A smart transport application of cyber-physical systems: Road surface monitoring with mobile devices

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) refer to systems that integrate physical processes with computation. Exhaustive characterization of such systems offers us insight in the way we interact with our surroundings. CPS can be modeled and simulated for performance (often real-time) using a model-based signature analysis, where models of physical processes, network and computing resources are integrated. Mobile CPS which have inherent mobility in the physical systems are increasingly popular e.g. smartphones, with wide range of applications given the computational power and memory resources along with host of assorted sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS etc. We present here one such application of CPS where we simulate the acceleration profiles for different type of cars and different road profiles. We then use the synthetic data generated to extract features for detection of anomalies in the road. Comparing the results with accelerometer data recorded on a mobile phone while actually driving on a road shows that the model can be used to test the features on different vehicles and road types which is always not feasible in real world due to limited resources.