Abstract:
It is becoming clear that location-aware intelligent transportation
systems will be one of the most promising upcoming applications
for next generation vehicles. The driving force behind this is the
introduction of pervasive high performance wireless networks
and location sensing technologies, such as GPS and roadside
detection systems. Intelligent transportation systems utilise intervehicle
cooperation without human assistance to provide
autonomous vehicle navigation from a given source to a predetermined
destination. The resultant sentient vehicles are
‘context-aware’ autonomous cars that form cooperative `flotillas’
of peers using mobile ad hoc network environments (MANETs).
In this paper we report on our experiences of building a
component framework based middleware architecture designed
to meet the challenges of such environments. We show how such
a framework can be used to engineer a proof of concept
cooperating sentient vehicle application, and highlight the
research challenges raised.
