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

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) 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. The research activities are closely integrated with education and outreach objectives, namely, 1) teaching undergraduate and graduate students about cybersecurity challenges in transportation systems; 2) expanding community college students’ knowledge domains and skill sets; 3) motivating K-12 and minority students to pursue engineering careers; and 4) collaborating with stakeholders in the transportation ecosystem. 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. The educational activities prepare undergraduate, graduate, community college, and K-12 students with skills for future engineering careers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.