Design and simulation of a car anti-hijacking system

Across the world, vehicle theft is a matter of grave concern that leads to huge monetary loss for vehicle owners. Tracking of stolen vehicles by police officials is difficult as criminals involved in vehicle theft often operate across the different states of the country. Hence there is a pressing need for a simple and cost-effective anti hijacking technique which will curtail vehicle theft and allow tracking of the stolen vehicle.

In this work, the focus is to develop a simulation model for an anti hijacking system using Labcenter Proteus. It is based on a secured technique of driver authentication by a two-factor authentication method using RFID and GSM. ECUs for authentication, Car Anti-hijacking System (CAS) and engine control were designed and modelled using PIC18F458 microcontrollers in Proteus. They were connected to each other on an I2C bus. The authentication ECU has RFID reader and a transponder that are used to authenticate a valid driver's RFID tag and communicated to the vehicle owner via a GSM module. After detecting a valid driver's tag the CAS ECU prompts the driver for a password for driver authentication. Once the driver is authenticated the engine control ECU permits the driver to start the vehicle. In case of the vehicle being hijacked, the engine control ECU sounds an alarm by checking engine idle condition and engine off condition. The engine ECU also retrieves a vehicle's location which is sent to driver's mobile phone by the CAS ECU.

The Embedded C code for this system was developed using MPLAB IDE. To parse location co-ordinates for the GPS receiver, string manipulation was implemented. The authentication ECU was tested successfully to identify two valid drivers and an invalid driver. The data communication in CAS ECU was tested by sending messages to two different mobiles. The developed model can be prototyped and integrated on a CAN bus in a vehicle to prevent hijacking. An Inertial Navigation System can also be integrated with the vehicle to locate the vehicle in the absence of GPS signal.