John Collura - US grants

Abstract EEC-9527519-University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Dr. John Collura, Principal Investigator This award provides funding to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst for the support of a Combined Research-Curriculum Development (CRCD) Program entitled, Research and Curriculum Development in Intelligent Transportation Systems. The CRCD program emphasizes the need to incorporate exciting research advances in important technology areas into the upper level undergraduate and graduate engineering curricula and stimulates faculty researchers to place renewed, equal value on quality education and curriculum development. The primary objective of this proposal is to integrate past and ongoing research results in the area of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) into upper level undergraduate and graduate level engineering curricula at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This will better prepare students at the undergraduate degree level to help plan design, operate, and evaluate ITS systems while also teaching students at the graduate level to participate in system development and ITS research.

Pay-as-you-Go investigates security and privacy for Integrated Transportation Payment Systems (ITPS). The research addresses integrated payments for trains, subways, buses, ferries, and recharging of electric cars, as well as toll collection for roads, bridges, and tunnels. Multi-disciplinary aspects include novel cryptographic protocols and lightweight implementations of privacy-preserving payment systems. Challenges include providing security and privacy in a low-cost, usable, and reliable manner. Payments for transportation differ significantly from general-purpose e-commerce in terms of both security and engineering constraints. For instance, transportation operators wish to observe user behavior to improve the overall performance of the system---seemingly contradicting privacy. Moreover, payment devices must be extremely cheap, mass produced, and tolerant of a wide range of passenger demands.
The expected results and activities include: (1) design of novel cryptographic algorithms achieving privacy at low cost while retaining the benefits of meaningful data collection for ITPS; (2) implementation of hardware and software to perform modern cryptographic operations on low-cost devices; and (3) testing of human factors and performance under realistic conditions that must balance security and privacy with cost and usability. The broader impacts are extensive as transportation systems are a critical part of most aspects of society, from the economy, to defense, to public safety. Moreover, information gathered from ITPS applications can facilitate advanced traffic management, travel time estimation, emergency management, congestion pricing, carbon emissions control, and environmental justice assessments. A substantial outreach plan builds on the research team?s significant experience working with transportation professionals in industry and government.

Approximately 30,000 people lose their lives in traffic crashes on our nation's roadways with about 300 of these fatalities occurring in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, along with assistance from the federal government, invests nearly $1 billion per year in transportation infrastructure. A portion of these funds are paid to the consultants who design and oversee the construction of the projects. A small, but still significant, portion of the design process is dedicated to assessing pre-build traffic conditions and crash data analyses. This I-Corps team will be merging two pieces of technology they have developed to create an improve platform for managing transportation data. The proposed technology has the potential to improve the accuracy and reliability of such analyses and to reduce the amount of time and cost to conduct the overall design process.

This I-Corps team has developed two systems at the University of Massachusetts. The first is the Regional Traveler Information Center (RTIC), an Intelligent Transportation System that collects travel times and traffic volumes in Western Massachusetts using cameras and sensors strategically placed on major arterials and highways. The other is the UMass Safety Data Warehouse that compiles numerous data sets from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These datasets allow researchers to investigate crash causes, identify high risk demographics and locate crash hot spots. Crash, citation, hospital, death certificate, and roadway inventory data have been linked using advanced statistical methodologies to create a single dataset that allows analysts to consider the comprehensive crash experience; including driver behavior, crash characteristics, roadway environment, and crash outcomes such as injuries and costs. The new platform will provide real time traffic collection and crash data analyses to customers through a web tool. This would be accomplished by expanding the real time traffic collection reach of RTIC, uploading data from RTIC and the UMass Safety Data Warehouse onto a web tool, and building algorithms to automate crash data analyses.

Each year an average of twenty passengers on intercity buses are killed in crashes according to data in a report from National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA). Several hundred serious injuries also occur annually in these crashes. Intercity buses often travel at high speeds on highways late at night. Since these buses are top heavy, they are prone to potentially rolling over in the event of some collision. Studies by both NHTSA and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) show that passenger use of seat belts could prevent more than half of these fatalities as well as the severity of many injuries by adequate restraint of passengers in such collisions. In spite of the obvious need, recent census data shows that nearly 80% of the total fleet of almost 30,000 intercity buses in the US is still not equipped with seatbelts for passengers. NHTSA ruled two years ago to require seat belts on all new intercity buses produced on or after 2016. However, all older buses are exempt from that ruling due to the estimated cost of $40,000 per bus to add seatbelts to the existing buses. The conventional approach requires replacement of all bus seats with more expensive seats that have seatbelts built into them. The team at University of Massachusetts at Amherst has a patent pending invention that can retrofit seatbelts onto existing intercity buses without any need to replace the existing seats. Thus, the cost will be lessened, and retrofits with seatbelts may now be feasible.

The goal of this project is to validate a design version of this retrofit invention that is compatible with the needs of the customer identified during a customer discovery process. Achievement of this goal will involve a scope and approach of: 1) verification that the design will meet the worst case load magnitudes specified in the federal standard that represents head on collisions, 2) verification that dynamic simulation of a rollover crash proves adequate restraint of passengers to prevent ejection of passengers from the seating area, which NHTSA studies show is a leading cause of the fatalities, 3) design for cost minimization and manufacturability given the need to meet these stated requirements, 4) development of an executable business model canvas based on customer discovery by contact of at least 100 potential customers. These customers are primarily the intercity bus owners and operators. To maximize the market penetration, the customer base could extend throughout the supply chain to bus manufacturers, bus seat suppliers, and motorcoach rebuilding facilities. Customer discovery will also involve discussions with regulators and insurers, and surveys of passengers. Here, the team can network from established contacts at the American Bus Association (ABA), Sarah's Wish Foundation, NHTSA, NTSB, American Seating, Peter Pan Bus Lines, Stage Arrow Lines, Lancer Insurance, and vehicular kinetics specialists to identify ideal product configurations, potential business models, customers, value propositions, cost structures, and revenue streams. If successful, the potential contribution should include both acceleration of the pace of retrofitting the existing total fleet with seat belts and an increase in revenues throughout the supply chain by the introduction of an innovative and more affordable product.