Design and implementation of a cloud-based membership system for vehicular cooperation

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Arquitetura, Sistemas e Redes de Computadores) Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2019Personal vehicles such as cars are the transportation method chosen by most people, and thanks to this, our cities are built around them, with roads that go to any place you could ever need to go. Given the number of daily vehicles in our cities, the pollution levels and traffic congestion are higher than ever. Traffic makes everyone’s life harder, and just creates more pollution, which ends up making living in a city a lot harder than it should. Multiples solutions have been proposed to help fixing this problem, but none of them work as expected or in the long run. Nowadays, the first autonomous vehicles are starting to appear, and consequently, bringing the opportunity to once again, try to solve this problem. Current autonomous vehicles are simple and still not a viable option for daily transportation, but everything shows that is likely to change soon. They already help a lot with traffic and pollution, but sadly, not as much as we would like, which means it will not be enough in the long run and another solution is needed. The existing ones make their decisions solely based on their own sensors and nothing else. That is, it is the only view they have of the external world. Even considering this, these vehicles are still not perfect as there is still a subject that was not well explored, communication between vehicles. Vehicle coordination is the next big step and an essential missing factor that has to be considered for the next generation of autonomous vehicles. By being able to communicate with each other, vehicles will be able to cooperate and share useful information about their own decisions or the outside environment. A solution such as this would help considerably with our current traffic issue and we believe that this could be a long term solution with the advantage of reducing pollution (due to higher efficiency), higher passenger security, and making everyone’s lives easier