Green City Transportation Architecture

Green City Transport Architecture:closing the loop between sensors, navigators, and routes, a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and involving researchers at UCLA, UC Riverside, and Rutgers University.  The aim of this research project is to identify opportunities for sensors and vehicle routing instructions to work together to reduce mobile source pollution and exposures within system of connected vehicles and infrastructure.  The UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies is working on policy, behavioral, and market research to better understand opportunities and challenges for implementation.

The general idea behind the Green City Transport Architecture is to explore opportunities to reduce emissions and improve system operations efficiency through the combination of:

  • The proliferation of connected vehicles and connected infrastructure.  “Connectivity” is enabled by a combination of long-range wireless data communications (3G, LTE, etc.) and dedicated short-range communications (the Federal Communications Commission has allocated the 5.9 GHZ band for Intelligent Transportation Systems).

  • Infrastructure-based sensors that continuously monitor both pollutant concentration and traffic conditions.

  • On-board vehicle sensors that directly measure or indirectly estimate emissions from a specific vehicle and report this information to government-administered local or centralized processing system.

  • Connected, smart traffic control systems that seek to optimize local flow and reduce local congestion based on real-time data from infrastructure and vehicle-based sensors.

  • An in-vehicle navigation system connected to a regionally-administered navigation service that both forecasts short-term demand for roadway links based on routing queries and assesses a dynamic congestion charge to balance the network.

UCLA Today News Story (9/19/2011)

 

Additional details:

Working on this project: Juan Matute, Brian D. Taylor, Jamiee Lederman, Stephen Brumbaugh, Carol Turlee, Arlen Spiro Project Start Date: September 2011   Project End Date: August 2014