Communications of the ACM
Computer Scientist Drives for Comprehensive Traffic Model
University of Illinois at Chicago assistant professor of computer science Jakob Eriksson has received a five-year, $400,000 National Science Foundation Early Faculty Career Award to support his work on a comprehensive traffic model.
Credit: University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) professor Jakob Eriksson is developing a traffic model that gathers and assembles data from smartphones, online maps, radio, and TV. "The long-range ambition is to build something like a roadmap, but annotated with everything that's going on at the moment," Eriksson says. He says mathematical calculations that could predict alternate routes on side streets and secondary routes could help motorists bypass traffic jams. A more dynamic, real-time traffic picture also could help commuters decide when it would be more practical to use mass transit. "This project asks, how do we combine it all into one coherent model showing the current status of the transportation network?" Eriksson says.
Initially, UIC researchers will use Chicago-area data for the project, but they plan to branch out into other cities in the future. "There may be 10,000 road segments we want to simulate in some detail with perhaps a million cars on the road during rush hour," Eriksson says. He notes that data not currently being fed into traffic reporting systems could be used for the model. Road sensors, tollway transponders mounted on windshields, and "jam cam" traffic cameras also could supply data.
From University of Illinois at Chicago
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