Transportation Route Scoring for Carbon-Aware Travel Choices
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional transportation methods lack the ability to effectively assess and mitigate the environmental impact, particularly carbon emissions and pollution, associated with different travel routes and modalities, making it difficult for individuals to make climate-conscious choices.
Innovation Solution
A transportation computer system that analyzes various routes and modalities to generate sustainability impact scores, allowing users to select the most environmentally friendly options through a user interface, considering factors like carbon emissions, pollution, and other sustainability metrics.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Object-affected harmful factors
If conventional transportation methods are used, then travel between locations is achieved, but environmental impact and carbon emissions increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system calculates sustainability impact scores for different transportation routes and modalities, providing feedback to users about the environmental consequences of their travel choices. This feedback mechanism enables users to make more eco-friendly selections without sacrificing travel efficiency, as the system optimizes routes based on multiple criteria including emissions, distance, and travel time.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the parameters used for route selection from traditional single-criteria approaches (time only) to multi-parameter evaluation including sustainability impact scores, carbon emissions, pollution levels, and other environmental factors. This allows the system to balance travel efficiency with environmental protection by weighing multiple parameters simultaneously.
2Measurement precision
If multiple transportation routes and modalities are analyzed, then sustainability impact assessment is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the transportation analysis into distinct components: route identification, modality evaluation, impact calculation, and recommendation generation. Each component handles a specific aspect of the complex assessment independently, making the overall system more manageable and easier to implement while maintaining high measurement precision through specialized algorithms for each segment.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces sustainability impact scores as an intermediary metric that consolidates multiple environmental factors (carbon emissions, pollution, resource consumption) into a single comparable value. This intermediary simplifies the decision-making process by transforming complex multi-dimensional environmental data into a unified scoring system that can be directly compared across different routes and modalities.
3Loss of information
If sustainability impact scores are generated for multiple routes, then environmental awareness is improved, but computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary calculations of sustainability impact scores for multiple routes and modalities in advance, storing these pre-computed values for quick retrieval during user decision-making. This preliminary action reduces the computational energy required during actual travel planning, as the heavy lifting of environmental impact assessment is completed beforehand when data is most readily available.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates simplified representations (copies) of environmental impact data in the form of standardized sustainability impact scores and emission factors. These copied values can be quickly processed and compared without requiring complex real-time environmental modeling, thus reducing computational energy consumption while maintaining accurate environmental information availability for user decisions.
Data Source
AI summary
A transportation system for generating a transportation recommendation may (1) receive a transportation request; (2) identify, using the transportation request, a first geographic location and a second geographic location associated with the transportation request; (3) determine, using the first geographic location and the second geographic location, a plurality of routes between the first geographic location and the second geographic location; and/or (4) generate a sustainability impact score for each of the plurality of routes, The sustainability impact score may indicate an estimated climate impact of using at least one transportation modality to travel along the route. The transportation system may also (5) select a recommended route from the plurality of routes using the sustainability impact scores of the plurality of routes; and/or (6) generate a user interface providing the recommended route or otherwise present the recommend route and other information on a user device.