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Herd Routes: A Preventative IoT-Based System for Improving Female Pedestrian Safety on City Streets

Madeleine Woodburn, Wynita M. Griggs, Jakub Marecek, Robert N. Shorten

TL;DR

Female pedestrian safety in public spaces is a persistent urban challenge. The paper proposes Herd Routes, a preventative IoT-based system that incentivises busier routes to improve safety, validated with SUMO simulations and an Android prototype. It couples a dynamic pricing controller with IOTA Tangle-backed location/ID recording and token exchange to influence pedestrian flows, supported by hardware-in-the-loop validation. The work demonstrates feasibility and potential social impact, and outlines concrete directions for further development and deployment.

Abstract

Over two thirds of women of all ages in the UK have experienced some form of sexual harassment in a public space. Recent tragic incidents involving female pedestrians have highlighted some of the personal safety issues that women still face in cities today. There exist many popular location-based safety applications as a result of this; however, these applications tend to take a reactive approach where action is taken only after an incident has occurred. This paper proposes a preventative approach to the problem by creating safer public environments through societal incentivisation. The proposed system, called "Herd Routes", improves the safety of female pedestrians by generating busier pedestrian routes as a result of route incentivisation. A novel application of distributed ledgers is proposed to provide security and trust, a record of system users' locations and IDs, and a platform for token exchange. A proof-of-concept was developed using the simulation package SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility), and a smartphone app. was built in Android Studio so that pedestrian Hardware-in-the-Loop testing could be carried out to validate the technical feasibility and desirability of the system. With positive results from the initial testing of the proof-of-concept, further development could significantly contribute towards creating safer pedestrian routes through cities, and tackle the societal change that is required to improve female pedestrian safety in the long term.

Herd Routes: A Preventative IoT-Based System for Improving Female Pedestrian Safety on City Streets

TL;DR

Female pedestrian safety in public spaces is a persistent urban challenge. The paper proposes Herd Routes, a preventative IoT-based system that incentivises busier routes to improve safety, validated with SUMO simulations and an Android prototype. It couples a dynamic pricing controller with IOTA Tangle-backed location/ID recording and token exchange to influence pedestrian flows, supported by hardware-in-the-loop validation. The work demonstrates feasibility and potential social impact, and outlines concrete directions for further development and deployment.

Abstract

Over two thirds of women of all ages in the UK have experienced some form of sexual harassment in a public space. Recent tragic incidents involving female pedestrians have highlighted some of the personal safety issues that women still face in cities today. There exist many popular location-based safety applications as a result of this; however, these applications tend to take a reactive approach where action is taken only after an incident has occurred. This paper proposes a preventative approach to the problem by creating safer public environments through societal incentivisation. The proposed system, called "Herd Routes", improves the safety of female pedestrians by generating busier pedestrian routes as a result of route incentivisation. A novel application of distributed ledgers is proposed to provide security and trust, a record of system users' locations and IDs, and a platform for token exchange. A proof-of-concept was developed using the simulation package SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility), and a smartphone app. was built in Android Studio so that pedestrian Hardware-in-the-Loop testing could be carried out to validate the technical feasibility and desirability of the system. With positive results from the initial testing of the proof-of-concept, further development could significantly contribute towards creating safer pedestrian routes through cities, and tackle the societal change that is required to improve female pedestrian safety in the long term.
Paper Structure (17 sections, 1 equation, 17 figures, 3 tables, 4 algorithms)

This paper contains 17 sections, 1 equation, 17 figures, 3 tables, 4 algorithms.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Related Work
  4. Current Market Solutions
  5. Opportunity Area, and Novel Contribution of the Paper
  6. Methodology
  7. Problem Area Exploration
  8. Development & Iteration of Concepts
  9. Build & Test
  10. Evaluation & Results
  11. Dynamic Pricing Control
  12. SUMO Simulation
  13. Hardware-in-the-loop
  14. System Considerations
  15. Business Case
  16. ...and 2 more sections

Figures (17)

  • Figure 1: Herd Routes system overview.
  • Figure 2: System architecture for the prototype, used in the Hardware-in-the-Loop testing.
  • Figure 3: Downloaded area from OpenStreetMap.
  • Figure 4: The map was edited, removing unnecessary features and making sure all roads had the correct pedestrian properties.
  • Figure 5: Dynamic pricing feedback loop to set the value of tokens.
  • ...and 12 more figures