Streamline the traffic, routing the traffic jams and make the life of drivers much easier. It may seem strange, yet for some, the mathematics serves mainly to this, especially if this someone is a researcher of the Faculty of Science and Technology. It’s called Valentina Morandi and in his scientific paper, where a normal mortal only distinguishes the armies symmetrical of numbers and symbols, equations and graphs, you are instead designing in a way that is almost artistic the movements of the future, the ones who could free the city from the grip of a traffic unbearable.
With two colleagues at the University of Brescia, Enrico Angelelli and Maria Grazia Speranza, Morandi has published three papers in which they propose a mathematical model whose application would significantly reduce the traffic: the first is called “Congestion avoiding heuristic path generation for the proactive route guidance”, the, according to “A trade-off between average and maximum arc congestion minimization in traffic assignment with user constraints” – both appeared in the scientific journal “Computers and Operations Research” – while the third is entitled “Proactive route guidance to avoid congestion” which appeared in “Transportation Research Part B: Methodological”.
The current systems for guided navigation, based both on the transmission of data via the internet or satellite, you may already now a smooth transit of the vehicles on the road. How? Taking advantage of a simple principle and is the basis of many of the achievements of man: the cooperation. Simplifying to the extreme, the mathematical model of Morandi – processed taking into account the data of the urban traffic of Anaheim, Los Angeles and Berlin, in addition to some of the city’s “benchmark”, are automatically generated to validate the experiment – penalizes to a minimal extent all drivers, forcing them to stretch in a way that is almost imperceptible to the path. In so doing, however, the entire community of drivers, they get a total advantage in terms of time saved. If no one helps others, the result is that you are traveling all more lenses. Is the so-called “Price of Anarchy” or “Price of anarchy”.
The moral? If all players agree to lose something, in fact, at the end we earn. “We reviewed the data of the move in the urban traffic collected from vehicles equipped with GPS and intelligent, such as, for example, Google Maps, that indicate the intentions of the people”, explains Morandi, “and we have seen that, asking for a minimum sacrifice to each user, and proposing a range of different possibilities with respect to the shortest path, we can optimize the system”.
This will assign, on the basis of the distance, the traffic situation, of the places of departure and arrival, the penalty – or “unfairness” – to each user. Spalmandole in a precise manner between all the actors, the traffic on the real network decreases in a percentage that varies from 5 to 10%. This is done, however, without the drivers almost noticing it. In fact, the travel time of the majority of users is equal to or less than the travel time without coordination and only a few users experience a small delay. This consists of a maximum of a minute on a 30 minute trip, making it negligible.
The growing use of autonomous guided vehicles, in the future, may be central to the model proposed by the researcher. “When a user enters a vehicle, self-guided only enter the origin and destination, and is the car to decide the route,” he explains, “this would give an impetus to the cooperation because of the fact there would be the selfish choice of the driver to put a brake”.
The problem currently is that there is no coordination between the different rail systems. “The way in which we drive when we are on the machine, and to follow the advice of your device that you have installed, is acquired by many GPS the individual decentralized,” explains Morandi, “from our calculations, it turns out that this increases the congestion by 10% compared to the possibilities offered by a centralized system”.
But this model not only would allow administrators to set up a transport policy more efficient, but also from the environmental point of view, it would be possible – in the face of a general decrease in pollution – also distribute the impact of pollution and traffic – reducing CO2 and other harmful substances – among the busiest areas and other less. The model studied by Morandi and colleagues can also serve to introduce dynamic pricing in which people have the incentive to follow the suggestions of the guide system, the dynamic and centralized. “This will be made even easier by the increasing diffusion of technologies such as 5G that facilitate the transmission of large amounts of data on a large scale and at very high speeds,” adds the math.
The second strand of research that you are working with the researcher, finally, is related to the transport-on-demand (the so-called “dial-a-ride” or “steps behind the telephone call”). There are areas that, due to their distance from major centres, low population density may have little or nothing served by public transport such as buses. Why not think of a system that is only active on request of the customer and suited to the travel needs of the inhabitants of these territories – for example, certain mountain valleys in the Alps or in the Apennines – making possible the integration of public and private services?
Morandi is developing a mathematical model that predicts patterns of exchange and reward profitable for the partners of the service and that makes possible the integration of transport. But not only that. In fact, this exchange would be possible even between lines of a public bus. “The example is provided by those areas in which overlap the powers of the two Provinces,” concludes Morandi, “I’m thinking, for example, the area of Passo Lavazé and Passo Oclini, halfway between Trento and Bolzano. Also in this cases the managers could exchange easily to the customers by reducing costs and, perhaps, by adding the interaction with private actors when they do not think it profitable to circulate their means”.
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