The MESSAGE Project Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across a Grid Environment

1
The MESSAGE ProjectMobile Environmental Sensing
System Across a Grid Environment
Professor John Polak Director, Centre for
Transport Studies Imperial College
London j.polak_at_imperial.ac.uk www.message-project.
org
2
Outline

• Background and motivation
• Overview
• Challenges and innovation
• Field trials
• Conclusion

3
MESSAGE - headlines

• 3 year project starting October 2006
• Funded jointly by EPSRC and DfT under EPSRCs
  e-Science demonstration programme
• 5 Universities, 19 industrial partners
• Combination and extension of e-Science, sensor,
  communication and positioning technologies
• New sensing infrastructure based on combination
  of ad-hoc mobile and fixed sensors

4
MESSAGE collaboration
5
MESSAGE - motivation

• Urban air quality is a major policy concern,
  especially the role of road transport
• Understanding vehicle emissions
• Understanding human exposure
• Managing network operations to optimise
  congestion and air quality outcomes
• Research and practice is hampered by lack of data
  of sufficient spatial and temporal granularity
• Opportunity to capitalise on low cost sensor,
  positioning and communications technologies

6
MESSAGE overview

• Heterogeneous fixed and mobile sensors on
  infrastructure, vehicles and people
• Sensors communicate via wireless networks
• Positioning via GPS wireless cellular ranging
• Integration of processing along the data path
• Multiple application studies in different local
  contexts

7
MESSAGE multi-disciplinarity

• MESSAGE involves integrating academic expertise
  from several disciplines
• 1Transport network modellers
• Air quality modellers
• Geomatricians
• Computer Scientists
• Electrical Engineers
• Sensor Developers (Physicists and Chemists)
• Together with industry experience and tangible
  real-world applications

8
MESSAGE research challenges

• Field units
• Sensors
• Positioning
• Communications
• e-Science
• Scalability
• Distributed data mining
• Online estimation of pollutant hotspots
• Transport and environment modelling
• Traffic management and control
• Traveller information

9
MESSAGE field units
We are deliberately deploying a variety of
different sensor, positioning and communications
technologies, to ensure that the MESSAGE system
is generic
10
MESSAGE e-Science challenge

• We will build on the foundation of past e-science
  projects (DiscoveryNet and OGSA-DAI)
• Grid-enabled sensor service (a sensor is a
  service generating data)
• Semantically-described sensors (Sensor-ML)
• Sensor data collection and warehousing
• Querying distributed data storage
• Workflow based analysis of sensor data
• New challenge Scalable distributed analytics for
  pervasive mobile heterogeneous sensors

11
MESSAGE e-Science innovation

• Development of sensor-level protocols to support
  in-network analytics
• Development of real-time in-network analytics
• Associated extensions of Discovery Net to support
  in-network analytics

12
MESSAGE modelling innovation

• Existing transport and air quality models have a
  simple centralised architecture
• Need to evolve new forms of interpretive and
  predictive transport models
• accommodate multiple data sources and scales and
  levels of behavioural richness
• support distributed architectures
• Must stimulate academic and commercial innovation
  in tool and service development and deployment

13
MESSAGE architecture
14
MESSAGE case studies
15
MESSAGE London case study

• Imperial and Newcastle sensor units
• Buses, fleet vehicles and street furniture
• Mobile deployment of heterogeneous systems
• Integration with existing TfL data streams
• Feedback to traffic management

16
MESSAGE London test site

• Camden High St.
• Multiple bus types
• Candidate routes
• 29
• 31
• 88
• 168
• 274

17
Opportunities

• MESSAGE is concerned with integrating a number of
  technologies and approaches from within the
  e-Science community and beyond
• Although our context is urban air quality, the
  concept of pervasive mobile sensing has much
  wider application
• Other application areas are being actively
  developed

18

• Thank you
• www.message-project.org

19
Scalable eScience hardware