Technology already exists to capture and communicate a variety of information from motor vehicles. Automobiles are equipped with sensors and can reliably report their location, velocity, and condition via cellular telecommunications. Truck location tracking with global positioning systems is common. Prototype systems exist for characterizing surrounding traffic and roadway condition. Given these advancements, we expect that future motor vehicles will be capable of reporting a wide variety of information about their own condition and the local environment, including the condition of the infrastructure that they are on.

Many uses exist for the vehicle and infrastructure related information that can be transmitted from the motor vehicles. For example, fleet operators can take advantage of this information for better management of their own fleet, subject to privacy agreements with their own drivers. Similarly this information can be used for traffic control purposes to improve roadway capacity, travel times and safety.

Even though it is becoming technologically feasible to use motor vehicle to transmit a variety of information collected through sensors, currently there is no necessity for motor vehicle information to be available for anything other than the private use of the motor vehicle owner. Currently, we are limited in our understanding of how this information might be utilized in various social uses and decision making, and how the current processes can be reengineered to benefit highly from this new venue of information. In addition, there are technical and organizational barriers to the greater use of motor vehicle information. Examples of these are privacy, data storage and broadcasting issues.

In the proposed research, we will investigate possible social uses of motor vehicle information and identify possible ways to address the technical and organizational barriers to the greater use of motor vehicle information. We will tackle these issues at three levels: (1) At the data collection, management and communication level, within which we ask the question of how motor vehicle sensor information could best be collected, communicated and managed to provide access yet ensure privacy, (2) At the application level, within which we ask the question of what the potential uses and benefits of this information are, and (3) At the business model level, within which we ask the question of what an appropriate business plan for financing and managing these information resources would be.

Our research approach includes consideration of system wide effects and hence it is intended to be broader and exploratory rather than deep in one specific area. We propose a wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary investigation with the expectation of identifying economies of scale and synergies among different data uses. We have established a multi-disciplinary team for this project. Participants of this team include faculty from Civil and Environmental Engineering, Graduate School of Industry Administration and Institute for Complex Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Each team member has background expertise on at least one of the objectives discussed above. In carrying out the research tasks we will have interdisciplinary smaller teams addressing one particular area together with larger group meetings to identify the issues in a larger scale.

At the end of this exploratory research, we expect to identify discipline specific and interdisciplinary research issues, and develop a clear research agenda and a business plan for exploiting motor-vehicle information and communications technology. Finally, we will have a simulation demonstration of the opportunities that we have identified in this area.

In addition to publications on professional, peer-reviewed journals, we are planning to implement a web-based project space to solicit suggestions for applications and comments on our results. We will use the same web-based platform for designing and conducting a secondary school competition for traffic flow and motor vehicle information management. A final educational task will be to incorporate project results into three existing courses as case studies, examples and problems.