UbiRoad: Semantic Middleware for Cooperative Traffic Systems and Services Vagan Terziyan MIT Department, University of Jyvaskyla P.O. Box 35 (Agora), 40014 Jyvaskyla, Finland e-mail: vagan@jyu.fi Olena Kaykova, Dmytro Zhovtobryukh Agora Center, University of Jyvaskyla P.O. Box 35 (Agora), 40014 Jyvaskyla, Finland e-mail: olena@cc.jyu.fi, dzhovto@cc.jyu.fi Abstract—Emerging traffic management systems and smart road environments are currently equipped with all necessary facilities to enable seamless mobile service provisioning to the users. However, advanced sensors and network architectures deployed within the traffic environment are insufficient to make mobile service provisioning autonomous and proactive, thus minimizing drivers’ distraction during their presence in the environment. An ideal system should provide solutions to the following two interoperability problems: interoperability between the in-car and roadside devices produced and programmed by different vendors and/or providers, and the need for seamless and flexible collaboration (including discovery, coordination, conflict resolution and negotiation) amongst the smart road devices and services. To tackle these problems, in this paper we propose UbiRoad middleware intending utilization of semantic languages and semantic technologies for declarative specification of devices’ and services’ behavior, application of software agents as engines executing those specifications, and establishment of common ontologies to facilitate and govern seamless interoperation of devices, services, remote systems and humans. Keywords- context-aware services; cooperative traffic; smart road; middleware; semantic technologies; agents I. INTRODUCTION There is about half of a billion drivers only in Europe, who wish driving to be more comfortable, efficient, ecological and less risky. Not far are the times when cars will themselves prevent accidents. People spend more time in vehicles and they are expecting also more possibilities to work and use various services while traveling, which requires new travel infrastructure and automation services [2]. These should combine various vehicles, their drivers and passengers, smart roads and appropriate Web services [3]. Recent wireless and internet technologies enable completely new possibilities to integrate available efforts into the new advanced traffic paradigm – cooperative traffic [4]. Service-oriented architectures related to traffic management, smart roads and future context-aware services for drivers are closely integrated into the Internet of Things [5], which is a world where things can automatically communicate to computers and each other, providing services for human benefits. In such “Future Internet”, intelligence and knowledge will be distributed among an extremely large number of heterogeneous entities: sensors, actuators, devices, cars, road infrastructures, software applications, Web services, humans, and others. To realize this vision, there is a need for an open architecture, which will offer seamless connectivity and interworking between these heterogeneous entities. Moreover, ensuring collaboration, synchronization but also control of this distributed intelligence is a challenge that needs to be addressed, or the Internet of Things will become a chaotic, un-controlled and possibly dangerous environment since some actors of this Internet have impact on the real world (e.g., software or humans through actuators). Cooperative traffic domain enables interoperability between a large number of heterogeneous entities, while ensuring predictability and safety of their operation, is difficult without an extra layer of intelligence that will ensure the orchestration of these various actors according to well- defined goals, taking into account changing constraints, business objectives or regulations. This paper introduces such a middleware layer (UbiRoad). It provides cross-layer communication services (data-level interoperability) to the entities and extended multi-agent technologies will provide collaboration-support services (functional protocol-level interoperability and coordination) for these entities. The UbiRoad middleware concept apparently entails a vision of a multifaceted, multi-purpose and multipronged middleware platform applying multidisciplinary approach to extension and enhancement of the future smart traffic environments UbiRoad middleware should be rather seen as a meta- structure on top of the future intelligent transportation systems and services and as intelligent stratum between the smart road device layer and the future service oriented architectures. A first major problem to be addressed by UbiRoad is inherent heterogeneity, with respect to the nature of components, standards, data formats, protocols, etc., which creates significant obstacles for interoperability among the components of ubiquitous computing systems. This heterogeneity is likely to induce some integration costs that will become prohibitive at a very large scale preventing a rich ecosystem of applications to emerge. It is generally recognized that achieving the interoperability by imposing some rigid standards and making everyone comply could not be a case in open ubiquitous environments. Therefore, the interoperability requires existence of some middleware to act as the glue joining heterogeneous components together. The second major issue is to guarantee high level of safety. Since the IT infrastructure and through them users are going to have real actions in the real physical world through