Issues in Acquisition, Processing and Use of Information to Enhance the Performance of Transportation Systems

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award is being made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. Information acquisition and processing is central to all Intelligent Transportation System technologies. Technological advances continue to facilitate the acquisition of a wide variety of data. However, in order to realize the potential benefits of equpping the transportation systems with sensing, actuation, data acquisition and communication systems, methodologies that provide guidelines, on the information to be acquired and how the acquired information must be processed and utilised to empower the transportation system with real-time decision making capability, are required and are currently lacking. The focus of this proposal is on engineering traffic flow behavior from the synthesis of control actions for constituent vehicles; we view vehicles as information sensing, purveying and actuating devices. In this study, we seek answers to the following questions. At the fundamental level, we would enquire into: 1. What characterizes the performance of a transportation system? What information is relevant and useful to improve the performance of a transportation system? Of these, what is feasible with the current state of technology? What kind of technologies can be developed? 2. What tools must be developed for the analysis of performance of the transportation system? At the applied level, we are interested in determining answers to the following questions: 1. How does one determine the effect of information acquisition, processing and utilization in the transportation system on its performance? 2. Given macroscopic performance specifications of the transportation system, how does one engineer a transportation system that achieves the given performance specification? We will develop tools to model traffic flow behavior, examine their stability and develop robust adaptive traffic flow control strategies to compensate for any changes in traffic flow behavior arising from road and weather conditions and from the effects of informed microscopic actions of the vehicles. It is expected that this research will provide guidelines on required infrastructure, communication and information processing capabilities for the next generation of vehicular and traffic control sytems.