TECHNICAL OBJECTIVES:
Major technical objectives of the project are the creation of 3 demonstrators:
This is the main focus of the project demonstrating the use of Occupancy within Road User Charging (RUC). General system operation and validation of research derived techniques to detect fraudulent use shall be presented in the final Road Demonstration (Aug. 2009).
Adaptive Traffic Management based upon Occupancy; is based upon the idea of transporting people rather than vehicles. ATMO shall investigate, via simulation, how occupancy information may be used to reduce the average journey time for passengers.
intelligent-Emergency Call; whereby the number of passengers, where each passenger is seated in the vehicle, blood types and medical conditions could be communicated in the case of an emergency, extending the state-of-the-art within ECall.
FURTHER APPLICATIONS:
In addition to the 3 demonstrators developed within the project scope, Occutek provides a necessary enabler which may facilitate range of applications including:
▪ Entitlement to parking privileges based on occupancy.
▪ Recognition of registered disabled passengers to gain parking privileges.
▪ Carbon footprint accounting for vehicles, drivers, and passengers.
▪ Dynamic route planning for private ridesharing vehicles.
▪ Occupancy credit trading.
▪ Car pool management accounting.
Through the project team and members of the Strategic Advisory Panel (SAP), dissemination activities shall aim to target these and other potential applications.
We believe in collaboration and risk sharing in order to expand into different application sectors. The formalisation of strategic collaboration is where we see the future for the OccuTek project. For further information or discussion, please do not hesitate to contact us.
TECHNICAL APPROACH:
OccuTek enables vehicle occupancy to be first "declared" and then "verified". Declaration is enabled by the automatic recognition of Bluetooth enabled mobile phones carried by vehicle occupants as they approach, enter or leave the vehicle. Verification and prevention of fraudulent use is a much more challenging problem, and where much of the technical innovation within OccuTek lies. The strategy applied for verification builds on HW-RDM UK Patent Application 0713336.6; whereby the RUC on-board computer provides an anchor node and a communications gateway which interacts with driver/passenger mobile phones within Bluetooth communications range, establishing a self-forming mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). Movement patterns are categorised by received signal strength indications (RSSI) upon the mobile phones (identifying proximity to other passenger mobile phones and the anchor node); and are classified in terms of driver/passenger behavioural patterns. This allows for the identification of suspicious movements, when approaching and entering (or leaving) a vehicle. Suspicious movements suggest the possibility of fraudulent passenger declaration such as simply turning on several mobile phones and tossing them into the back seat. Once occupancy has been verified or conditionally verified, the occupancy manifest is declared to the on-board road charging system. Conditional verifications are transmitted to the Vehicle Operations Support Centre for further analysis. In summary, the aim of OccuTek is to reduce fraudulent occupancy declarations to negligible levels.
