{"id":28426,"date":"2018-01-12T22:18:47","date_gmt":"2018-01-13T02:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/?p=28426"},"modified":"2021-08-17T01:06:36","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T05:06:36","slug":"28426-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/28426-2\/","title":{"rendered":"New Study Offers Hope for Urban Commuters"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new paper\u00a0by faculty and student researchers from BU Center for Information & Systems Engineering could dramatically ease commuter frustration.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\"waze
Navigating Boston with Waze<\/figcaption><\/figure>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Frustration. Rage. Anxiety. These are just some of the\u00a0adjectives people use to describe their emotional state when driving the streets of Boston, the\u00a0sixth-most-gridlock-plagued\u00a0urban area<\/a>\u00a0in the country,\u00a0according to a WBUR survey.<\/span><\/p>\n

Boston is not alone in dealing with ever-growing commuter frustration, cost, and environmental strain associated with traffic congestion.\u00a0The average U.S. commuter spends 42 hours in traffic per year.\u00a0Commuter delays have\u00a0risen by 260 percent over the past 25 years, and 28 percent of U.S. primary energy is now used in transportation.<\/span><\/p>\n

While an increasing number of commuters are relying on navigation apps, like Waze, to circumvent traffic,\u00a0research shows that these apps are increasingly having the opposite effect<\/a>: directing heavy traffic flow into side streets not designed for traffic congestion. The reason is that navigation apps like Waze encourage \u201cselfish driving\u201d whereby each driver seeks out the best route to reach her destination, based on location and speed data, without taking into account the overall system performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

A new study by faculty and student researchers from Boston University College of Engineering could dramatically ease commuter frustration. The study uses real-time traffic data from the Boston area to estimate the effect on traffic congestion of drivers\u2019 selfish route selection as opposed to a more coordinated, socially optimal routing scheme. The researchers found that during certain heavily congested periods, socially optimal routing can lead to as much as 50% reduction in congestion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe study demonstrates that we can effectively leverage minute-by-minute traffic data, learn from the data, and develop strategies to ease traffic\u00a0congestion by inducing socially-aware driver behavior,\u201d says Ioannis Paschalidis, Professor (ECE, SE, BME) and Director of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering. \u201cWith this approach, apps\u00a0such as Waze and Google Maps, and autonomous vehicles, could in the future,\u00a0be programmed to select\u00a0routes that will reduce road congestion in urban areas.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ioannis Paschalidis, Professor (ECE, SE, BME) and Director of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering is the lead author of the study,\u00a0The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Data-Driven Evaluation and Reduction Strategies<\/em><\/a>. Christos Cassandras, Professor (ECE, SE) and Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, and graduate students Jing Zhang and Sepideh Pourazarm are also authors of the paper. The paper is scheduled to appear this spring in\u00a0Proceedings of the IEEE<\/em><\/a>, the flagship journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Funding for this research was provided by the\u00a0National Science Foundation<\/a>, the\u00a0U.S. Department of Energy<\/a>, the\u00a0U.S. Department of Defense<\/a>,\u00a0Bosch<\/a>, and\u00a0MathWorks<\/a>. The\u00a0Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Office<\/a>\u00a0and the City of Boston provided access to traffic data.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new paper\u00a0by faculty and student researchers from BU Center for Information & Systems Engineering could dramatically ease commuter frustration. Frustration. Rage. Anxiety. These are just some of the\u00a0adjectives people use to describe their emotional state when driving the streets of Boston, the\u00a0sixth-most-gridlock-plagued\u00a0urban area\u00a0in the country,\u00a0according to a WBUR survey. Boston is not alone in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18553,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[127,76],"tags":[137,136],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18553"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28426"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33594,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28426\/revisions\/33594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}