SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will result from a significant reduction in traffic delays, crashes, and fatalities by implementing a fully adaptive traffic signal re-timing solution. The most recent National Traffic Signal Report Card gave a failing grade of D+ to traffic signal operations in the United States. These failing grades are despite the fact that agencies spend approximately $2 billion every year on signal operation, maintenance, and capital improvements. If the US supports its signals at an "A" level, the public would see: (i) a 15-40% reduction in traffic delay, travel time savings up to 25%, and a 10-40 % reductions in stops; (ii) a 10 % or more reduction in fuel consumption resulting in nationwide savings of almost 170 billion gallons of motor fuels per year; and (iii) up to 22% reduction in harmful emissions. From a science and technology perspective, this effort will be an impactful success story for artificial intelligence and machine learning. As the small business is a product of Iowa State University start-up factory, the project is expected to involve students looking for industry experiences in the project leading to a more comprehensive education for them. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop and demonstrate proof-of-concept of a fully adaptive traffic signal re-timing solution. The key intellectual merit of this effort will be developing deep learning models to extract abstract features from a range of heterogeneous information sources to perform feature-level fusion. Upon feature extraction, the proposed solution will use scalable deep reinforcement learning models to obtain re-timing decisions. The reinforcement learning process will help the system adapt to changing traffic scenarios at different time-scales without the need for significant manual interventions. The solution will be flexible for both onboard and cloud-based computing, depending on the availability of such platforms. Overall, the proposed system will reduce implementation time and capital and maintenance expenditures. These advantages will encourage cities around the US and internationally to adopt such a re-timing strategy and will dramatically transform the current landscape of this market. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project focuses on an adaptive traffic signal timing solution. Cities and municipalities worldwide spend over $4 billion annually to retime traffic signals and yet often fail to adequately reduce congestion on roadways. The consequences of mistimed traffic signal timing are: a) increasing productivity losses due to congestion with the average American spending 97 hours stuck in traffic every year, b) increasing accidents due to traffic, with one fatality every 15 minutes on US roads, and c) increasing greenhouse emissions with a third of all emissions caused by vehicles on the roads. This project will support the development and commercialization of a web-based technology to support traffic managers in cities and municipalities to better manage traffic using artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics. In addition to improving traffic flow and reducing congestion, the system will also significantly reduce harmful emissions, leading to more environmentally friendly city streets. The serviceable markets for this technology in the US and Europe, which together constitute 60% of the global signal-timing market, represent a $2.4 billion opportunity. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project seeks to develop a proof-of-concept for a fully adaptive traffic signal retiming solution that can robustly handle multiple signal corridors for commercialization. The key intellectual merit of this effort will be developing deep learning models that can run at scale and handle sensor noise robustly. The reinforcement learning process will help the system to adapt to changing traffic scenarios at different scales without the need for manual interventions. Research objectives that must be overcome in Phase II are focused on: 1) scaling the solution; 2) making the solution robust; and 3) ensuring that the system is user ready. Achieving these objectives may help ensure the product can successfully run on big-data architecture economically deployed on the cloud. The solution will also provide a deeper understanding of human-machine interaction. Overall, the proposed system may reduce implementation time as well as capital and maintenance expenditures for signal timing systems. These advantages will encourage cities around the US and internationally to adopt such signal timing strategies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.