Craig Jordan

Cyber risk to transportation, industrial control systems, and traffic signal controllers

This paper is a result of a cyber risk assessment with a goal of increasing awareness to operators of infrastructure, managers, and political leadership. Senior executives and political leaders have a very limited understanding of industrial control systems (ICS) and of the crucial role ICS provide to public/private infrastructure, industry, and military systems. Therefore, to accomplish our purpose, we conducted a cyber-risk study focusing on a bridge tunnel ICS and a cyber event that tampered with traffic light operation—two scenarios of concern for senior leaders. In this paper, we present the analytic approach, discuss our model and simulation, and analyze the results using a notational data and generic system description. As a result of this study, we were able to discuss the importance of controls systems with senior leaders. We were able to demystify what we mean by “cyber”, showing that it is possible through simulation to inject the effects of cyber scenarios of concern into simulations to assess impact. Most importantly, during a system audit, ICS operators with decades of engineering experience began to realize that the ICS is vulnerable to willful intrusion.

Generic Incident Model for Investigating Traffic Incident Impacts on Evacuation Times in Large-Scale Emergencies

Traffic incidents cause a ripple effect of reduced travel speeds, lane changes, and the pursuit of alternative routes that results in gridlock on the immediately affected and surrounding roadways. The disruptions caused by the secondary effects significantly degrade travel time reliability, which is of great concern to the emergency planners who manage evacuations. Outcomes forecast by a generic incident model embedded in a microscopic evacuation simulation, the Real-Time Evacuation Planning Model (RtePM), were examined to quantify the change in time required for an emergency evacuation that results from traffic incidents. The incident model considered vehicle miles traveled on each individual segment of the studied road network model. The two scenarios considered for this investigation were evacuations of (a) Washington, D.C., after a simulated terrorist attack and (b) Virginia Beach, Virginia, in response to a simulated hurricane. These results could help the emergency planning community understand and investigate the impact of traffic incidents during an evacuation.

Path Clearance for Emergency Vehicles Through the Use of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

The study described in this paper evaluated and tested a new strategy to enable emergency response vehicles (EVs) to navigate through congestion at signalized intersections more efficiently. The proposed strategy involves the use of vehicle-to-vehicle communication to send messages to alert vehicles to the approach of the EV and to provide specific instructions on maneuvering to allow the EV to proceed through congested signalized intersections as quickly as possible. This movement is achieved by creation of a split in the vehicle queue in one lane at a critical location to allow the EV to proceed at its desired speed but minimize the disruption to the rest of the traffic. The proposed method uses kinematic wave theory (i.e., shock wave theory) to determine the critical point in the vehicle queue. The proposed method is simulated in a microscopic traffic simulator for evaluation. The results show that this strategy can significantly shorten the travel time for EVs through congested signalized intersections.

Making way for emergency vehicles at oversaturated signals under vehicle-to-vehicle communications

This paper presents a new strategy to enable emergency vehicles to navigate through congestion at signalized intersections more efficiently. The proposed strategy involves communicating control messages to vehicles to change their behavior so that the emergency response vehicle (EV) can go through the congested intersection as quickly as possible. To achieve that, the vehicular queue on one of the traffic lanes is split at a critical point so that the EV can proceed at its maximum speed while the disruption to the rest of the traffic is minimized. The proposed method makes use of the kinematic wave theory (i.e., shockwave theory) to determine this critical point. The proposed method is simulated in a microscopic traffic simulator for validation and evaluation. The results show that this strategy can shorten the trip time for EVs significantly.

Generic incident model for use in large-scale evacuation simulations

Incidents and accidents can have a negative impact on the travel-time of road travelers; this impact is especially important during an evacuation. Many factors influence the rate and impact of incidents on a road facility (e.g., rainy conditions, driver behavior, pot-holes in the road); this has caused many transportation models to steer clear of generic incidents models. However, evacuation models do not require the high-fidelity that many other transportation models require. This paper introduces a new generic incident/accidents model that determines incident probabilities based on the modeled Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) and determines the effects of the incident in terms of lane closes and road capacity reductions. It was implemented in the Real-time Evacuation Planning Model (RtePM) which is a tool used to help emergency planners determine the evacuation time required to clear user-defined regions in the USA.