About the project
Metropolitan areas across the world use travel demand models and expensive data collected from various labor-intensive sources to forecast road traffic in order to assist decision-making on regional transportation system operation, infrastructure investment, environmental protection and land use planning. The ability of the model to produce base year volume estimates within acceptable ranges of tolerance compared to actual ground counts is essential to validate the entire travel demand model. However, metropolitan transportation demand models rely primarily on expensive and infrequent household door-to-door surveys and limited observed data from sensors. Other GPS-based data such as mobile phones and Google maps only provide coarse and/or fragmented data due to decentralized collection and data ownership, often extremely high data processing cost, and inadequate precision on how a subset of travelers and vehicles move around in the city. Such deficiencies are critical barriers to further improvement of the transportation demand model as multimodal mixed traffic and high-occupancy vehicles are increasingly more important in planning metropolitan LA.
Recently UCLA has been developing state-of-the-art chip-scale LiDAR sensors for autonomous self-driving vehicles and improved driving safety. The chip-scale LiDAR sensors, with high-performance precision laser characteristics, enable next-generation transportation density mapping across the metropolitan Los Angeles. This project will use the LiDAR sensor to map out real-time multimodal traffic and network characteristics in multiple road links and intersections in the UCLA-Westwood area, from traffic density on the Wilshire corridor to vehicular path statistics on Sunset Boulevard to dynamic traffic mapping with a mounted sensor on the UCLA campus.
The chip-scale state-of-the-art lasers developed at UCLA serve as the impetus for wide-spread LiDAR implementation. By understanding the Westwood traffic characteristics in finer precision and in real-time along the high-density corridors, the project will provide previously unavailable inputs to transportation planning models and to the intelligent traffic optimization of the Westwood area.
Additional details:
Working on this project: Chee Wei Wong, Rui Wang