Road to the Future: Advantages and Challenges of Smart Transportation
The Internet of things or IoT is spreading rapidly. You can already see this technology not only in your smart home system but also in transportation, which you use every day (or not so often now because of quarantine). How does it work and how useful it can be?
Internet of things is a system of devices (computing, digital, mechanical) that have unique identifiers (UID) and can transmit data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. In transportation, IoT can integrate communications, control and information processing, giving some good advantages to transportation companies. Let us try to find out how it can be applied.
Advantages and use cases
The first use case of IoT solutions in transportation is maintaining vehicle health. Manufacturers and mechanics can get information about a car’s health from onboard diagnostic ports (OBD). Consumers can track this information too, with the help of an adapter plugged into OBD and a mobile app. However, it is not the limit. IoT solutions allow companies to manage the performance of their fleet and recognize problems before they occur. This information can save them an awful lot of money which otherwise would have been spent on repairing and replacing a broken car. Also, IoT helps companies to optimize fuel consumption and idle time.
The second use case is vehicle tracking in real-time. Thanks to IoT you can know how far your bus or tram is from your stop and don’t need to waste your time if it is stuck in a traffic jam. All that you need is an app on your smartphone, which gets tracked data from some central system. Truck companies use this tracking as well. It allows them to know the location of a particular vehicle and to be sure that its driver does not deviate from the prescribed path.
Curbing traffic is the third use case of IoT in transportation. Such services as Waze allow drivers and passengers to share information about their route with other drivers. Using this information, you can map a smarter route and avoid traffic jams. Car manufacturers also use IoT trying to prevent congestion. For instance, Ford’s technology Traffic Jam Assist allows the car to match the speed of the car ahead of it. This mode can smooth out traffic flows and decrease congestion. Other automakers followed the example demonstrating their willingness to adopt IoT-enabled technologies.
Challenges and cyber threats
As IoT spreads, its challenges become more noticeable. The most difficult of them is data protection. IoT devices exchange a lot of important information, so some security holes can cause many problems.
For instance, in 2015 and 2016, automotive cybersecurity researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek hijacked a Jeep over the Internet. In the first case, they managed to stop a car and disable its brakes remotely when it was going below five miles per hour. The following year they succeeded, hijacking steering and brake systems at a faster speed.
Their Сhinese colleagues — Samuel LV, Sen Nie, Ling Liu, and Wen Lu — did a similar thing with Tesla Model X. They turned on the brakes remotely and got the doors and trunk to open and close while blinking the lights in time to music streamed from the car’s radio. Researchers managed to control the car via both Wi-Fi and a cellular connection. Fortunately, in both cases, automakers have known about the vulnerability of their products immediately. Nevertheless, it suggests that IoT software developers should constantly care about data protection.
Another challenge of IoT in transportation is network infrastructure. The proliferation of IoT devices will increase the workload for Information Technology (IT) teams because organizations will have to deal with larger data capacity and manage more IP addresses. So transportation companies should have an infrastructure, which can easily scale as organization and program needs to evolve. Also, large IoT systems need automated onboarding to manage numerous sensors and devices.
Therefore, IoT solutions have a promising future in transportation as well as in other industries. This technology offers great opportunities for businesses and individuals but also requires a great deal of responsibility.
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