CCRI: Planning-C: Planning to Build Digital Infrastructure for Real-Time, Continual, and Intelligent Transportation Analysis and Management

Readily available and easy-to-use simulators have been driving the recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) research. This project leads planning and outreach activities that envision a large-scale research infrastructure that operates in parallel with real-world transportation systems in real time, continually, and integrating features to support AI-based discovery of new and more effective traffic management strategies.

The infrastructure provides access to three types of users: data providers (e.g., local communities) who offer traffic data and/or controllers, researchers who utilize the infrastructure to discover traffic management strategies, and traffic managers who aim to gain insights on effectively managing the traffic through the infrastructure’s visualizations and analyses.

This Planning project includes activities to 1) develop proof-of-concept that establishes a prototype traffic simulator that supports AI-based automatic calibration and intelligent traffic control, 2) organize workshops that outreach to researchers in relevant CISE sub-disciplines to formulate, refine, and prioritize new research opportunities enabled by the envisioned infrastructure, and 3) outreach local communities and agencies to identify key community needs. These planning activities are designed to build a cross-disciplinary and community-integrated team for a Medium-New CCRI proposal, which ultimately builds and maintains the envisioned infrastructure.

Success of the envisioned infrastructure entails fundamental advances and seamless integration of multiple disciplines, including mobile computing, modeling and simulation, transportation science, and artificial intelligence. Moreover, the envisioned infrastructure significantly reduces barriers to innovations in using AI for improving transportation management that can bring transformative benefits to transportation planning for increased mobility, safety, energy efficiency, etc.

Finally, the planning activities are expected to engage a broad-based community, from undergraduate students that can benefit from improved curricula from the infrastructure to diverse participants that can access the workshops from anywhere in the world through virtual attendance.

Project URL: https://ccri-planning-intelligent-transportation.github.io/ The project repository will hold data, code, simulators, etc., for at least two years.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.