NSF/USDOT Partnership for Exploratory Research - ICSST: Decentralized Surveillance, Control and Data Transmission for Transportation Applications

Ohio State University Research Foundation -Do Not Use, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

PI:Coifman Institution: Ohio State University Research Foundation. Decentralized surveillance, control and data transmission for transportation applications This research will reexamine the control and data transmission systems used by highway operating agencies to reduce the combined surveillance and communications costs, without sacrificing traffic management effectiveness. These agencies rely on automated surveillance tools to monitor conditions throughout the road network. Under conventional operation, the fixed-point surveillance systems transmit data at constant intervals to allow for a rapid response when conditions change. Yet most of the time, the response to the data is simply that no action is necessary. The required communications network and transmission costs can become significant. Some states spend several million dollars each year to cover the associated communication expenses. This problem will intensify as new traffic management surveillance technologies are deployed in the future. The research will develop distributed control algorithms to make decisions in the field and the systems will only transmit data when it would be beneficial for wide scale control. The research will focus on the decision to transmit data, based on prevailing conditions at the detector station, to reduce the costs of surveillance. Key to this event driven approach is the recent emergence of new communication technologies, such as cellular digital packet data. With a slight increase of processing power in the field, the detector station could initiate communications as soon as conditions warrant reporting. The fundamental contributions of this research include quantifying the benefits of information, modeling various communication network topologies to optimize system performance, developing efficient communication and distributed control algorithms for these networks, and demonstrating the work in a detailed case study.