Could wireless networking in vehicles be the answer to gridlocked roads?
A major transport project is investigating introducing wireless networking to vehicles as a way of drastically reducing congestion and the environmental impact of traffic. Experts at Nottingham Trent University are involved in the €3m European project, which is looking at incorporating ad-hoc wireless technology to vehicles to enable them to automatically gather traffic information and relay it to other commuters.
The three year research project - Models for Optimising Dynamic Urban Mobility, or MODUM - could lead to every vehicle on the road 'talking' to each other about how widespread congestion is in any area, at any given time. This could enable motorists to avoid queuing traffic and reduce journey time by identifying potential problems before and during their journey.
It is hoped that this innovative form of traffic control would result in less congestion without the need to improve or extend the current road infrastructure.
Congestion contributes to almost three quarters of pollutants in cities and the transport sector consumes about 30% of the total energy used in the EU. The MODUM project, funded by the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) is a direct response to the demand for a novel intelligent transportation system which has the ability to cut CO2 emissions and vastly improve the quality of life in cities.
The driver would plan the journey via the routing software and then traffic information - such as congestion caused by rush hour traffic and road works, or unexpected circumstances such as following an accident - would be automatically detected and then communicated to the vehicle by other road users via the wireless technology. The GPS assisted system would then automatically plan an alternative route to the destination.
Prototype devices are currently being prepared for a number of vehicles in order for locations in Nottingham and Sofia in Bulgaria to be used as test sites to show the benefit of the approach. The developed software would be cheap and easy to install, both to new and existing vehicles.
Academics in Nottingham Trent University's School of Science and Technology are working alongside the University of Manchester and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium as part of the project. Transport & Mobility Leuven in Belgium; technology partner Technolution of Holland and Austrian Mobility Research are also among the key partners in the European consortium.
"This system would be incredibly fast, in a matter of seconds congestion would be identified, information broadcast wirelessly to the relevant users, and the best route determined," said Dr Evtim Peytchev, an expert in wireless and mobile communications at Nottingham Trent University.
He added: "Wireless ad-hoc networking could help us to dynamically manage the traffic in every city, and it could potentially be done using the existing road infrastructure to its full capacity. The cars would effectively be talking to each other at all times, identifying a range of traffic conditions and, working as post boxes, delivering the messages to the destination without additional help.
"Each vehicle is actively participating in urban traffic control, the more cars you have the better communication system you will have. The system could even be used to communicate other messages, such as warning about an icy stretch of road or a rainy region."