Commercial Cloud Computing for Connected Vehicle Applications in Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems

This study focuses on the feasibility of commercial cloud services for connected vehicle (CV) applications in a Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS) environment. TCPS implies that CVs, in addition to being connected with each other, communicates with the transportation and computing infrastructure to fulfill application requirements. The motivation of this study is to accelerate commercial cloud-based CV application development by presenting the lessons learned by implementing a CV mobility application using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The feasibility of the cloud-based CV application is assessed at three levels: (i) the development of a cloud-based TCPS architecture, (ii) the deployment of a cloud-based CV application using AWS, and (iii) the evaluation of the cloud-based CV application. We implemented this CV mobility application using a serverless cloud architecture and found that such a cloud-based TCPS environment could meet the permissible delay limits of CV mobility applications. Commercial cloud services, as an integral part of TCPS, could reduce costs associated with establishing and maintaining vast computing infrastructure for supporting CV applications. As the CV penetration levels on the surface transportation systems increase significantly over the next several years, scaling the backend infrastructure to support such applications is a critical issue. This study shows how commercial cloud services could automatically scale the backend infrastructure to meet the rapidly changing demands of real-world CV applications. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrate how commercial cloud services along with serverless cloud architecture could advance the transportation digital infrastructure for supporting connected mobility applications in a TCPS environment.