Guest Editorial: Cyber-Physical Threats and Solutions for Autonomous Transportation Systems

Abstract

The rapid evolution of technology has radically changed our everyday lives from multiple points of view. Systems and devices are nowadays more interconnected and capable of taking autonomous decisions without or with limited human intervention. Among the others, transportation systems are populated by smart and interconnected vehicles that need to communicate with each other and with critical infrastructures to orchestrate traffic and mobility. Such vehicles are equipped with multiple modules, which are sensing or communication devices that help the vehicle in assessing its well-being besides providing the basic information to be shared for the orchestration in the overall network. Transportation systems are hence operated through multiple technologies that need to cooperate to provide efficient delivery of goods and human mobility, as well as to provide security in the overall network. The latter task is complicated by the fact that vehicles autonomously drive and cooperate in the network without human intervention. In fact, thanks to the self-regulating capacity of the modules deployed both inside each vehicle and in the network infrastructure, vehicles do not need to be actively and fully driven by humans as in the past but require minimum intervention to mitigate extreme cases. The level of human intervention depends on the specific architecture and solution but is generally very limited. The overall transportation network can be therefore represented by a cyber--physical system, where a large number of sensors, actuators, and multiple technologies are connected and exchange information.