Securing safe driving for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) continues to be a widespread concern, despite various sophisticated functions delivered by artificial intelligence for in-vehicle devices. Diverse malicious network attacks are ubiquitous, along with the worldwide implementation of the Internet of Vehicles, which exposes a range of reliability and privacy threats for managing data in CAV networks. Combined with the fact that the capability of existing CAVs in handling intensive computation tasks is limited, this implies a need for designing an efficient assessment system to guarantee autonomous driving safety without compromising data security. In this article we propose a novel framework, namely Blockchain-enabled intElligent Safe-driving assessmenT (BEST), which offers a smart and reliable approach for conducting safe driving supervision while protecting vehicular information. Specifically, a promising solution that exploits a long short-term memory model is introduced to assess the safety level of the moving CAVs. Then we investigate how a distributed blockchain obtains adequate trustworthiness and robustness for CAV data by adopting a byzantine fault tolerance-based delegated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Simulation results demonstrate that our presented BEST gains better data credibility with a higher prediction accuracy for vehicular safety assessment when compared with existing schemes. Finally, we discuss several open challenges that need to be addressed in future CAV networks.
Autonomous driving is an active research topic in both academia and industry. However, most of the existing solutions focus on improving the accuracy by training learnable models with centralized large-scale data. Therefore, these methods do not take into account the user's privacy. In this paper, we present a new approach to learn autonomous driving policy while respecting privacy concerns. We propose a peer-to-peer Deep Federated Learning (DFL) approach to train deep architectures in a fully decentralized manner and remove the need for central orchestration. We design a new Federated Autonomous Driving network (FADNet) that can improve the model stability, ensure convergence, and handle imbalanced data distribution problems while is being trained with federated learning methods. Intensively experimental results on three datasets show that our approach with FADNet and DFL achieves superior accuracy compared with other recent methods. Furthermore, our approach can maintain privacy by not collecting user data to a central server.
Fog computing is introduced by shifting cloud resources towards the users' proximity to mitigate the limitations possessed by cloud computing. Fog environment made its limited resource available to a large number of users to deploy their serverless applications, composed of several serverless functions. One of the primary intentions behind introducing the fog environment is to fulfil the demand of latency and location-sensitive serverless applications through its limited resources. The recent research mainly focuses on assigning maximum resources to such applications from the fog node and not taking full advantage of the cloud environment. This introduces a negative impact in providing the resources to a maximum number of connected users. To address this issue, in this paper, we investigated the optimum percentage of a user's request that should be fulfilled by fog and cloud. As a result, we proposed DeF-DReL, a Systematic Deployment of Serverless Functions in Fog and Cloud environments using Deep Reinforcement Learning, using several real-life parameters, such as distance and latency of the users from nearby fog node, user's priority, the priority of the serverless applications and their resource demand, etc. The performance of the DeF-DReL algorithm is further compared with recent related algorithms. From the simulation and comparison results, its superiority over other algorithms and its applicability to the real-life scenario can be clearly observed.
There has been growing interest in the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles on roads over the last few years, encouraged by the empirical successes of powerful artificial intelligence techniques (AI), especially in the applications of deep learning and reinforcement learning. However, as demonstrated by recent traffic accidents, autonomous driving technology is not mature for safe deployment. As AI is the main technology behind the intelligent navigation systems of self-driving vehicles, both the stakeholders and transportation jurisdictions require their AI-driven software architecture to be safe, explainable, and regulatory compliant. We propose a framework that integrates autonomous control, explainable AI, and regulatory compliance to address this issue and validate the framework with a critical analysis in a case study. Moreover, we describe relevant XAI approaches that can help achieve the goals of the framework.
Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) improve the throughput of intersections by crossing in a lane-free order as compared to the signalised crossing of human drivers. However, it is challenging to quantify such an improvement because the available frameworks to analyse the capacity (i.e., the maximum throughput) of the conventional intersections does not apply to the lane-free ones. This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to numerically simulate and compare the capacity of lane-free and conventional intersections. The results show that the maximum number of vehicles passing through a lane-free intersection is up to seven times more than a signalised intersection managed by the state-of-the-art max-pressure and Webster algorithms. A sensitivity analysis shows that, in contrast to the signalised intersections, the capacity of the lane-free intersections improves by an increase in initial speed, the maximum permissible speed and acceleration of vehicles.
Autonomous driving has achieved a significant milestone in research and development over the last decade. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of self-operating vehicles on roads promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rise of computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, autonomous vehicles can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate more reliably without human interventions. However, intelligent decision-making in autonomous cars is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, the AI systems of autonomous vehicles also need to explain how these decisions are constructed in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds a comprehensive light on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the present gaps with respect to explanations in the state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle industry. We then show the taxonomy of explanations and explanation receivers in this field. Thirdly, we propose a framework for an architecture of end-to-end autonomous driving systems and justify the role of XAI in both debugging and regulating such systems. Finally, as future research directions, we provide a field guide on XAI approaches for autonomous driving that can improve operational safety and transparency towards achieving public approval by regulators, manufacturers, and all engaged stakeholders.
Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Data Fusion techniques have gained popularity in public and government domains. This usually requires capturing and consolidating data from multiple sources. As datasets do not necessarily originate from identical sensors, fused data typically results in a complex data problem. Because military is investigating how heterogeneous IoT devices can aid processes and tasks, we investigate a multi-sensor approach. Moreover, we propose a signal to image encoding approach to transform information (signal) to integrate (fuse) data from IoT wearable devices to an image which is invertible and easier to visualize supporting decision making. Furthermore, we investigate the challenge of enabling an intelligent identification and detection operation and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Deep Learning and Anomaly Detection models that can support future application that utilizes hand gesture data from wearable devices.
Recent years have witnessed significant advances in technologies and services in modern network applications, including smart grid management, wireless communication, cybersecurity as well as multi-agent autonomous systems. Considering the heterogeneous nature of networked entities, emerging network applications call for game-theoretic models and learning-based approaches in order to create distributed network intelligence that responds to uncertainties and disruptions in a dynamic or an adversarial environment. This paper articulates the confluence of networks, games and learning, which establishes a theoretical underpinning for understanding multi-agent decision-making over networks. We provide an selective overview of game-theoretic learning algorithms within the framework of stochastic approximation theory, and associated applications in some representative contexts of modern network systems, such as the next generation wireless communication networks, the smart grid and distributed machine learning. In addition to existing research works on game-theoretic learning over networks, we highlight several new angles and research endeavors on learning in games that are related to recent developments in artificial intelligence. Some of the new angles extrapolate from our own research interests. The overall objective of the paper is to provide the reader a clear picture of the strengths and challenges of adopting game-theoretic learning methods within the context of network systems, and further to identify fruitful future research directions on both theoretical and applied studies.
Edge intelligence refers to a set of connected systems and devices for data collection, caching, processing, and analysis in locations close to where data is captured based on artificial intelligence. The aim of edge intelligence is to enhance the quality and speed of data processing and protect the privacy and security of the data. Although recently emerged, spanning the period from 2011 to now, this field of research has shown explosive growth over the past five years. In this paper, we present a thorough and comprehensive survey on the literature surrounding edge intelligence. We first identify four fundamental components of edge intelligence, namely edge caching, edge training, edge inference, and edge offloading, based on theoretical and practical results pertaining to proposed and deployed systems. We then aim for a systematic classification of the state of the solutions by examining research results and observations for each of the four components and present a taxonomy that includes practical problems, adopted techniques, and application goals. For each category, we elaborate, compare and analyse the literature from the perspectives of adopted techniques, objectives, performance, advantages and drawbacks, etc. This survey article provides a comprehensive introduction to edge intelligence and its application areas. In addition, we summarise the development of the emerging research field and the current state-of-the-art and discuss the important open issues and possible theoretical and technical solutions.
Reinforcement learning is one of the core components in designing an artificial intelligent system emphasizing real-time response. Reinforcement learning influences the system to take actions within an arbitrary environment either having previous knowledge about the environment model or not. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on Reinforcement Learning focusing on various dimensions including challenges, the recent development of different state-of-the-art techniques, and future directions. The fundamental objective of this paper is to provide a framework for the presentation of available methods of reinforcement learning that is informative enough and simple to follow for the new researchers and academics in this domain considering the latest concerns. First, we illustrated the core techniques of reinforcement learning in an easily understandable and comparable way. Finally, we analyzed and depicted the recent developments in reinforcement learning approaches. My analysis pointed out that most of the models focused on tuning policy values rather than tuning other things in a particular state of reasoning.
The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is undergoing a transformation to the decentralized topology from its centralized form. On the other hand, blockchain has some excellent features which make it a promising application for smart grid paradigm. In this paper, we have an aim to provide a comprehensive survey on application of blockchain in smart grid. As such, we identify the significant security challenges of smart grid scenarios that can be addressed by blockchain. Then, we present a number of blockchain-based recent research works presented in different literatures addressing security issues in the area of smart grid. We also summarize several related practical projects, trials, and products that have been emerged recently. Finally, we discuss essential research challenges and future directions of applying blockchain to smart grid security issues.