Method and system for partitioning a continental roadway network for an intelligent vehicle highway system

Abstract

An intelligent vehicle highway system collects and provides real-time traffic data to a vehicle traveling on a continental roadway network. A digitized continental roadway network has nodes interconnected by links that define a digitized representation of the continental roadway network. To enable intelligent data collection and navigation over large expanses of the continental network, which would otherwise be computationally onerous, the digitized continental roadway network is partitioned into a plurality of digitized roadway subnetworks. The onboard vehicle navigation device has a processor for executing an application that instantiates a subset of the digitized roadway subnetworks in a vicinity of a current position of the vehicle to collect and provide relevant real-time traffic data to the vehicle in a computationally efficient manner.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This is the first application filed for the present invention.TECHNICAL FIELD[0002]The present invention relates, in general, to traffic engineering and, more particularly, to intelligent vehicle highway systems that collect traffic information and provide real-time traffic information to vehicles.BACKGROUND ART[0003]Real-time traffic data collection is of fundamental importance for traffic information management, road guidance, and intelligent vehicle highway systems (IVHS).[0004]Most techniques addressing this issue use static probes, i.e. fixed sensors and / or cameras. Given the enormous size of a continental roadway system, and the sheer number of roads contained therein, it is impractical not to mention prohibitively expensive to install sensors and / or cameras throughout the network to collect road traffic data for each and every public road on the continent.[0005]U.S. Pat. No. 6,401,027 (Xu et al.) entitled “Remote Road Traffic Data ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0007]In general, this invention relates to a continental roadway network partitioning technique for road traffic data collection and intelligent vehicle highway systems. In particular, a system and method is provided for dividing a continental roadway network into a set of smaller, computationally more manageable roadway networks for efficiently collecting real-time traffic data and providing traffic forecasts and travel guidance to drivers of vehicles equipped to interact with the system.

[0011]This new technology facilitates what would otherwise be a computationally onerous, if not impossible, task given the limitations of current microprocessors, namely providing real-time traffic data to vehicle occupants for large expanses of a continental roadway network. Despite the limited computational processing power of onboard vehicle navigation devices, intelligent navigation can be provided by innovatively partitioning a continental roadway into more computationally manageable subnetworks. Even if processor speeds were to be dramatically improved, this new technology would still be extremely useful in radically augmenting computational efficiency. Traffic managers for relevant subnetworks are instantiated to provide traffic intelligence about the immediate vicinity without wasting computational resources on areas or regions that are far away. Accordingly, this technology collects traffic data and provides intelligent navigation to vehicles even if they travel long distances, e.g. from one metropolitan area to another, and is thus highly useful for long-distance commuters, people on road trips, long-distance truckers, to name but a few end-users. Nevertheless, the traffic data that is collected from all participating vehicles in the network is shared among all other subscribers, whether they are traveling long distances or merely locally (short distances).

Problems solved by technology

Given the enormous size of a continental roadway system, and the sheer number of roads contained therein, it is impractical not to mention prohibitively expensive to install sensors and / or cameras throughout the network to collect road traffic data for each and every public road on the continent.

However, even though the foregoing technology can, in theory, cover the entire territory of a continent, the sheer number of links and nodes needed to represent all the roadways and intersections in a continental roadway system is so enormously large that it is computationally inefficient to do so.

Images