Traffic Operating System for Smart Cities

The purpose of this project is to develop, simulate and test through targeted vehicle and roadway infrastructure field test experiments a traffic operating system (TOS) that organizes existing computation, communication and automotive technologies to minimize congestion by increasing traffic throughput and to enhance safety by reducing driver errors through the use of cooperative adaptive cruise control strategies. These goals are achieved through integration of traffic measurements with the traffic management on vehicle, road link and network layers, making effective use of dynamic traffic models and simulation. Today there is no integrative framework for these three layers of feedback control; instead the problem at each layer is addressed in isolation with inputs from the other layers treated as disturbances. This project will demonstrate how traffic control can be efficiently integrated across layers and will develop new simulation and control design techniques.