Americans spend an average of 97 hours per year in gridlock traffic, causing environmental pollution and costing US households $1,348 and the US economy $87 billion annually.

A poster was created about this topic.

While building new roads and repairing damaged ones is a start, the future of transportation lies in the implementation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).

The DALI system makes existing traffic control systems autonomous and smart, without the need for expensive changes or infrastructure upgrades. With DALI, an intelligent software agent is plugged into existing intersection controllers, making it “the brain”. These agents analyze the traffic data, communicate with each other, and work to develop and execute a timing strategy that improves traffic flow in real-time.

And…it works!

At three different intersections near UT-Dallas, traffic delays were reduced by about 40%. The next steps include installation in additional intersections in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

DALI has won the best Application/Demo Award at AAMAS 2020, the flagship international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

1INRIX, 2019 Global Traffic Scorecard, available at: https://inrix.com/scorecard/, accessed April 2020.