Traffic congestion is a global challenge. Besides the obvious energy and environmental impacts, traffic congestion imposes tangible costs on society. It is unlikely that traditional physically-centered mitigation strategies by themselves will be successful or sustainable in the current economical and environmental climate. Numerous strategies have been proposed to construct Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), by incorporating sensing, information, and communication technologies in transportation infrastructure and vehicles. In this EAGER proposal, we present an early-concept exploration to investigate an innovative and transformative approach for ITS. We envision that this exploratory research could advance the next generation of ITSs by introducing a tightly-integrated real-time traffic simulation, estimation, and visualization for traffic management. We are developing novel hybrid methods for real-time flow estimation, traffic reconstruction and visualization, as well as designing GPU and many-core algorithms to accelerate the overall performance.
If successful, this research could enable adaptive route planning for vehicle guidance and navigational aid to alleviate traffic congestion through an algorithmic lens. The proposed unified framework also has the potential to provide computational advances for diverse applications, including regulating traffic, improved urban planning, transportation system design, virtual tourism, education, entertainment, surveillance, and emergency response. The set of pedagogical and outreach activities complement and extend the research impact through integrated education-research programs and effective dissemination of research results.
Traffic congestion management is a global challenge. Besides the obvious energy and environmental impacts, traffic congestion imposes tangible costs on society. It is unlikely that traditional physically-centered mitigation strategies by themselves will be successful or sustainable in the current economical and environmental climate. Numerous strategies have been proposed to construct Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), by incorporating sensing, information, and communication technologies in transportation infrastructure and vehicles. Many of these efforts tend to perform off-line simulation and decoupled analysis. Most existing traffic simulations focus on either microscopic (e.g. agent-based simulation) or macroscopic (e.g. flow-like) behaviors; few have examined the intriguing interplay across different physical scales in a complex transportation system. Through networks of sensors, recent cutting-edge efforts can provide real-time traffic monitoring and limited vehicle-based rerouting, but do not offer immediate, coordinated system-level relief to the traffic congestion problem. In this EAGER project, we advance the next generation of ITS by exploratory investigation of an innovative and transformative approach that integrates simultaneous simulation, reconstruction, and route planning of the metropolitan scale traffic. INTELLECTUAL MERIT The following major scientific contributions have been achieved during this project: (1) a fast technique to reconstruct traffic flows from in-road sensor measurements; (2) adaptive, self-aware traffic route planning algorithms that take the planned routes adopted by the current drivers as part of the future traffic prediction; and (3) a new concept, called "Participatory Route Planning" that coordinates the traffic management through the user adoption and participation via mobile communication. BROADER IMPACT Applications and impacts of this work include regulating highway/arterial traffic, improved urban planning, civil and traffic engineering, transportation system design, highway and freeway layout, virtual tourism, education and entertainment, surveillance, and formulating emergency response strategies. The resulting research has been demonstrated to thousands of K-12 students and senior members in the nearby communities and in NC, helping to attract K-12 students and enhance study opportunities for under-represented groups and women students. One Ph.D. student, David Wilkie, has been partially supported by this grant and completed his Ph.D. dissertation supported by this grant; and other undergraduate student gained valuable experience from this project and plans to continue for graduate study. Resulting software systems are to be posted online. They are also under further development for designing accessible games for children with disabilities to learn how to cross streets. Five refereed publications resulting from this project are disseminated through websites, courses, and international conferences.
