CCEE’s Ali Hajbabaie appears on Canada’s CTV News to discuss new “white light” traffic research

CCEE Associate Professor Ali Hajbabaie recently appeared on Canada’s CTV News to discuss his research on adding a fourth light on traffic signals to help traffic flow with autonomous vehicles. 

“The main message of the white light is you need to follow the vehicle in front of you,” Hajbabaie said. “And we use that to communicate with human-driven vehicles. The idea here is that, in the near future, we are going to have more autonomous vehicles on our roadways. We are going to share our roadways with them. We wanted to tap into their capabilities so we can make traffic operations more efficient so we have fewer delays or travel times, fewer crashes so we have a safer environment, and less fuel consumption.”

Hajbabaie explained that the autonomous vehicles communicate with each other and with the computer that controls the intersection and they negotiate a safe right-of-way for human-driven vehicles and navigate them through the intersection.

Hajbabaie is interested in real-time optimization of large-scale complex engineering systems represented by models with a high degree of realism. His research is focused on traffic operations and control in the presence of connected human-driven and self-driving cars. Hajbabaie and his research group use multi-scale analysis, modeling, and optimization to improve traffic operations. His research is advancing our understanding of cooperative traffic control systems and contributes to the development of future mobility systems, including connected and automated vehicles.

Watch the video here.