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Abstracts of Magazine FUJITSU 2014-7 (Vol. 65, No. 4)

Special Issue: Smart Mobility

Overview

  • Smart Mobility Created by Mobility Platform

There are various issues with urban transportation depending on factors such as the country, region and stage of economic development and one solution cannot solve all of them. However, there is an approach that can not only solve issues with transportation but also provide the optimum solution in line with urban growth: use of a platform to aggregate and visualize massive amounts of information about movement including automobiles, public transportation systems and people's demand for movement. A combination of analysis and prediction application programs can be applied to such information according to the respective country, region and stage of economic development in order to quantify the improvement status. Fujitsu has taken advantage of its technology for developing telematics services that it has built up over the years and technology to use probe data collected from running vehicles to build a mobility platform that visualizes urban transportation.

Personal Mobility

  • Proposal of Next-generation Ubiquitous Device for New Mobility Society: Next-generation Cane

Fujitsu develops products under the basic concept of making use of the capability of user-focused (human centric) ICT (information and communications technology). One representative example of our technology that offers ease of use and safety/security of products is Human Centric Engine (HCE). This technology, which is integrated in smartphones, is an application of mobile sensing technology that we have evolved over the years and it provides a core component that supports users. We have considered applying this HCE to other products that help make people's lives comfortable and attempted to newly develop a walking stick (Next-generation Cane). This paper describes our activities for developing technology ranging from discussing specifications to carrying out development, and it covers our consideration of the reactions we obtained at trade shows, etc. and the technology's future prospects.

  • Installation Support Tool for Wi-Fi-based Area Distinction System

In this paper, an installation support tool for a Wi-Fi-based area distinction system is proposed. Along with recent diversified work styles, mobility services have been required to provide services to people anywhere. As one of these mobility services, location-based service (LBS) is getting popular. Various kinds of area distinction methods have been proposed to embody an indoor LBS. Especially, Wi-Fi-based methods have advantages because no new device for the LBS is necessary. However, expert knowledge and skills are required to install a Wi-Fi-based area distinction system, because it is too difficult to estimate the system's performance beforehand. Therefore, the authors developed an installation support tool for a Wi-Fi-based area distinction system. This tool can be used easily by anyone because it has an ability to visualize the area distinction performance in advance. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated in an experimental study.

  • Mobility on Demand for Improving Business Profits and User Satisfaction

For a sustainable society, we need to design a mobility management system that does not excessively depend on private vehicles. To achieve this goal, an innovative transportation service is required that provides high user satisfaction in terms of both convenience and fares and is viable as a profit-making business. Recently on-demand transportation, which makes use of information and communications technology (ICT), has been growing and may be a viable solution to the challenges mentioned above. We are developing an innovative on-demand transportation system that has flexibility in terms of vehicle allocation and provides a menu of travel options to users. The system dynamically allocates a fleet of vehicles owned by a business to different transportation services such as taxi, shared taxi and minibus. It offers convenient and reasonably fared transportation services through an optimization framework where services are assigned based on a choice model in order to maximize profit. The system is expected to improve both user satisfaction and business profits as compared to conventional means of transportation. This paper presents the concept of the system and provides experimental results as a proof of concept using a simulation framework.

  • Connectivity-Based Battery and New e-Mobility

Electrically driven vehicles have evolved along with a reduction in the size and weight of batteries and, for short-distance applications, this has led to bicycles, motorcycles and small vehicles driven by batteries that are small enough to be replaced by users. In the future, if batteries become readily replaceable even when away from the home or office, issues such as charging time and running distance will be resolved and the degree of practicality of such vehicles will further increase. However, it is still difficult for people to take many expensive batteries with them when they go out or to store them in various places outside and so to achieve these goals a system of sharing batteries is essential. Fujitsu aims to establish a system for grasping the status of shared battery assets (connectivity-based battery system) that allows batteries to be replaced with peace of mind and with no degradation to battery quality perceivable by the user, and that maximizes the asset value of the shared batteries. This can be achieved by having batteries always connected to a location data cloud to manage the state of their charge and monitor changes to the characteristics of the individual batteries. This paper presents the technology of "connectivity-based batteries" that are always connected to a cloud service and the possibility of creating various values.

Safe and Secure Mobility

  • Construction of Safe Driving Environment

In the field of transportation and traffic, big data are beginning to be used for improving transport efficiency and assisting in safe driving. Fujitsu has commercialized FUJITSU Intelligent Society Solution SPATIOWL, a cloud service that uses location data, to build a system that accumulates in the cloud various types of information associated with location data of mobile objects including vehicles. We have also developed sensing technologies for use in vehicles or on road infrastructure that promote road traffic safety. Data acquired by sensing technology related to road traffic systems have so far only been used in limited applications such as individual vehicle systems and safety systems for specific road sections. But systems are now in place that make it easier to connect with data in the cloud, and this facilitates data aggregation and accumulation. Adequate analysis of the massive amounts of data accumulated makes it possible to identify information about points requiring attention in driving, and to do this requires analysis technology that can accurately identify significant pieces of information that suit the purpose of analysis, out of massive amounts of data. This paper presents a technique of efficiently analyzing massive amounts of data from drive recorders and detecting truly necessary information and a system that utilizes SPATIOWL to implement the technique as a functional component for assisting in safe driving.

  • Telematics Service for Commercial Vehicles to Realize Safe Traffic Society

As operation management for commercial vehicles, services that use digital tachograph-based devices are an industry standard. Here a digital tachograph refers to a device approved by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism that records travel speeds and distances of a vehicle as needed. Digital data including travel speeds recorded with a digital tachograph system have conventionally been intended for visualizing the details of vehicle operation by recording data on a dedicated card and reading and analyzing them at the office to which the vehicle belongs, and for allowing the operation manager to use the result to give guidance on the operations. The telematics service for commercial vehicles presented in this paper further develops the digital tachograph described above. The service does not require a dedicated card, which is a mobile medium for the recorded data, and uses the FENICS wireless communication network to send the operation data to the cloud center in real time for analysis. At the cloud center, proprietary analysis middleware is used for analyzing the vehicle diagnosis information and driving operations of the driver based on the enormous amount of sensor data. These advanced forms of information and communications technology (ICT) allow unprecedented real-time provision of guidance on driving and hazard prediction.

  • Detection Technology of Stress Situations based on Voice Information

As a monitoring service technology, Fujitsu has developed a way to process voice signals in order to detect the situation of a person's stress based on their conversation and also developed prototypes of a terminal–center linking system using smartphones, which are increasingly becoming widespread, to evaluate the system's operation. This technology is intended to be used to detect problems between customers and employees at an early stage so as to improve customer satisfaction and to monitor elderly people living alone and people driving vehicles in order to ensure safety, security, etc. This technology to detect the situation of stress analyzes changes in the tone of a person's voice, that is, in the pitch and level of their voice, from the ordinary situation that occurs when a person is under stress and has a dry throat. As a result of examining the detection accuracy in an evaluation experiment with simulated conversations in which the subjects were put under stress, it was found that this system can detect the situation of stress with an accuracy of 90% or higher. This paper describes the technology to detect the situation of stress based on the pitch and level of a voice and the configurations of the two prototype systems developed.

  • 79 GHz-Band High-Resolution Millimeter-Wave Radar

High-resolution millimeter-wave radar that operates in the 79 GHz band is expected to achieve a significant increase in the distance resolution of radar systems because of the availability of a wide frequency bandwidth of 4 GHz as compared with 0.5 GHz of the existing 77 GHz-band millimeter-wave radar. For this reason, it has the potential to distinguish between a vehicle and a human, which was conventionally difficult, and recognize their movements, and so it raises expectations for use as periphery monitoring radar in preventive safety measures and automatic driving. As one of Fujitsu Ten's efforts regarding sensing technologies for preventive safety measures and automatic driving, it has been developing 79 GHz-band high-resolution millimeter-wave radar. This paper presents radar specifications for application to systems that assist in safe driving and automatic driving and the results of testing a prototype for a wider bandwidth that is required to accomplish the technology's purpose. This radar increases the ability to detect a pedestrian in the vicinity of a vehicle, which was difficult to do with the existing 77 GHz-band radar. Furthermore, this paper also describes how the newly developed radar offers the possibility of improving the performance of a sensor for automatic driving and systems to assist in safe driving.

Comfortable Mobility

  • Car Navigation System with Enhanced Connecting Function

In November 2013, FUJITSU TEN released three models of Z Series as new products of ECLIPSE, and they were the first commercially available car navigation systems with a Wi-Fi function in Japan. When you connect your smartphone to these products through Wi-Fi communication, the following services are available to you: a voice interactive destination search service, a push-type agent application software through which the information concerning surrounding facilities is delivered in speech, and a new service that allows you to remotely operate a car navigation system from an electric instruction manual application software on your smartphone. In conjunction with the My Cloud service provided by Fujitsu, these products also provide an application software with which you can retrieve and enjoy pictures and music saved on your home PC. This paper gives an overview of these services, their features, and their future challenges.

  • Approach to Mobility M2M

Machine to machine (M2M), which has evolved as one solution to social issues such as energy conservation and reduction of environmental impact, now makes it possible to have advanced analysis and prediction by making use of big data and is being applied to an increasingly wider range of fields. Application of M2M is expanding also in the field of mobility, which can contribute to a next-generation car-oriented society, such as in emergency call and theft tracking systems that will be made mandatory and in promotion of car sharing by ultra-small mobility devices. Fujitsu Ten is also moving ahead with the development of in-vehicle communication devices and working to realize telematics services based on having drive recorders connected with a cloud. This paper describes Fujitsu Ten's approach to mobility M2M. It also presents technology for installing VoIP wireless devices in vehicles and for automobile control systems related to smartphones that can be used to solve issues related to communication stability and information security that need to be overcome when connecting vehicles to a network.

  • Global Rollout of Telematics Service

Along with the advent of the age of big data utilization, services and areas covered by telematics services are increasing in Japan and overseas. The forms of services are undergoing a shift from those provided by service providers to those offered by automotive OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), which have their own service centers and launch services independently. As an example of big data utilization, Fujitsu has planned the rollout of a service to provide traffic information, which is one of the telematics services, intended for automotive OEMs in Europe. For the rollout of this service, we have adopted the Traffic Message Channel (TMC) data format based on our understanding that standardizing data formats of traffic information, which is input and output data of the service, will be key to the service's success. This paper describes the global rollout of Fujitsu's service to provide traffic information.

  • M2M Network for Smart Mobility

Smart mobility involves gathering information from mobility and analyzing the gathered information as big data. The analyzed data are then supplied to drivers and vehicle manufacturers as a service. For a mobile communication system to gather and supply information about mobility, a wireless network is used mainly as a machine-to-machine (M2M) network. This causes an increase in the volume of communication and degradation of communication quality once the number of vehicles that provide mobility data increases to between several ten thousand and several million. Additional issues include increased communication expenses and the need to ensure security on the network along with providing various services. FENICS (Fujitsu Enhanced Information and Communication Services) II Business Network, which is a set of network services offered by Fujitsu for enterprises, provides FUJITSU Managed Infrastructure Service FENICS II M2M Service capable of addressing these issues for M2M and Internet of Things (IoT). This paper presents the M2M network that supports smart mobility by describing the details of FENICS II M2M Service and giving examples.