Dynamic, Simulation-Based Management of Surface Transportation Systems

 

Project Summary

Delays in surface transportation systems today cost tens of billions of dollars annually in the U.S. in lost productivity, wasted fuel, and pollution. In times of crisis, delays can result in lost lives. This project is exploring the exploitation of advances in sensing and mobile distributed computing to meet the challenges of transportation system management. Specifically, computing systems are envisioned that are distributed across vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and traffic management centers that continually sense the current state of the transportation network and project future system states to order to optimize the operational system.


This project is addressing research challenges concerning the effective realization of dynamic data driven application simulations (DDDAS) used for the management of surface transportation systems. Middleware research will address challenges associated with dynamically adapting the computing and communication infrastructure to disseminate and propagate data and computations to meet quality of service requirements. Research in data cleaning and imputation will use statistical techniques to address issues such as gaps and errors that will arise in real-time data feeds. Modeling research will focus on agent-based, dynamic data driven simulation models of transportation networks that adapt to real-time data feeds to predict future states of the system, and modeling of plume cloud dispersions that when integrated with transportation simulations, allow evaluation of the DDDAS approach in important emergency scenarios. Finally, a paradigm termed ad hoc distributed simulations will be explored that features dynamic collections of autonomous simulations interacting with each other and real-time data in a continuously running real-time distributed simulation environment.

Publications

R. M. Fujimoto, M. Hunter, J. Sirichoke, M. Palekar, H.-K. Kim, W. Suh, “Ad Hoc Distributed Simulations,” Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation, June 2007.

M. P. Hunter, R. M. Fujimoto, W. Suh, H. K. Kim, “An Investigation of Real-Time Dynamic Data Driven Transportation Simulation,” Winter Simulation Conference, December 2006.

R. M. Fujimoto, R. Guensler, M. Hunter, H.-K. Kim, J. Lee, J. Leonard III, M. Palekar, K. Schwan, and B. Seshasayee, “Dynamic Data Driven Application Simulation of Surface Transportation Systems,” Workshop on Dynamic Data Driven Application Simulations, pp. 425-432, June 2006.

B. Petit, M. Ammar, R. M. Fujimoto, “Protocols for Roadside-to-Roadside Data Relaying over Vehicular Networks,” IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, pp. 294-299, April 2006.

 

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0540160. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.