Research internship (M2/PFE): Towards a distributed, fault-tolerant communication infrastructure for emerging intelligent transport systems

The ENAC, National School of Civil Aviation, is located in Toulouse, France, the centre of the European aerospace industry (e.g., AirBus, Thales, and CNES). It offers an ideal working environment, where researchers can focus on developing new ideas, collaborations and projects.
Our research topics at ENAC Lab include emerging CPS design (e.g., drones and nanosatellites), aviation safety and security, sustainable transportation development, and aeronautical computer-human interactions. For further information, please consult our site.
The proposed research will be developed in the ENAC research laboratory, ENAC Lab, in close cooperation with Onera, and LabSoft, our industrial partner in Toulouse.

Context

Multimodal intelligent transportation system is becoming increasingly important to ensure the movement of users in urban areas. In 2023, a second local government-driven study was launched[1] to identify and implement mobility solutions combining different modes of transportation (bicycle, public transport, train, road, carpooling) in the metropolitan area of Toulouse, southern France.
However, in order to offer user-centred, reliable services that guarantee efficient urban mobility, it is necessary to develop new information systems to enable the emerging multimodal intelligent transport properly.
Indeed, a multimodal intelligent transport system for densely populated urban areas is very complex and depends on several information subsystems, such as the communication infrastructure through computer networks. To ensure transport services such as Mobility as a Service[2], new fault-tolerant and highly available communication infrastructures must be developed.
We are interested in studying these new communication infrastructures via numerical simulations. Using a simulation tool based on computational fluid dynamics and designed during a previous research cooperation between Onera (onear.fr) and Enac (enac.fr), we wish to contribute to the study of a distributed, hybrid (wired and wireless) communication infrastructure subject to faults (breakdowns, temporary unavailability) to meet the functional requirements of new multimodal intelligent transport systems. In this context, our industrial partner, LabSoft (www.labsoft.fr/), will provide its expertise in the field of frugal computer system design in order to improve and adapt the simulator engine and its integration with more complex information systems, such as digital twins or more generic design assistance tools, particularly based on AI technologies.

Proposed research and tasks

As part of a new cooperation between LabSoft and the research laboratories of Onera and Enac, this research internship aims to conduct a preliminary study on the performance of fault-tolerant, efficient communication networks for multimodal intelligent transport systems. Through the numerical simulation of highly dynamic communication networks, we wish to estimate in a very efficient (very fast computations) and enough accuracy the availability of the communication infrastructure and the data transfers' latency between multiple transport modalities and users. We are particularly interested in studying how to improve the communication infrastructure in order to allow the integration of the transport modalities of the future, in particular urban air mobility, whose proper functioning strongly depends on a reliable and efficient wireless communication networks.
To pursue the aforementioned research goals, the recruited intern will be tasked with:

• Surveying the state-of-the-art, related work, in particular numerical simulation, digital twins of intelligent transport systems, and fault-tolerant communication networks .
• Setting up simulation scenarios for a multimodal transport system based on the metropolitan area of Toulouse.
• Estimating the performance of mobile, continuously dynamic communication infrastructures (especially considering energy consumption management) which integrate existing wired networks with wireless communication networks, in particular in ad hoc mode.
• Investigating how to parallelize simulation jobs.
• Contributing towards improving the functionalities and documentation of our open-source simulation framework.

References

[1] Lancement de la deuxième phase des études multimodales (EMM) de l’aire métropolitaine Toulousaine. https://www.prefectures-regions.gouv.fr/occitanie/Actualites/Lancement-de-la-deuxieme-phase-des-etudes-multimodales-EMM-de-l-aire-metropolitaine-Toulousaine. Consulté le 12 octobre 2024.
[2] Georgakis, Panagiotis, Adel Almohammad, Efthimios Bothos, Babis Magoutas, Kostantina Arnaoutaki, and Gregoris Mentzas. "MultiModal route planning in mobility as a service." In IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence-Companion Volume, pp. 283-291. 2019.
[3] Ferreira, Bruno Chianca, Guillaume Dufour, and Guthemberg Silvestre. "A Lightweight Fluid Model for Mobile Ad hoc Distributed Systems." In 2022 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), pp. 1-7. IEEE, 2022.

In this research project, we intend to explore both a fundamental and an applied aspects. Candidates to this position should be doing the final year of a Master's degree in Computer Science/Informatics, Mathematics or a related field, or hold one by the starting date of the internship. They must be excited by research in distributed/parallel computing, wireless/ad hoc network, differential equations, and/or computational fluid dynamics, , and should have an excellent academic record in one of these areas. Familiarity with intelligent transport systems, queueing network model, and numerical simulations would be greatly appreciated.