Road traffic optimization
Motivation
Large road traffic congestion is a serious civillization and commercial issue. It causes huge delays, wasted time and energy, noise and larger emission of greenhause gases which may have a negative impact on the environment and our health. Therefore, it is important to analyze and manage traffic properly. There are very good ideas to reduce the demand for using private cars by introducing public transport, carpooling/vanpooling services. However, the pandemic crisis showed the the shared mobility is not a perfect solution. There are also ideas to build more bicycle paths which are great as well but we can't travel everywhere with bikes, some people can't use them or can use them only for short distances. There are also ideas to ban using private cars in some areas (e.g., city centers) or collect tolls for driving in city centers or for parking. It also helps but we don't like bans and too large costs of parking. Sometimes we just have to use private cars so they will stay with us in the future, at least for some time. However, they may become more and more autonomous and connected with each other and with the road infrastructure, so that it will be more and more easier to acquire the information about traffic conditions and future route of vehicles. Therefore, we should already think on how to take advantage of the growing amount of traffic data and availability of computational power. The answer may lie in new technologies, such as AI or quantum computing, and designing the best possible future traffic management systems leveraging the power of those new technologies is one of the goals of the TensorCell research group.