Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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    Privacy- and context-aware release of trajectory data
    Naghizade, E ; Kulik, L ; Tanin, E ; Bailey, J (ACM, 2020-03)
    The availability of large-scale spatio-temporal datasets along with the advancements in analytical models and tools have created a unique opportunity to create valuable insights into managing key areas of society from transportation and urban planning to epidemiology and natural disasters management. This has encouraged the practice of releasing/publishing trajectory datasets among data owners. However, an ill-informed publication of such rich datasets may have serious privacy implications for individuals. Balancing privacy and utility, as a major goal in the data exchange process, is challenging due to the richness of spatio-temporal datasets. In this article, we focus on an individual's stops as the most sensitive part of the trajectory and aim to preserve them through spatio-temporal perturbation. We model a trajectory as a sequence of stops and moves and propose an efficient algorithm that either substitutes sensitive stop points of a trajectory with moves from the same trajectory or introduces a minimal detour if no safe Point of Interest (POI) can be found on the same route. This hinders the amount of unnecessary distortion, since the footprint of the original trajectory is preserved as much as possible. Our experiments shows that our method balances user privacy and data utility: It protects privacy through preventing an adversary from making inferences about sensitive stops while maintaining a high level of similarity to the original dataset.
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    The Impact of Flexible Platoon Formation Operations
    Maiti, S ; Winter, S ; Kulik, L ; Sarkar, S (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2020-06)
    Vehicle platooning, a coordinated vehicle movement strategy, has been proposed to address a range of current transport challenges such as traffic congestion, road safety, energy consumption and pollution. While the current literature mainly focuses on platoon control strategies and intra-platoon communication, comparatively little work is done on how to form these platoons. Literature assumes platoon formation by tail merge which is sufficient only for planned formation on a ramp or at a ramp-highway junction. In this article we study the impact of three different merge operations, namely front, middle, and tail merge. The efficiency of these operations is analyzed under different scenarios, varying the vehicles speed adjustment strategy, traffic density, and the density of mergeable vehicles. The impact of the merge operations is represented in terms of merge time, merge distance, average traffic speed, and merge success rate. Our experiments show that in an ideal no traffic scenario, the middle merge is costlier in terms of merge time for the same merge distance whereas in the presence of traffic middle merge helps is quick platoon formation on an average in a higher traffic density in particular. This insight should provide a more flexible toolkit for planning a platoon formation.
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    Imprecise Navigation
    Duckham, M ; Kulik, L ; Worboys, MF (SpringerLink, 2003)
    Conventional models of navigation commonly assume a navigation agent's location can be precisely determined. This paper examines the more general case, where an agent's actual location cannot be precisely determined. This paper develops a formal model of navigation under imprecision using a graph. Two key strategies for dealing with imprecision are identified and defined: contingency and refinement. A contingency strategy aims to find an instruction sequence that maximizes an agent's chances of reaching its destination. A refinement strategy aims to use knowledge gained as an agent moves through the network to disambiguate location. Examples of both strategies are empirically tested using a simulation with computerized navigation agents moving through a road network at different levels of locational imprecision. The results of the simulation indicate that both the strategies, contingency and refinement, applied individually can produce significant improvements in navigation performance under imprecision, at least at relatively fine granularities. Using both strategies in concert produced significant improvements in performance across all granularities.
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    Ontology-driven map generalization
    Kulik, L ; Duckham, M ; Egenhofer, MJ (Elsevier, 2005)
    Different users of geospatial information have different requirements of that information. Matching information to users' requirements demands an understanding of the ontological aspects of geospatial data. In this paper, we present an ontology-driven map generalization algorithm, called DMin, that can be tailored to particular users and users' tasks. The level of detail in a generated map is automatically adapted by DMin according to the semantics of the features represented. The DMin algorithm is based on a weighting function that has two components: (1) a geometric component that differs from previous approaches to map generalization in that no fixed threshold values are needed to parameterize the generalization process and (2) a semantic component that considers the relevance of map features to the user. The flexibility of DMin is demonstrated using the example of a transportation network.
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    Efficient generation of simple polygons for characterizing the shape of a set of points in the plane
    Duckham, M ; Kulik, L ; Worboys, M ; Galton, A (ELSEVIER SCI LTD, 2008-10)