From Selfish Driving to Social Optimality
By Brendan Galvin, CISE
In the modern urban landscape, driving is fundamentally “selfish.”
Each driver chooses a route based on personal convenience, often leading to traffic congestion. Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, and CISE Faculty Affiliate Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) is proposing a solution to this problem—transforming cities into integrated “cyber-physical systems” in which vehicles no longer compete but cooperate.
In a recent Nature report, titled “Smart cities drive into the future,” Cassandras was interviewed and shared his proposal for a networked environment in which every vehicle shares data with another vehicle or a coordinator regarding position, velocity, and destination to optimize routing across the entire city.