Autonomous Trucking

Client: Arlen Anderson Ab Initio, <arley@abinitio.com>

Autonomous vehicles are likely a wave of the future. A lot of effort is going into automating the control of individual vehicles to provide a self-driving version of our current experience. An alternative is centralized control of fleets of vehicles to optimize large-scale traffic flow. This is a simpler problem which might be very appealing for transport of goods by truck. The brief is to build a simulation environment to demonstrate centralized control of a fleet of trucks. The simulation should consist of three elements: a) a traffic optimization algorithm which achieves maximal transport of goods, given boundary conditions for trucks joining and leaving the flow of traffic, b) a visualization of the traffic flow, c) control of the traffic variables, including highway pattern (on-ramps, off-ramps), rates of trucks entering and leaving the traffic pattern, basic dynamic properties of trucks (e.g. maximum rate of acceleration/deceleration).