Book your space out of congestion

Max Glaskin interviews Liviu Iftode from Rutgers University about his concept of a new reservation system whereby drivers book slots on special lanes – which Iftode thinks could be a realistic and effective solution to keep traffic on the move

Liviu Iftode knows a thing or two about congestion. He used
to commute 200km every single morning only to face the same grueling drive once more in the evening. Today, the Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey, has a much shorter round trip and is using his experience and the extra available time to come up with radical new ideas to keep traffic moving.

Right: Liviu Iftode, Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey

Under his stewardship in recent years, postgraduate students have worked out how to provide drivers with more information about nearby congestion, how to change the sequences of intersection lights to improve traffic flow, how to create social networks among commuters, and – most intriguingly – how to run a lane-reservation system so that drivers can guarantee the duration of their journeys.

This latter concept should appeal to highways operators and drivers alike, and has been developed in collaboration with Professor Mario Gerla from the UCLA’s computer science department. It describes how drivers could reserve a slot on a highway lane that is guaranteed to flow freely, so they can be confident that they will arrive at their destination on schedule. Their paper was first published at a conference in September 2007 and the idea has been gathering interest ever since then.

Considered approach
The concept leverages a host of technologies, including online booking, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, and RFID and/or CCTV/ALPR for enforcement. Unlike many concepts from academia, Iftode’s team has clearly considered the practical requirement for making this one work and believes that its position should be to incorporate the time guarantees of other popular means of commuter travel into the highway system, while maintaining the convenience of automobile travel. In other words, train and metro commuters are able to estimate their journeys to the minute, if not the second, and car commuters could also be offered the same benefit.

Such precision is all very well for a centrally controlled rail network but is counter to the principals of roads as we know them, where individual drivers choose their own actions. The solution proposed by Iftode’s team is inspired by experience of computer networks, where data is distributed optimally by following strict protocols. This, essentially, is what is being suggested now for cars. “Highways could have a lane to be used only by those who make a reservation,” Iftode suggests. “There will be enforcement mechanisms that will deter or prevent others from entering it. The agency operating the lane will guarantee a journey time by ensuring that the number of reservations does not exceed the lane’s capacity to support free-flow.”

Each reservation would have an arrival time slot to which drivers must adhere. They could book their position online before they start their journey, or while en route to the highway – the same slot could even be reserved for each working day. All, of course, would be expected to pay for the privilege for a journey of a known duration, the fee for which could be dynamic, reacting accordingly to supply and demand in near-real-time. There could also be discounts for regular travelers, akin to metro season tickets, and premiums for last-minute bookers. “It’s feasible that a secondary market could develop where reserved time slots are traded or auctioned,” Iftode says.

According to the team’s paper, the entering and exiting of vehicles from the reserved lane will have to be managed most carefully. One system involves a car that is approaching the highway communicating its imminent arrival to the vehicles that are already in the reserved lane. Drivers then automatically receive details of the car that they must fall in behind. Similarly, the car already on the highway – which will have to make room for the new arrival – will receive its details so that it can slow down to let other cars enter safely.

Iftode is also keen to stress that there must be a mechanism in place to accommodate exceptional incidents in the reserved lane, such as collisions or breakdowns. This would include canceling reservations, reimbursement and reassignment of reservations – all conducted automatically and distributed through the pervasive computing, which is available even now in our navigation devices, cell phones and the scores of processors on modern cars.

Although it all sounds a bit far-fetched at the moment, Iftode is nothing if not pragmatic. “This is a position paper to make a case for the idea,” he explains. “I like to make working prototypes of systems but this one is not so easy to prototype so we would have a lot of work to do beforehand, to simulate it and assess its impact. If the simulations show that there are likely to be benefits, then we would be in a position to consider prototyping.”

Right now Iftode and his colleagues are busy preparing an application for funding from the National Science Foundation to develop the simulation. He has been most successful in recent years in getting funding, with the NSF giving a significant grant of US$1.5 million for his pioneering TrafficView project, which uses vehicle-to-vehicle communications to provide drivers with information about congestion in the immediate area. A similar concept was commercialized in 2008 by Dash Express.

The success of TrafficView lends credibility to the highway lane-reservation concept. “The feedback we received from our peers at conferences has been positive,” Iftode confirms. “We ran it with people at the California PATH laboratory and they are interested in joining us in the funding proposal that we’re submitting. And Professor Vinny Cahill at Trinity College, Dublin, is working in parallel on real-time scheduling, with support from the Science Foundation Ireland.”

It is beginning to look as if it is an idea whose reserved time slot has come.

Liviu Iftode was interviewed by Max Glaskin
 

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