Smart Roads for Resilience in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Smart Roads for Resilience in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Surface intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are enabled by a wide range of connected sensors that inform on continuously changing situations and conditions on the roads. In this talk, I will first discuss different types of such sensors and how each contributes to the resilience or lack of resilience in ITS. Next, I will present the emerging optical fibre-based distributed acoustic sensor (DAS) systems and how these can be deployed to inform on ITS problems and complement existing sensors to improve the resilience and precision. The talk will examine how deep learning models are trained to analyse the DAS signature of vehicles to determine their location, speed, direction of movement, and also the type of vehicle and its occupancy. I will then present new findings in which DAS is used to analyse and monitor active travel: can the system enable tracking the location and speed of unmotorised traffic? Can the DAS signature inform if the person is walking, cycling, or riding an e-scooter? The talk will discuss the role of DAS in informing ITS in different road conditions and will explore how it can be used jointly with existing systems, such as GNSS, to track surface traffic when the satellite signal is obstructed.

Biography

Mona Jaber is a Senior Lecturer in IoT with the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include zero-touch networks, the intersection of ML and IoT in the context of sustainable development goals, and IoT-driven digital twins. In this regard, she has published in the areas of sustainable energy, smart mobility, and privacy-preserving e-health. As part of her industry research collaboration efforts, Mona has established a ground-breaking project that uses optical fibre systems for the detection and classification of active travel – a robust, scalable, and privacy-preserving method that informs smart city and safety in transportation planning. She is the director of the ‘Digital Twins for Sustainable Development Goals’ research lab at QMUL, where she attracted the first multidisciplinary core team to further the studies in this area. Mona was awarded the title of N2Women Rising Star in Computer Networking and Communications in 2022. She is a committee member of the IEEE-PST-Transportation group and an executive committee member of the IEEE UK and Ireland Women in Engineering affinity group.

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