In this NFS-funded project, we are
working in collaboration with the Institute
of Transportation Studies to develop a distributed and
self-organizing transportation management and control system. Dubbed Autonet, this autonomous
information network
is composed of vehicles containing GPS-equipped computers that
communicate with each other information about traffic conditions. This
information is collected and propagated through the network so that
individual vehicles can, for example, have advance notification of
traffic jams and choose a more optimal route to their destination. It
would also be used by the transportation department to collect data about
traffic flow and make better decisions in designing the
transportation network. For future work, each car will store its routine travel patterns in
order to make automatic predictions about where it is likely to travel.
Trevor Harmon
Jie Hu
A snapshot of the Autonet source code, taken on June 17, 2007, is available for download.