NSF CAREER grant supports Rensselaer modeling of complex connected vehicle systems
Future roads will likely carry autonomous vehicles that communicate with one another in a system where vehicles relay information – like destination, speed, or upcoming lane change – and then receive real-time feedback about decisions like route changes necessary to avoid traffic.
Such an intelligent connected vehicle system could vastly improve mobility and safety, while reducing congestion and emissions from vehicles idling in traffic, but it will also add significant complexity to already dynamic traffic patterns, making vehicle flow vulnerable to instability.
“The advent of connected vehicles will pose tremendous challenges to the robustness of the traffic management system,” said Sean X. He, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “We have nice dynamic modeling of our current traffic system; however, if we add another layer – that’s the communication layer – it becomes very chaotic. We don’t yet know how to formulate the complex interactions that would occur between the traffic and communication layers.”