Mikael Asplund

Student project ideas

Doing a Master’s thesis on a research topic allows you to try new ideas, challenge your creativity and to get a taste of what research is all about. If things go well, you might also get the change to present your work at some international conference or workshop.

Below is a list of ideas for thesis work. If you are interested in one of these or have some ideas of your own, don't hesitate to write me an email or drop by my office. You can also look at the list of completed theses where I have been supervisor or examiner.

Smart vehicle coordination using Bitcoin-inspired algorithms

The virtual currency Bitcoin is having a disruptive effect on the financial sector. While initially considered as a curiosity, the technology behind bitcoin, so called blockchains now receive investments from companies like Goldman Sachs and IBM. The potential of blockchains go beyond that of currencies, allowing decentralised coordination and smart contracts, and IBM is advocating it as a basis for coordination in the Internet of Things. With the help of Turing-complete script languages such as being used by the Ethereum platform, the possibilities are endless. In this project the goal is to design, implement and evaluate a blockchain-based coordination mechanism for vehicular networks. The project involves both theoretical analysis and practial implementation. The scope is suitable for at least on 30hp project, possibly also a combination of two 16hp projects.

Attacks and mitigations for the connected car

As cars become more advanced and connected, the number of incidents where cars are being hacked also increase. An promising technology in future intelligent transportation systems is the ability to cooperate in groups of vehicles. Such cooperation require group membership protocols. This project will investigate vulnerabilities and attacks against such group membership protocols, and suggest mitigations and counter measures that can protect the systems under certain circumstances. This project is suitable for students with an interest in information security.

Theoretical analysis of distributed coordination

Autonomous cars are already on the horizon. The next generation of self-driving cars will interact with other vehicles using wireless communication to coordinate their actions and and enable more efficient traffic solutions than human drivers can accomplish. However, distributed coordination is still an open problem, especially in situations where the local actions taken by vehicles propagate to other parts of the system causing congestion and unpredictable delays.

This Master’s thesis project will consider an abstraction of this problem in a theoretical setting to investigate the asymptotic behaviour of distributed coordination under varying circumstances. Consider a system composed of N mobile agents that move around in a directed graph G=(V,E). At any point in time a node v ∈ V can contain either zero or one mobile agents. Obviously |V| ≥ N.

Each agent can communicate locally with agents located in neighbouring nodes, and nodes up to h hops away (h being a parameter under study). Moreover, for each agent a there is a set of nodes Va such that the agent wishes to visit all nodes in Va as many times as possible. The performance of an agent is determined by the number of visits to the node in Va with the least number of visits.

The task of this thesis project will be to investigate the bounds on achievable performance under varying conditions (starting with a restricted setting, and using increasingly complex models). A suitable student should be comfortable with mathematical reasoning, and interested in theoretical analysis of distributed algorithms.

Vehicular group membership resilient to malicious attacks

Next generation of heavy-duty vehicles will use wireless communication and advanced sensor technology to enable platoon driving where multiple trucks coordinate their driving in order to save fuel. Such advanced applications require vehicles to be able to accurately determine which other vehicles that are participating in the cooperation and to detect and adapt to changes as vehicles come and go. A key challenge is how such a membership protocol can withstand attacks from malicious actors in the environment (other vehicles or even from vehicles within the platoon).

This project is focused on implementation of a group membership protocol for vehicular platoons. The core idea of the protocol is to combine the use of communication, on-board sensors, and rearrangement of the platoon to detect malicious actors. The student will implement the protocol in a simulation environment and evaluate the ability to detect different attack types. The work is performed in cooperation with Scania.