CAREER: Securing Next-Generation Transportation Infrastructure: A Traffic Engineering Perspective

Principal Investigator: Yiheng Feng

This project establishes an integrated research and education plan to investigate the cybersecurity risk in next-generation transportation infrastructure, which is envisioned to be equipped with advanced sensors, communication systems, and edge computing capabilities to provide safer and more efficient traffic management strategies. Despite the benefits, these components are increasingly exposed to cyberattacks. To secure transportation infrastructure in cyberspace, this project conducts security analysis, recommends defense solutions, and evaluates system performance under various scenarios. The results inform public agencies for developing standards and policies, and prioritizing deployment of limited defense resources. 

Existing cybersecurity literature related to transportation infrastructure is limited, especially from the perspective of emergent behaviors and system level performance. This project explores the impact of cyber-attacks on transportation mobility and safety and coalesces knowledge from diverse fields such as optimization, machine learning, and statistical inference. The project aims to bridge research gaps between the cybersecurity and transportation disciplines by incorporating domain knowledge (e.g., traffic flow models) into security analysis.

Keywords: Cybersecurity, risk analysis, transportation infrastructure