to identify factors associated with this willingness. Statistically significant factors could be categorized into socio-demographics and economics (e.g., unemployed, gender, age, household size), technology adoption and comfort (e.g., use of ride-hailing services, high comfort with using AVs for deliveries), frequency of giving and/or volunteering, and current commute mode.

An ordered logit model for the evacuation scenario was applied to a synthetic South Carolina population to determine the number of AVs that would be shared by the public to assist with evacuation. A Monte Carlo simulation model was developed to test the potential of using only shared AVs to evacuate the CTNH for different scenarios of AV market penetration.  The most optimistic scenario predicted that all of the demand could be covered in the not too distant future once AVs start gaining market share.  With a 20% AV market penetration, approximately 85% to 90% of the CTNH could be evacuated.  Lastly, the experiment results indicated that an AV market penetration of 30% to 35% (depending on the scenario considered) was sufficient to evacuate all CTNH requiring evacuation assistance.

• Final Report
• Technology Transfer Report
• Report Data*

*Additional data available upon request

In recent years, developments in vehicle-to-everything communication (V2X) have steadily increased in applications such as platooning, collision avoidance, and routing algorithm. V2X provides vehicles with long range information regarding traffic congestion and routing, but also short and mid-range information allowing cooperative adaptive cruise control, automatic collision warnings, and others. Despite being potentially beneficial in several aspects, challenges exist from a safety and reliability standpoint due to the possibility of cyber-attacks aimed at influencing the behavior of vehicles. In this project, a cloud-based method to detect the false data injection attack on Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) is presented. The sandboxing concept utilized in this paper comes from computer security and it is recasted in a control framework as a way to isolate and evaluate the data exchanged by the CAVs affecting the vehicle control system. Numerical experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the approach using microscopic traffic simulation. Our results are summarized as follows: (i) both two proposed data fusion algorithms with different architecture are able to improve the localization results of CAVs; (ii) both two proposed attack detection strategies are able to detect false data injection attacks in platooning scenario and rerouting scenario, respectively.

• Final Report
• Technology Transfer Report
• Report Data

C²M² would like to thank Mizanur “Mizan” Rahman, University of Alabama, for participating in our inaugural C2M2 Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Frontiers Series. This speaking series was created to showcase former and current C2M2 doctoral students and early-career faculty researchers who have worked on C²M² funded projects. Rahman’s talk took place on Friday, May 28th, 2021.

Seminar Title

A Physics-based Longitudinal Control Model for Automated Vehicles in a Mixed Traffic Environment

Seminar Abstract

The penetration level of automated vehicles (AV) will be low in the near future. In a mixed traffic environment, AVs will travel by different types of road users, such as human-driven vehicles. The AV controller needs to engage its acceleration and deceleration in such a way so that AV movement must be compatible with immediate upstream vehicles, which could be a human-driven vehicle, and passengers in the AV should feel comfortable as it moves through a mixed traffic environment. This presentation will focus on a physics-based autonomous vehicle longitudinal driver model (PAVL-DM) to move an AV forward with a minimum following gap while considering safety and passenger comfort. The concept, theoretical considerations, and mathematical formulations of the PAVL-DM longitudinal control model will be discussed along with PAVL-DM model equilibria and robustness for safety assurance and string stability. The numerical analysis related to riding comfort and a dynamic minimum following gap while considering safety will also be presented. It is revealed that PAVL-DM (i) can maintain safety between a subject AV and an immediate front vehicle using a newly defined safe gap function depending on the speed and reaction time of an AV; (ii) shows local stability and string stability; and (iii) provides riding comfort for a range of autonomous driving aggressiveness depending on passengers’ corresponding preferences on driving aggressiveness. In addition, a case study using a real-world dataset will be presented, which proves that an AV with the PAVL-DM model maintains a minimum following gap between a subject AV and an immediate front vehicle without compromising safety and passenger comfort. 

Speaker Bio

Mizanur “Mizan” Rahman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA), Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is also the director of the Connected and Automated Mobility laboratory (CAM Lab) at UA. His research focuses on traffic flow theory, driver behavior modeling for connected/automated vehicles (CAVs), cybersecurity, artificial intelligence-based predictive analytics, and transportation cyber-physical systems for CAVs/smart cities. He received the best paper award from America’s Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS) at the 2014 ITS World Congress. He also received the 2015 IEEE ITS Society George N. Saridis Best Transactions Paper Award for Outstanding Survey. Rahman received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering (Transportation systems), from Clemson University, in 2013 and 2018, respectively.  After his graduation in August 2018, he joined the Center for Connected Multimodal Mobility (C²M²), a U.S. Department of Transportation Tier 1 University Transportation Center as a postdoctoral research fellow. After that, Rahman served as Assistant Director of C²M² and a research associate for the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer and Network RESIliency and Security for Transportation (CAN-RESIST) planning grant.

C²M² would like to congratulate three of our Clemson students for awards that they won this Spring. Both Md. Zadid Khan and Fengjiao Zou were awarded the James Edwin Clark Fellowship by the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering on March 29th, 2021. This fellowship is awarded to the outstanding graduate students enrolled in the Civil Engineering graduate program with the intent of pursuing a career as a traffic/ transportation engineer. Zadid was also, awarded the “2021 Outstanding Graduate Researcher” from the Glenn Department at Clemson for his work this year. Zadid’s research focuses on developing secure and reliable vehicular communication using artificial intelligence, software-defined networking, and edge computing. We would also like to congratulate Sababa Islam on her selection as a Glenn Teaching Fellow award. This award recognizes her hard work and excellence in teaching.

All three of these students are pursuing doctoral degrees at Clemson University and work with our researchers on C²M² sponsored projects. In additional Fengjiao Zou is also the current IEEE ITSS Student Chapter President. We are very proud of our students’ achievements and cannot wait to see what these scholars accomplish next.