National Science Foundation/United States Department of Transportation AutoNet

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This research will develop and evaluate the use of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications to leverage cooperative, vehicle-centric pervasive computing as a platform for transportation management. At its core, we conceive of the resulting system as a bundle of services supporting an arbitrary collection of transportation management applications. We intend to explore the use of inter-vehicle communication (IVC) and roadside to vehicle communication (RVC) for traffic management and control applications by: 1) developing a comprehensive simulation environment that can simultaneously model implementation details of IVC/RVC and the full suite of traffic management and operations common to state-of-the-art research in Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2) testing a prototype system within a real transportation network specifically instrumented for research purposes, and 3) running simultaneous real-time experiments on the simulated and real transportation networks. The research activity will develop a full-fledged Autonet (cooperative IVC/RVC systems) simulator that can be used to evaluate the new traffic management applications arising from the set of inter-vehicle-related services (information sharing, distributed computation, cooperative driving, etc.). This research will begin by identifying a set of candidate applications to target. This application set will identify a core bundle of services that will be required to support these applications. These service specifications will, in turn, define a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for an Autonet simulator that couples a microscopic traffic simulation model with a model of wireless communications services. The functionality of the API will then be implemented using models of any of a variety of candidate techniques and technologies allowing the exploration of functional requirements those services place on the underlying information technology and communications systems. The broader impact of the research is potentially important both for the users as well as for traffic managers. Results of the research will contribute to better planning, management, and evaluation of transportation networks by integrating recent advances in wireless communications and mobile ad-hoc networking research into state-of-the-art network and traffic simulation models to analyze traffic information propagation in a distributed environment. From the users' point of view, real-time traffic information means more predictable travel times. Better predictable travel times imply improved scheduling matches since travel time can be predicted more precisely. From the traffic managers' point of view, the "intelligence" imparted to the driver can be exploited to help ensure stability of the quality of service. This directly contributes to less fuel consumption and emissions since there are fewer vehicles undergoing acceleration/deceleration cycles. In addition, through the efforts of cooperating software, networking and device researchers within the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, the application could provide a living laboratory for the investigation of mobile ad-hoc networking research issues.