SafeITS is a three-years research project (2015-2018) funded by the Qatar National Research Funds (QNRF) within the 7th cycle of the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) under the reference NPRP-7-1113-1-199. The project started on January 11th 2015 and will be running until January 11th 2018.

Motivation:

Due to the growing number of vehicles on the roads worldwide, road traffic accidents are currently recognized as a major societal and public safety problem. In this context, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), aka Connected Vehicles or Vehicular Networks (VANET), are currently considered as the key enabling technology to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. Through the use of wireless technologies, ITS systems will enable vehicles to autonomously communicate with other nearby vehicles or road infrastructures and thus, will have the potential to accelerate the deployment of a wide range of novel applications.

However, connecting wireless-enabled vehicles to external entities can make ITS applications vulnerable to security threats and network conditions, and thus impacting the safety of passengers, vehicles and ultimately drivers. Currently, there is still a lack of research addressing the development of ITS applications by considering safety, security and performance limitation threats to connected vehicles. This innovative project aims at establishing a long term and multidisciplinary R&D efforts between Qatari and US research centers and universities, with the objective of designing and developing a context aware framework to automate the generation of ITS applications which take into account these three aspects of safety, security and performance, as well as their dynamic adaptation to context changes. The proposed framework and security models will be integrated in a standard compliant ITS platform and a set of active road safety applications will be demonstrated in Doha city through small scale deployments.

For more information kindly visit: http://www.safeits.org/