2014 Results

During last year's stay of Giovanni De Nunzio (Ph.D. student at NeCS team) and Prof. Carlos Canudas de Wit (director of NeCS team) at UC Berkeley, a scientific collaboration was established to deal with the problem of urban eco-driving.


Dr. Gomes’ work on the optimization of road arterial bandwidth (i.e. maximization of the time interval in which the vehicles can travel the length of the arterial without having to stop) has been extended.  The proposed idea is to use both the offsets and the variable speed limits in each segment as control variables in order to maximize bandwidth. The problem has been enriched by considering a two-way scenario (i.e. an inbound and an outbound signalized corridor with constraints on the offsets of the two traveling directions to replicate the realistic case of presence of multiple phases at each intersection), and by extending the objective function of the optimization.

Now the goal is not only to maximize bandwidth, but also minimize energy consumption and travel time. The challenge is to define everything as a function of the desired unknowns of the problem while keeping the linear structure of the problem formulation. The considered energy term takes into account and penalizes the energy consumption induced by the variable-speed-limits control. In other words, even though varying the speeds can help to catch more timely the next green windows, one wants to discourage frequent changes in speed limits between a segment and the next one, both for driver’s comfort and more importantly to reduce additional energy consumption in the speed changes. At the same time trivial solutions, such as equal but too low speeds, are discouraged by the term minimizing the travel time


The stay in Berkely ended in December 2014