usecase_table_web

♦ Use case 1: Healthcare application domain

Hospital beds have to be cleaned thoroughly before each new patient. In most hospitals this cleaning is performed manually – even where the hospital has a centralized bed-washing facility (CBWF). The reasons for this are: transporting the empty bed to and from the CBWF takes about as long as cleaning the bed manually on the ward; and until recently manual cleaning was considered at least as good as cleaning performed by the CBWF systems available. Cleaning beds thoroughly and transporting beds to a CBWF are both tasks demanding hard physical labor and non-ergonomic motions and positions.

Proposed solution for ordinary (non-automated) hospital beds:

Design a system of small robots, that is a pair of robots linked by a long and rigid bed that need to move in perfect synchrony. For this reason, the guaranteed wireless communication of SafeCOP is necessary. In this line, SafeCOP will develop a communication system that will allow our pair of robots to communicate with each other reliably and robustly without interfering with hospital equipment.

♦ Use case 2: Maritime Application Domain

The market for unmanned or autonomous marine vessels and systems has increased by 43% between 2008 and 2011, and the trend is predicted to continue as the demand for such systems increases. A boat-autopilot which is capable of automatically identifying surrounding obstacles, can provide reliable information when changing a predefined route (medium-term actions) or can engage in automatic emergency avoidance maneuvers (short-term actions), to help increase navigation safety; the IMO (International Maritime Organization) reported that more than 75% of ship accidents worldwide were due to human error. However, to enable this degree of automation, it will increasingly be necessary to ensure that the automation, command and control are safe. SafeCOP brings an important development in this area.

In this use case, (semi-) autonomous boats and other vehicles cooperate to perform bathymetry measurements for a portion of the Trondheims fjord, an inlet of the Norwegian Sea, in Norway. An autonomous UAV flies over the area providing added sensing capability and communications relay, increasing reliability, resilience and flexibility of the cooperative decision making system.

The methods and tools in the SafeCOP project will be applied on proof-of-concept autonomous boats and UAVs, which are capable of collecting sensor data, identifying obstacles, providing reliable information to change of a predefined route (medium-term actions) or to engage emergency avoidance maneuvers (short-term actions).

♦ Use Case 3: Automotive and Weather Application Domain

Vehicle control loss warning

Current trends in the automotive embedded software market are based on the use of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), commonly combined as V2x, and in the fact that mechanical systems will be replaced by ECUs, thus implementing true automotive by-wire systems.

The goal of this Use Case is to demonstrate how we can apply and extend safety assurance frameworks to automotive cooperative V2x-based systems such as auto-braking and platooning. This class of applications – safety critical applications – presents new challenges such as trust of information sources, misuse, security, authentication and above all safety.

In the project we will develop a Control Loss Warning system where, when a vehicle in a platoon loses some functionality affecting its platooning ability (maybe by mechanical failure or human action), all vehicles downstream and the road infrastructure concessionaire are notified in order to assess if further actions are required (e.g. full auto braking, emergency services assistance).

♦ Use Case 4: Automotive and Weather Application Domain

Vehicles and roadside units interaction

In this use case we study the scenarios related to vehicles and roadside infrastructure interactions and, in particular, the so-called “road weather service”. This service is delivered directly to the vehicles and aims to provide up-to-date information related to local road weather phenomena.

Road weather stations (RWS) are typically installed to the fixed locations beside the road and collect different measurement parameters related to weather and traffic to be then sent to a single data collection point, typically being the road administrator.

In this use case, we will extend the responsibilities of RWS to also deliver the up-to-date local road weather information based on its own observations directly to the passing vehicles, with wireless communication. As an exchange, vehicles can also deliver their own observational information back to RWS, to be consumed as local supporting data in wide-area meteorological services. During these interactions, the purity of delivered data and the communication session in general are validated throughout the operation by the sequential validation checks and continuous observation of a safety and security runtime manager.

♦ Use Case 5: Automotive and Weather Application Domain

V2I cooperation for traffic management

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, up to 80% of automobile accidents can be prevented with improved vehicle connectivity, using V2X communications. Additionally, it is projected that over 10% of the driving time is wasted in traffic jam, 12% of urban traffic is created by vehicles trying to park, and up to 17% of urban fuel is wasted at traffic lights when there is no cross-traffic. With vehicles connected together and connected with roadside infrastructure, all of these problems can be mitigated. However, V2X communications and driver assistance platform large scale diffusion can be negatively impacted by security concerns.

Use case 5 explores the integration, on the V2I network, of the traffic management application and a Video Content Analysis (VCA) platform (acquisition from video cameras and elaboration algorithms) for detecting possible dangerous road events/situations (such as vehicles slowing down, vehicles queue, motionless objects) and contributing to the active read safety, in order to alert drivers of such traffic anomalies. V2I networks supports communications for both management and safety information.