October 6, 2015 - Collisions and congestion at intersections and where highways merge could be greatly reduced – even eliminated – with a technology being developed by a team led by Andreas Malikopoulos, deputy director of the Urban Dynamics Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The approach presented by Malikopoulos at the recent 18th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems takes into account which vehicle is closest to the merging zone and assigns times for each vehicle to reach and leave that section. Unlike other approaches addressing the vehicle coordination problem, this method yields the “optimal solution” for all vehicles in real time, which allows for easy vehicle implementation. Malikopoulos and colleagues note that an optimized connected vehicle system can dramatically reduce the 5.5 billion hours wasted each year in traffic jams and the nearly 3 billion gallons of fuel.
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