MIDAS: A Cyber Physical System for Proactive Traffic Management to Enhance Mobility and Sustainability

Abstract: 

While driving on your favorite route to your destination, have you ever wondered why the technology you are seeing as far as traffic management is concerned is so antiquated? My answer to that is the people and organization that manage the traffic are not “cyber-physicists” and Google does not run our traffic lights. The MIDAS project* hopes to demonstrate the synergistic use of a cyber-physical infrastructure consisting of smart-phone type devices; cloud computing, wireless communication, and intelligent transportation systems to manage vehicles in the complex urban network – through the use of traffic controls, route advisories and road pricing/rewards – to jointly optimize drivers’ mobility as well as achieve the sustainability goals of reducing energy usage and improving air quality. A key element of MIDAS-CPS is the real-time streaming data collection and data analysis and the subsequent traffic management through traffic controls and advisories, through visualizations of predicted queues ahead, effective road prices/rewards, and route advisories. Although drivers will not be forced to use recommended routes, it is anticipated that MIDAS-CPS would lead to lesser drive stress and improved road safety, besides the designed benefits on the environment, energy consumption, congestion mitigation, and driver mobility. This talk will only focus on the architecture of the traffic control schemes, while this multidisciplinary project is at the cutting edge in several areas: real-time image processing, real-time traffic prediction and supply/demand management, and data processing/management through cloud computing.