This is the first of four follow-on articles to Do Smart Highways Now—Delay is Not Smart, in which an integrated automated highway system is envisioned. This article will describe how such a system would work and what its architecture would look like.
Imagine you’re driving your car. It doesn’t matter what type of road you’re on. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Interstate or primary highway, or a city or suburban street. There could be traffic lights and other directive controls such as yield signs, merge ramps, or traffic circles. If you routinely drive or ride in any road vehicle (and that is very many of us), you know this activity as part of normal life. This routine is based on the reasonable expectation that you (or your driver) are skilled enough to navigate through traffic directives and the actions of other drivers to safely arrive at your destination. You might feel this is working nominally well enough with the current manual control of individual vehicles—why would you ever want to change that?
The reason for changing it is it’s not working well at all with the increasing level of traffic everywhere. This is separate from going green—regardless of how cars are powered, there will still be cars. Regardless of how much mass transit is built out (and it needs to be built out, both in and between populated areas), there will always be plenty of places that many people need to go where the smartest transportation means is individual conveyances. The pain points in current vehicular traffic experiences are those of congestion, miscues from other drivers, sub-optimal traffic flow, and driver stress from the need to be in a constant state of readiness for instant response to unexpected incidents. An automated traffic management system that directs the cars themselves (including your car) can solve the congestion occurrences and increase safety. It also can get you to your destination in less time.
I expect that last point (less time) got your attention. Let’s get our car hooked into the system. You drive manually in the traditional way until your system dashboard indicates that you’re in a control zone of the vehicle automated flow control system. Note the wording “vehicle automated” and not “automated vehicle.” You are still the driver and your car is never autonomous. This is more like the familiar cruise control for speed, except it also controls direction and braking as well, and is under centralized coordination. The system can do this because it has more outside information than you have—it knows where every other car in the system is located, and where it wants to go. It also knows if there is trouble up ahead, and where.
Just as advanced consumer GPS units receive traffic information, the vehicle flow system has the same information (but in more granular resolution sourced from all the other cars online at the moment). Consumer GPS units sometimes suggest alternative routes based on the traffic information they receive, and the vehicle flow system does this even better by maneuvering the car for you. This is safer, as the system is talking to every other car at the same time and won’t let any car pull out in front of another. It says to each car in optimal maneuver order “it’s your turn, now it’s your turn, and now you go, and now you … .”
In this scenario, machines are much better than humans for the task. As humans, we’re thinking higher level thoughts that impede practical cooperation on low level tasks. Note that “low level” doesn’t rule out “complex,” as in computer processors that work with just 1s and 0s but in a very complex manner. And higher level human thoughts such as “you jerk!” or “your idiot!” do not help optimize traffic flow. Things go much more smoothly when driving doesn’t have to consider what that jerk or idiot in the next lane might do—the jerk/idiot factor is eliminated when the vehicle flow system is directing all cars through an integrated process.
When your dashboard display indicates the system is available, you then select (say) “Join.” Voice control is the primary means of interface, to keep your hands on the wheel at all times until the system engages your car’s local control system. After a brief few seconds of handshakes between your car and the vehicle control system, the dashboard announces that it’s ready for its destination assignment from you. Just as with consumer GPS units, you can tell it an address, intersection, or (most likely) a saved location. The dashboard then announces that it has established a control session between the car and the vehicle flow system. At that point you let go of the steering wheel and take your feet off of the pedals—and alertly ride along.
You can take back control at any time by just moving the steering wheel or tapping the brake or accelerator pedal. The system will happily give you back control, but might nag you if you do something unsafe. It also will announce to all the other cars that your car is under manual control. Because all the other drivers have the same ability to disengage from the system, your display (and all theirs too) will light up in a warning color on your dashboard all the cars that are not being coordinated by the vehicle flow system. That’s why you are still alert when you’re just riding along. But now you only have to be concerned with the few who are not engaged with the system.
When this vehicle flow system is implemented and goes live on the highways, all new cars will have transponders that talk to the system and announce (at a minimum) their location, speed, direction, and whether they’re under system control. All older cars still in service will be retrofitted with such transponders. None of this will be at owner expense, as it will be part of the public highway infrastructure.
Within the vehicle flow system central process in the (computing) cloud, each individual car is placed in an optimal lane, on an optimal route (which could vary daily depending on various conditions) to its driver’s chosen destination. The dashboard in your car will show the route you are to follow, which you can alter by tapping and dragging it to go a different way if you so chose. But there should rarely be a reason for you to choose to change the route, other than for reasons unrelated to getting to your destination at the earliest time possible. You may observe that you are in a lane you never would have picked if you were driving, but that would have been under conditions when all the other human drivers were also driving without the vehicle flow system’s central viewpoint in the cloud.
Both central control and precise smart endpoints are essential components of the vehicle flow system. The system has a critical real time requirement that might be serviced by pushing all telemetry and compute functions as close as possible to the network edge. This real time capability could be met by migrating all processes that have instant effect on the car’s kinetic status from one section to another as the cars proceed along their routes—similar to the way cell towers hand-off phones as they travel through different locations. Here’s a very high level verbal block diagram of the system architecture:
- Each individual car
- Transponder, as described above, that responds to queries from the system and other cars
- Dashboard with verbal and touch interfaces
- Status of route and surrounding traffic
- Alerts to imminent danger, and information
- Condition of car control system
- Controller unit for drive train, lights, doors, windows, and other critical core car systems and status
- Physical control mechanisms for steering, speed, and braking
- Sensors for other vehicle proximity, and receipt of transponder signals
- Wireless communication infrastructure (multiple options, none mutually exclusive)
- Transceiver nodes distributed along the highways and streets to provide blanket coverage for all road sections
- Wide range higher power nodes on existing communications towers (e.g. broadcast and telecommunications towers)
- Integrate with cell tower data networks
- Central processing system
- Cloud based distributed data centers
- Redundant fail-over to parallel compute, database, and storage capability
- Software defined system infrastructure, for ready system patching and upgrades
- Strong security and privacy throughout, leveraging authentication, encryption, access control, auditing, and other security best practices
The architecture will be open source (permissive license is okay), and readily available for public works departments, manufacturers, car dealers and repair garages, and for systems engineers to recommend improvements. As the system design will be national in scope, it should be standardized and its configuration managed at the federal level.
With the vehicle flow system in place, we will all be less stressed from driving. And that will have further derivative benefits.
mcw
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