A £3.5million, 3 year research project

Jointly funded by the Department for Transport and EPSRC

Beginning in October 2006

Research posts and Ph.D. studentships available now.

We are looking for researchers with skills in one or more of e-Science, sensor and positioning technologies, data fusion, traveller behaviour, traffic modelling and emissions dispersion modelling.

The impact of road traffic on local air quality and individuals exposure to air pollution are major public policy concerns and have stimulated a substantial body of research aimed at improving underlying vehicle technologies and traffic management schemes to minimise the impact of air pollution.

This research however requires increasingly detailed knowledge of how traffic-generated pollution behaves in the urban environment (with factors such as street and building design, vehicle braking and accelerating patterns, individual traveller decisions and local weather conditions all potentially affecting the concentration of pollutants) and can therefore only be undertaken based on the availability of high quality, high-granularity spatial-temporal environmental sensor data.

A particularly exciting direction for future development of such environmental sensor data sources is the use of vehicles and people themselves as platforms for outward facing environmental sensor systems, enabling them to operate as mobile environmental probes, providing radically improved capability for the detection and monitoring of environmental pollutants and hazardous materials.

However, these developments present new and formidable research challenges arising from the need to transmit, integrate, model and interpret vast quantities of highly diverse spatially and temporally varying sensor data.

This project aims to address these challenges by novel combination and extension of state-of-the-art e-Science, sensor and positioning technologies, data fusion, traveller behaviour, traffic modelling and emissions dispersion modelling techniques, based on combinations of pervasive roadside and vehicle/person-mounted sensors.

This work will be at the leading edge of e-Science, stretching the capabilities of the grid in a number of important respects and also facilitating a step change in the capability of underlying measurement and modelling capabilities in transport and environmental science.

The overall aims of this project are….

To harness the potential of diverse, low cost and ubiquitous environmental sensors to provide data to address key scientific challenges in the field of transport and environmental monitoring and modelling and analysis.

To develop a flexible and reusable e-Science infrastructure to support a wide range of scientific, policy-related and commercial uses and applications for the resultant data and to demonstrate the operation and utility of this infrastructure in diverse case study applications.

These aims lead to a number of specific objectives:

To develop the capability for suitably equipped vehicles and individuals to act as mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards.

To extend existing e-Science, sensor, communication and modelling technologies to enable the integrating of data from heterogeneous fixed and mobile environmental sensors grids in real time to provide dynamic estimates of pollutant and hazard concentrations.

To demonstrate how these data can be usefully correlated with a wide range of other complementary dynamic data on, for example, weather conditions, transport network performance, vehicle mix and performance, driver behaviour, travel demand, pollutant exposure and health outcomes.

To implement relevant e-Science tool sets and (fixed and mobile) sensor and communication system in a number of selected real-world case study applications, involving close collaboration with business and the public sector, and to thereby demonstrate their value to the research and policy community.

The project is organised in a series of parallel research and development activities….

e-Science sensor data grids

Sensor technologies

Communications and positioning

….interweaved with a series of diverse demonstration activities

Environmental signal control strategies (Imperial)

Traveller behavioural responses (Southampton)

Exposure of individuals to environmental pollutants (Cambridge)

Calibration of emissions dispersion models (Leeds/Newcastle)

The MESSAGE consortium (led by Imperial College) brings together internationally leading (6* and 5*) specialist research groups in the fields of e-Science, transport, sensors, communications and positioning technologies across five universities, together with a number of major industrial partners and transport authorities.

Project partner Lead researchers Current project research staff/student opportunities

Imperial College London

Centre for Transport Studies,

Department of Computing,

Department of Electrical Engineering,

Department of Physics. Prof John Polak,

Dr Washington Ochieng,

Dr Robert Noland,

Prof John Darlington,

Prof Yike Guo,

Prof Kin Leung,

Dr John Hassard

University of Cambridge

Computing Laboratory,

Cambridge e-Science Centre,

Department of Chemistry. Prof Peter Landshoff,

Prof Jean Bacon,

Prof Rod Jones

University of Leeds

Institute for Transport Studies. Prof Margaret Bell,

Dr Haibo Chen

University of Newcastle

School of Civil Engineering and Geoscience,

School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering

North East Regional e-Science Centre. Prof Phil Blythe,

Prof Bayan Sharif

University of Southampton

Transport Research Group. Prof Mike McDonald,

Dr Ben Waterson

RELATED PROJECTS

This project is associated with and builds on other research undertaken by the consortium including….

National Transport Data Framework

Discovery Net

Vehicle Performance and Emissions Monitoring System (VPEMS)