WATI: Warning of Traffic Incidents for Fuel Saving

Traffic incidents (heavy traffic, adverse weather conditions, and traffic accidents) cause an increase in the frequency and intensity of the acceleration and deceleration. The result is a very significant increase in fuel consumption. In this paper, we propose a solution to reduce the impact of such events on energy consumption. The solution detects the traffic incidents based on measured telemetry data from vehicles and the different driver profiles. The proposal takes into account the rolling resistance coefficient, the road slope angle, and the vehicles speeds, from vehicles which are on the scene of the traffic incident, in order to estimate the optimal deceleration profile. Adapted advice and feedback are provided to the drivers in order to appropriately and timely release the accelerator pedal. The expert system is implemented on Android mobile devices and has been validated using a dataset of 150 tests using 15 different drivers. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of a system to detect traffic incidents and provide an optimal deceleration pattern for the driver to follow without requiring sensors on the road. The results show an improvement on the fuel consumption of up to 13.47%

Network Maintenance and Capacity Management with Applications in Transportation

abstract: This research develops heuristics to manage both mandatory and optional network capacity reductions to better serve the network flows. The main application discussed relates to transportation networks, and flow cost relates to travel cost of users of the network. Temporary mandatory capacity reductions are required by maintenance activities. The objective of managing maintenance activities and the attendant temporary network capacity reductions is to schedule the required segment closures so that all maintenance work can be completed on time, and the total flow cost over the maintenance period is minimized for different types of flows. The goal of optional network capacity reduction is to selectively reduce the capacity of some links to improve the overall efficiency of user-optimized flows, where each traveler takes the route that minimizes the traveler’s trip cost. In this dissertation, both managing mandatory and optional network capacity reductions are addressed with the consideration of network-wide flow diversions due to changed link capacities. This research first investigates the maintenance scheduling in transportation networks with service vehicles (e.g., truck fleets and passenger transport fleets), where these vehicles are assumed to take the system-optimized routes that minimize the total travel cost of the fleet. This problem is solved with the randomized fixed-and-optimize heuristic developed. This research also investigates the maintenance scheduling in networks with multi-modal traffic that consists of (1) regular human-driven cars with user-optimized routing and (2) self-driving vehicles with system-optimized routing. An iterative mixed flow assignment algorithm is developed to obtain the multi-modal traffic assignment resulting from a maintenance schedule. The genetic algorithm with multi-point crossover is applied to obtain a good schedule. Based on the Braess’ paradox that removing some links may alleviate the congestion of user-optimized flows, this research generalizes the Braess’ paradox to reduce the capacity of selected links to improve the efficiency of the resultant user-optimized flows. A heuristic is developed to identify links to reduce capacity, and the corresponding capacity reduction amounts, to get more efficient total flows. Experiments on real networks demonstrate the generalized Braess’ paradox exists in reality, and the heuristic developed solves real-world test cases even when commercial solvers fail.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Industrial Engineering 201