Commercial Cloud Computing for Connected Vehicle Applications in Transportation Cyberphysical Systems: A Case Study

This article focuses on the feasibility of commercial cloud services for connected vehicle (CV) applications in a transportation cyberphysical systems (TCPS) environment. TCPS implies that CVs, in addition to being connected with each other, communicate with the transportation and computing infrastructure to fulfill application requirements. The motivation of this study is to accelerate commercial cloud-based CV application development by presenting the lessons learned from implementing a CV mobility application using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The feasibility of our cloud-based CV application is assessed at three levels: 1) the development of a cloud-based TCPS architecture, 2) the deployment of a cloud-based CV application using AWS, and 3) the evaluation of the cloud-based CV application. We implemented this CV mobility application using a serverless cloud architecture and found that such a cloud-based TCPS environment could meet the permissible delay limits of CV mobility applications. As the CV penetration levels on the surface transportation systems increase significantly over the next several years, this article illustrates how the commercial cloud could automatically scale the backend infrastructure to meet the rapidly increasing demand of real-world CV applications. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrated how commercial cloud services, along with a serverless cloud architecture, can advance the transportation digital infrastructure for supporting CV mobility applications in a TCPS environment. In addition, to enable other researchers to recreate the serverless cloud computing environment in AWS efficiently and to further contribute to commercial cloud utilization for developing CV applications, an AWS CloudFormation template related to our CV mobility application is published in an open source data management platform and is referred to in this article.