NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Towards Privacy-Preserving Autonomous Vehicle Sharing Services

Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Over the past several years, the automobile and technology industries have made significant leaps in bringing computerization and automation to car driving. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have the potential to fundamentally improve transportation systems by dramatically reducing crashes, assisting traffic flows, reducing travel time and energy consumption, providing critical mobility to the elderly and disabled, and making vehicle sharing convenient, popular, and necessary. This project studies the architecture and privacy issues related to autonomous vehicle sharing (AVS) that can revolutionize our transportation experience by providing novel time-sharing and ride-sharing services. The time-sharing services allow AVs to be shared by different users at non-overlapping time periods, while the ride-sharing services allow AVs to be shared by users taking similar trips during the same time period. With autonomous driving techniques, the quality of both services can be significantly enhanced to benefit commuters. However, the time- and ride- sharing systems need to communicate with users to organize shared vehicles, which is not risk free. Massive information on users' activities can be exposed in case of privacy breach. Existing privacy-preserving techniques cannot be applied effectively and efficiently in AVS due to problems and requirements unique to AVS, e.g., location- and time- sensitive trips and multi-user coordination. This project addresses the unique privacy problems raised by AVS and proposes effective and efficient privacy-preserving techniques, which can promote AVS among users. The research in this project will have major technological impacts on privacy-preserving AV sharing services. The project will study the privacy-preserving task matching problem for the time-sharing service and the privacy-preserving trip searching problem for the ride-sharing service, while computation and communication overhead, trip delays due to unexpected conditions, costs of transitional trips, users' social preferences, and different privacy protection levels will be considered. The proposed research activities will trigger further research in other applications such as social networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, smart grid, and electric vehicles communications, where privacy is an important factor. The results from this research will be disseminated through conference and journal publications, online documents, and software release. Seminars to high school and community colleges students will be offered in the Boston and Cookeville areas, and presentations regarding the proposed research will be delivered to demonstrate how science and engineering can enhance quality of life in order to stimulate the students' interest in technology. Students in under-represented groups will be encouraged to participate in the proposed research activities.