Dan Work

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Vanderbilt University

  • Nashville TN

Expert in self-driving cars and traffic management.

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AI-powered cruise control system may pave the way to fuel efficiency and traffic relief

The CIRCLES Consortium, consisting of Vanderbilt University, UC Berkeley, Temple University and Rutgers University-Camden, in coordination with Nissan North America and the Tennessee Department of Transportation, concluded a five-day open-track experiment on Nov. 18. Congestion Impacts Reduction via CAV-in-the-loop Lagrangian Energy Smoothing (CIRCLES) Researchers tested an AI-powered cruise control system designed to increase fuel savings and ease traffic using 100 specially equipped Nissan Rogue vehicles. The experiment—which ran from Nov. 14 through Nov. 18 on a sensor-filled portion of Interstate 24—is based on the results from an earlier, closed-track study where a single smart vehicle smoothed human-caused traffic congestion, leading to significant fuel savings. A single AI-equipped vehicle could influence the speed and driving behavior of up to 20 surrounding cars, causing a kind of positive ripple effect in day-to-day traffic. The CIRCLES Consortium will spend the next several months analyzing data collected on the AI-equipped vehicles and their impact on the flow of traffic over the duration of the experiment. The test was conducted on the recently opened I-24 MOTION testbed, the only real-world automotive testing environment of its kind in the world. Stretching for four miles just southeast of downtown Nashville, the smart highway is equipped with 300 4K digital sensors capable of logging 260,000,000 vehicle-miles of data per year. The CIRCLES Consortium research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Energy. Support was also provided by Toyota North America and General Motors. The experiment included Toyota RAV4 and Cadillac XT5 vehicles. Preliminary vehicle and traffic flow detection in the I-24 Mobility Technology Interstate Observation Network (MOTION). “On November 16 alone, the system recorded a total of 143,010 miles driven and 3,780 hours of driving. The I-24 MOTION system, combined with vehicle energy models developed in the CIRCLES project, provided an estimation of the fuel consumption of the whole traffic flow during those hours. The concept we are hoping to demonstrate is that by leveraging this new traffic system to collect data and estimate traffic and applying artificial intelligence technology to existing cruise control systems, we can ease traffic jams and improve fuel economy,” the CIRCLES team said in a joint statement. “Nissan has always been a pioneer in automotive innovation, and with our long-term vision, Nissan Ambition 2030, we know our future is autonomous, connected and electric,” said Liam Pedersen, deputy general manager at the Nissan Alliance Innovation Lab in California’s Silicon Valley. “CIRCLES shares our common goal of building a safer, cleaner world by empowering mobility.” “When it comes to transportation and mobility in Tennessee, we are at a critical juncture,” said Deputy Governor and TDOT Commissioner Butch Eley. “Traffic congestion is now becoming more prominent throughout Tennessee, and not just in urban areas. Addressing these challenges will force us to think critically about solutions, as transportation infrastructure projects traditionally are not identified nor completed before traffic congestion more dramatically affects our quality of life. One of these solutions is greater use of technology to enhance mobility. We are confident that this project and others like it will further strengthen Tennessee’s reputation for being a hub of automotive excellence.” “The I-24 MOTION project is a first-of-its-kind testbed, where we’ll be able to study in real time the impact connected and autonomous vehicles have on traffic in an open road setting,” said Meredith Cebelak, adjunct instructor in civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt and Tennessee transportation and transportation systems management and operations department leader at Gresham Smith. “The permanent infrastructure has been designed and installed, meaning the testbed will always be ‘on’ and available to researchers. By unlocking a new understanding of how these vehicles influence traffic, vehicle, infrastructure, and traffic management strategies, design can be optimized to reduce traffic concerns in the future to improve safety, air quality and fuel efficiency.”  “Partnership across universities, government and the private sector is the key to pioneering projects like this one,” Vice Provost for Research and Innovation Padma Raghavan said. “From its earliest inception, all the partners in this effort have played vital roles. That trusted collaboration continues as the team analyzes results to seek new insights to address pressing challenges in transportation in Tennessee and beyond.”

Dan Work

Biography

Dan Work is a Chancellor Faculty Fellow and professor in civil and environmental engineering, computer science, and the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University. He has held research appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2010-17), Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (2015, 2020), Microsoft Research Redmond (2009), and Nokia Research Center Palo Alto (2007-09).

Dr. Work pioneered methods for monitoring and controlling road traffic using vehicles, rather than fixed infrastructure, to sense and control road congestion. In 2015 he and his collaborators were the first to experimentally demonstrate that "phantom" traffic jams, which seemingly occur without an obvious cause but are due to human driving behavior, can be eliminated via control of a small fraction of automated vehicles in the flow. Work is a recognized transportation expert whose work has appeared in media outlets including ABC's Good Morning America, Reuters, Wired, and MIT Technology Review.

Dr. Work received a 2018 Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering and a 2014 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He earned a BS from Ohio State in 2006, and an MS (2007) and Ph.D. (2010) from UC Berkeley, all in civil and environmental engineering.

Areas of Expertise

Adaptive Cruise Control
Traffic
Inverse Modeling
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
Traffic Estimation and Control
Transportation Cyber Physical Systems
Self-Driving Cars
Transportation Data Analysis
Mathematical Models of Traffic
Mobile Sensing
Cruise Control

Accomplishments

2018 Pioneers

Connected World

NAE Gilbreth Lecturer

National Academy of Engineering, 2018

NAE China US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium Speaker

National Academy of Engineering, 2017

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Ph.D.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

University of California, Berkeley

M.S.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

The Ohio State University

B.S

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Selected Media Appearances

Researchers zero in on Tennessee's I-24 to study traffic jams

Axios  online

2022-12-22

The area, dubbed I-24 MOTION, will give researchers unprecedented insight into traffic and could steer different efforts to make our commutes a little less painful.

"This thing is like an MRI, when the rest of the world is looking at traffic with an X-ray," Vanderbilt engineer Dan Work tells Axios.

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Researchers: AI in connected cars eased rush hour congestion

Associated Press  online

2022-11-23

Human drivers just don’t do a good job of navigating dense traffic conditions, but an experiment using artificial intelligence in Nashville last week means help could be on the way. In the experiment, specially equipped cars were able to ease rush hour congestion on Interstate-24, researcher Daniel Work said on Tuesday. In addition to lessening driver frustration, Work said less stop-and-go driving means fuel savings and, by extension, less pollution.

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Adaptive cruise control technology could ease phantom traffic jams, Vanderbilt study finds

WKRN  tv

2022-11-23

Results from a Vanderbilt University-led study conducted on I-24 show a new kind of car technology, called adaptive cruise control that could help ease traffic jams that seem to come out of nowhere, called phantom traffic.

“The extremely frustrating traffic jams that motorists are very familiar with, you’re stopped without a good reason. You’re stopped because of the way you and I drive,” Dan Work, a Vanderbilt University civil and environmental engineering professor said.

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Selected Articles

Evaluation of traffic data obtained via GPS-enabled mobile phones: The Mobile Century field experiment

Elsevier

Daniel Work, Juan C. Herrera, Ryan Heering ...

2010-08-01

2010

"The growing need of the driving public for accurate traffic information has spurred the deployment of large scale dedicated monitoring infrastructure systems, which mainly consist in the use of inductive loop detectors and video cameras. On-board electronic devices have been proposed as an alternative traffic sensing infrastructure, as they usually provide a cost-effective way to collect traffic data, leveraging existing communication infrastructure such as the cellular phone network.

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