  This study focuses on the feasibility of commercial cloud services for
connected vehicle (CV) applications in a Transportation Cyber-Physical Systems
(TCPS) environment. TCPS implies that CVs, in addition to being connected with
each other, communicates with the transportation and computing infrastructure
to fulfill application requirements. The motivation of this study is to
accelerate commercial cloud-based CV application development by presenting the
lessons learned by implementing a CV mobility application using Amazon Web
Services (AWS). The feasibility of the cloud-based CV application is assessed
at three levels: (i) the development of a cloud-based TCPS architecture, (ii)
the deployment of a cloud-based CV application using AWS, and (iii) the
evaluation of the cloud-based CV application. We implemented this CV mobility
application using a serverless cloud architecture and found that such a
cloud-based TCPS environment could meet the permissible delay limits of CV
mobility applications. Commercial cloud services, as an integral part of TCPS,
could reduce costs associated with establishing and maintaining vast computing
infrastructure for supporting CV applications. As the CV penetration levels on
the surface transportation systems increase significantly over the next several
years, scaling the backend infrastructure to support such applications is a
critical issue. This study shows how commercial cloud services could
automatically scale the backend infrastructure to meet the rapidly changing
demands of real-world CV applications. Through real-world experiments, we
demonstrate how commercial cloud services along with serverless cloud
architecture could advance the transportation digital infrastructure for
supporting connected mobility applications in a TCPS environment.
